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The brands we trust most are the ones that know us best. They earn our loyalty and business.
Decades ago, when many businesses were smaller—and local—it was easy to know your customers. But as businesses scaled and globalized, personal customer relationships were replaced by standardized processes and layers of technology.
Today, customers now encounter a maze of customer service options that feel noisy, disjointed, and hard. Meanwhile, enterprises grapple with fractured workflows, siloed data, and serious blind spots in the customer lifecycle.
Why voice still matters
In recent years, industry leaders pushed hard for digital transformation. Many organizations assumed customers would migrate to chat, messaging, and social channels for service. Investments followed. Expectations rose.
But the results were disappointing. Voice remained the top channel in most contact centers, even among younger consumers. In fact, research still consistently shows that 7 in 10 consumers reach for the phone when they need support or service. For example:
It’s not hard to understand why. Negotiating a complex issue is often easier with an actual conversation than a series of chat messages. And for customers, a phone call feels more personal. It lets them talk freely and express themselves fully, with tone and sentiment that would be lost in a chat, even with a human agent.
> Watch the webinar, "Voice isn’t dead—it just needed better AI," with CX Expert and NYT Bestselling Author Shep Hyken.
The challenge voice presents for enterprises
For contact centers, voice is the hardest and most expensive channel to support. Chatbots and other self-service options deflect a non-trivial percentage of digital interactions away from human agents. But automating voice has been a much bigger challenge.
Without effective automation, voice requires a large staff of agents. And with turnover still staggeringly high, recruiting and onboarding are both endless and costly. The revolving door for agents leaves enterprise contact centers and the BPOs they often rely on with too many new agents in the mix. And new agents are far less effective than experienced veterans.
“Many times in our history, we have taken a binary approach to enhancing the customer experience. Voice or digital, automation or agent, efficiency or satisfaction. We’ve often treated these as mutually exclusive choices, when in reality they shouldn’t have to be.”
Chris Arnold
VP of Contact Center Strategy, ASAPP
How generative AI changes the value equation for voice
Generative AI can completely bend the value curve for voice with autonomous AI agents. Current top-tier AI agents for customer service fully resolve a wide range of issues through familiar conversational experiences. That reduces costs while simultaneously improving customer satisfaction with less friction and fragmentation.
The cost savings from reducing the load for human agents are substantial. But there’s more going on here. AI agents allow customers to continue picking up the phone when they need help. Because AI agents adapt to the conversation and other contextual information, they let customers speak naturally. The conversation can flow in a way that’s intelligent, empathetic, and emotionally aware.
Relentless innovation in voice performance and quality makes this possible. Robotic, laggy, or error-prone AI agents erode trust fast. So, the voice experience must be clear, responsive, and natural. Practical elements that enable this include:
- Ultra-low latency: No awkward pauses, so the conversation feels natural.
- Barge-in capabilities: Customers can interrupt and clarify just like they would with a human, without confusing the system.
- Natural prosody: Speech output is finely tuned for tone, emphasis, and rhythm, ensuring the AI’s voice sounds engaging and on-brand.
- Robust speech recognition: Handles diverse accents, speaking styles, and noisy environments, reducing the need for customers to repeat themselves.
With these capabilities in place, customers encounter a familiar and satisfying voice experience that resolves their issues efficiently. That builds trust, loyalty, and customer lifetime value—all while cutting the cost to serve.
The rise of the agentic enterprise
The introduction of autonomous AI agents is a major leap forward for customer service, but it’s just a taste of what’s coming. In the near future, entire networks of AI agents will be deployed throughout the enterprise like a nervous system. These AI agents will always be on, listening, and acting to serve customers, initiate internal workflows, and gather data to drive value for the business.
In the agentic enterprise, AI will be more than a tool. It will be the connective tissue that ties functional areas to one another and customers to your brand. This shift is no mere efficiency play. It’s a new system of intelligence that will learn from every engagement with a customer or agent, then adapt to provide even better service in the future.
Recentering voice in the agentic enterprise
As generative AI changes the economic realities of voice interactions, the role of voice in CX strategy will change.
Customer service leaders will no longer begrudgingly accept that voice is their most important channel.
Instead, they’ll embrace the unique qualities it offers for personal connection and customer satisfaction.
Digital channels will continue to grow and evolve. So will voice. In the agentic enterprise, the full range of customer interactions will become a consistent and cohesive data stream that drives the business. Customer conversations are gold mines of information, but it’s often hard to collect as structured data. Voice is especially data-rich. Every utterance is filled with information—not just what the customer said, but how they said it. And customers say more in a call than in a chat. Gathering and making sense of it all is impossible with legacy technology. But the network of AI agents that powers the agentic enterprise will learn from every interaction and create a persistent intelligence layer from that data.
Personal service at scale, finally
Historically, personal service hasn’t been possible at scale. CX tech providers have chipped away at the issue with integrations to pull a customer’s account information, AI-powered routing to connect the customer with the right agent more quickly, and predictive analytics to help agents make targeted recommendations that customers are likely to accept. It’s a valiant effort to personalize a generic experience. But it still doesn’t translate into genuinely personal service.
The network of AI agents in the agentic enterprise will change that. The AI will gather and analyze data from every customer interaction at an unprecedented scale, not just for business intelligence, but to craft more personal experiences.
If a customer states a preference during a call, the AI agent will ask if it should store that information for future reference—and then it will. Later, when the customer interacts with your brand again, the AI will use that stated preference as context to improve service.
Or it might take proactive action based on the cumulative contextual information it’s gathered. Imagine a customer calling to book a trip with an airline they use regularly, one that has an agentic customer experience platform with interaction memory. The AI agent that takes the call might know that the customer is likely calling to book their annual Thanksgiving trip to Chicago, and that they typically prefer a Wednesday afternoon flight. So, the AI agent begins the conversation by proactively verifying the customer's preferences for this trip, with the corresponding flight options ready to be presented.
To the enterprise, that’s all data-driven and AI-powered. But to the customer, it’s personal service, the kind they thought they couldn’t get anymore. It makes them feel like your brand knows them enough to earn their loyalty.
Personal service is more than a nicety for your customers. It’s good business. And in the agentic enterprise, it will be business as usual.
