What happens when you stop treating the contact center like a cost center?
Value isn’t found in the margins—it’s built through connection.
There’s a part of your business that talks to more customers than marketing, collects more data than analytics, and sees more pain points than your product team.
And in most organizations, it’s still considered a cost to control—not a growth lever.
“When you prioritize and equip your contact center as a cost center, your customers feel it—and so do your agents,” says Jessica Cash, global service transformation lead at Slalom. “What should be a moment of connection and loyalty improvement turns into a missed opportunity. And after a while, those missed moments start to add up.”
The contact center is an untapped asset for your business growth and your customer relationships. And the smartest companies are already treating it like one.
What’s standing between you and better service?
Explore how aligned systems, people, and tech unlock stronger customer and agent experiences.
How connected data creates real connection
For many organizations, the contact center is still treated as a break-fix function—reactive and disconnected from the broader customer journey. But as service and experience become more integrated, it transforms into a loyalty lever, decision accelerator, and brand differentiator, turning routine interactions into moments that matter.
This is especially true in high-consideration industries like travel, where the journey is long, the stakes are both personal and expensive, and every point of friction risks more than just convenience.
“You’re often talking about multi-thousand-dollar trips and emotionally charged decisions,” says Frank Klensch, senior director of enterprise technical delivery at Slalom. “That’s why the contact center isn’t just about handling demand—it’s about building relationships and brand affinity.”
That kind of relationship building becomes nearly impossible when service agents are working with fragmented systems, legacy infrastructure, and limited visibility across the customer journey. Without a unified CRM—and with critical booking data disappearing within 24 hours—one of the world’s largest cruise lines was struggling to deliver the kind of seamless, high-quality experiences that their guests had come to expect. They needed a way to close the gap between service systems and customer expectations.
By implementing a Salesforce CRM solution, we helped create a 360-degree view of the customer, integrating booking data, excursion history, and preference models into a single, accessible, and enduring source of truth. AI-driven recommendations—supported by tools like Agentforce and a newly launched travel agent portal—allowed agents to anticipate needs, personalize support, and close sales faster. Quality and connection became the new hallmark of customer interactions.
“What started with Agentforce kicked off a broader transformation—one that connected data, empowered agents, and created a foundation for a much better customer experience,” says Klensch.
The result of approaching the contact center as a driver for value creation instead of merely a cost center: shorter calls, improved loyalty, accelerated revenue, and a dramatically improved experience for both agents and travelers.
Cost-center thinking is costing you growth
Most organizations aren’t overspending on service—they’re underinvesting in what it could be. When service is treated as a cost to contain rather than a driver of growth, long-term impact is often far greater than realized short-term savings.
A prominent regional bank serving over 100 markets in the Midwest and South was facing this exact challenge. As it aimed to expand and modernize, the contact center’s legacy model was limiting scale, delaying customer experience improvements, and eroding confidence in future growth. The bank’s leaders wanted outside perspective and guidance to help them plan and operate differently—with an eye toward growth over cost containment.
Our growth-focused approach started by moving beyond short-term fixes and cost-first thinking. We quickly identified key capability gaps and translated them into a scalable five-year roadmap—spanning near- and long-term improvements from chat and self-service to a more integrated CRM and data ecosystem. We also conducted a multi-vendor contact center as a service (CCaaS) evaluation to lay the groundwork for smarter, more strategic tech investments. In parallel, we delivered 15+ quick wins that generated immediate ROI and unlocked capital for future growth.
The bank gained more than just a collection of short-term wins. It gained a plan, platform, and the momentum for growth—one that supports better service, smarter investments, and a clearer path to long-term impact.
How Agentforce streamlines customer experience and operations
Find out how Avetta scaled GenAI to elevate support experiences and boost agent efficiency.
Inside-out beats surface-deep
Too often, contact center change starts and ends with front-line fixes: update scripts, add a chatbot, improve average handle time. But real transformation doesn’t happen at the surface. Real, results-oriented change happens when you align operations, technology, and experience across the entire service ecosystem.
Service is where every disconnect across the business shows up first: legacy workflows, siloed systems, inconsistent processes, and misaligned teams. If your technology is modern but your operating model isn’t, both your customers and your agents will feel it.
That’s why the most impactful transformations start from the inside out.
Take one of the largest retail healthcare companies in the US. After acquiring a major health insurance provider, the organization faced a complex challenge: more than 60,000 agents operating in silos, unable to deliver consistent experiences or predictable outcomes. This led to fragmented member journeys and rising operational costs.
What began as a straightforward engagement to reduce operating expenses and simplify a complex technology footprint quickly expanded into a full-landscape modernization effort. While moving to the cloud and selecting a CCaaS platform were critical first steps, the real transformation came through rethinking how service worked at every level. We came in as an experienced, agnostic guide for vendor selection—but as the work evolved, so did the scope. Together, we integrated strategy, people, process, and technology to improve customer experiences, drive business results, and optimize service spend.
Through deep collaboration and business alignment, we helped the organization:
- Redesign agent workflows to reflect business priorities, not legacy constraints
- Standardize the operating model, including performance metrics and coaching structures
- Integrate systems across a changing landscape of business process outsourcers (BPOs), unifying how their agents worked across business lines
- Implement real-time performance tools and reduce custom complexity, reducing the number of unique agent skill combinations by 65%
- Save over $16M in ACD spend in year one, without sacrificing service
Another benefit beyond modernizing the contact center? IT became a business enabler, shifting from reactive support to a strategic partner. In reimagining what the contact center could be, IT and business leaders developed deeper understanding and empathy for each other’s roles—aligning their strengths to drive growth. It marked a clear break from past models centered on break-fixes and point solutions.
Where your brand keeps its promises
Every day, your contact center handles the defining moments that shape the perceptions—publicly and privately held—of your brand, your customer relationships, and your future growth. It’s not just where problems are solved. It’s where reputations are built, loyalty is earned, and insights are surfaced.
Most of us have felt service models under strain: being transferred repeatedly to dispute a charge or making multiple calls just to book a quick, 15-minute follow-up with your doctor. These high-friction experiences are often the result of systems built to compress cost instead of create value, and they put loyalty at risk.
Organizations pulling ahead are the ones that see service for what it can be: a place to differentiate, delight customers, and drive the business forward.
“When organizations start prioritizing outcomes and impact, looking beyond efficiency gains, they realize something greater and more sustainable than merely cost savings,” says Matt Kiesling, managing director of service, sales, and loyalty transformation at Slalom. “They unlock trust, loyalty, and scale, which are the foundation for market growth, customer and employee retention, and long-term business optimization.”
That’s not overhead. That’s value.
