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Key takeaways:
- Contact centers can evolve from cost centers into intelligent growth engines.
- Agentic AI and cloud-native platforms help reduce friction, improve service quality, and increase efficiency.
- Amazon Connect provides a foundation for connected customer experiences across channels.
- Human and AI collaboration enables faster, more personalized customer interactions.
- Modern contact centers can reduce costs while improving customer satisfaction and revenue growth.
Making connections count: AWS reinvents the contact center
Digital technologies have fundamentally reshaped the contact center. Automated voice systems, chatbots, knowledge bases, and AI agents have helped companies significantly scale customer support. But there’s a catch: the relationship between customers and companies is increasingly contentious.
Consumers now bring high expectations to each interaction. In both B2B and B2C environments, they expect the same seamless, intuitive, and personalized experiences they’ve come to expect from leading digital platforms.
Too often, customers instead encounter long wait times, communication gaps, numerous handoffs, and inconsistent and sometimes incorrect responses. These breakdowns also take a toll on companies. Nearly one-in-three consumers have stopped buying from a brand due to a subpar customer experience, according to the PwC 2025 Customer Experience Survey.1
It’s a serious problem with real consequences. Poor customer service costs companies; in fact, companies can lose up to 15% of revenue to customer churn.2 But that’s just the starting point. A tarnished brand, agent burnout, and strained business collaborations drag things down further.
Adding new layers of hardware and software may not fix the problem. The solution lies in a contact center that serves as an intelligent and connected hub for the enterprise. With a unified technology ecosystem in place, the situation changes significantly: context is available to AI and human agents across channels (phone, chat, messaging, etc.). As AI detects context and behavior, it selects the most efficient resolution path and works in concert with human agents to help deliver desired business outcomes.
The contact center is no longer just a cost-center; it has the potential to become a growth engine. PwC research shows that up to 40% of inbound contacts can be eliminated or monetized through automation, improved self-service and proactive outreach.3 Organizations that adopt an AI-first contact center mode, can significantly reduce costs, while simultaneously increasing revenue by 1% to 2%.4
This intelligent customer experience framework is built on PwC-designed agentic AI platforms that extend across leading cloud and AI ecosystems. This includes Amazon Web Services, where Amazon Connect serves as a core orchestration layer.
The connected intelligence hub spans the overall customer lifecycle: predictive AI agents intercept issues before they become tickets; AI-managed self-service handles basic requests; and intelligent assistance supports human agents as they interact with customers. Workflow automation then closes the loop by updating records, routing follow-ups, and suggesting next steps. Suddenly, each transaction and interaction adds business value.
Why conventional contact center modernization disappoints
A problem with conventional contact center technology is that it can automate tasks and reduce costs but delivers little or no value to customers.
As businesses attempt to layer AI onto legacy IT systems, including aging interactive voice response (IVR) systems, problems surface: erratic point-to-point interactions and excessive handoffs increase, critical data and context often get lost, and systems become difficult to maintain and scale—without seeing performance deteriorate.
As a result, customers are often forced to repeat a problem to different reps, bots overlook critical cues and context, and insights get lost in silos. As processes break down, contact center agents feel overwhelmed, and they can find themselves facing the wrath of angry customers.
At the same time, many organizations force customers to use outdated channels such as IVRs and chatbots rather than more natural, embedded experiences such as conversational AI, video-based support, and seamless messaging.
These issues are rooted in design and technology. Legacy contact centers incorporate deterministic systems that can make it difficult to adapt in real time to specific people and events. They also struggle to personalize exchanges because data is stuck in silos and there’s little or no context. Adding new technology doesn’t fix the underlying problem; it can make it worse by adding more complexity.
The result? Ticket resolution slows down, and the business continues to devote increasing resources to inefficient workflows. Over time, IT and business leaders find themselves managing fragmented products from multiple vendors—including hyperscalers, foundation model providers, agent specialists, and legacy Contact Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) providers—with little to no coordination across these technologies. The costs and technical debt pile up in other ways. Human agents often scramble to stay current with a steady stream of new tools, technologies, and features. In some cases, they resist change because they perceive that each new tool makes an already tough job more difficult or just to replace them. This, in turn, creates an environment that disappoints customers, employees, and businesses.
Cloud and AI help transform customer interactions
A technology framework that elevates customer service and solves real-world problems is within reach. A cloud-native contact center doesn’t simply overlay new technology atop a broken system; it’s a complete reboot. Data, AI, and communication channels flow through a single system. This leads to synchronized and accurate data, smart workflows, fast response times and real-time visibility.
Suddenly, a business can anticipate customer needs rather than react to them. Agentic systems enable free-form conversations—and hand off cases to the right human agent when the situation demands it. These AI agents are smart enough to connect customers and representatives to the right information at the right moment.
These multimodal frameworks also change what’s possible. For instance, a customer can share a video of a problematic device, and human and AI agents can team up to diagnose and fix the problem in real time. A “smart” contact center can also create the opportunity for a 360-degree customer view. Suddenly, marketing, sales, and support are linked, enabling the business to act proactively and strategically.
It’s possible, for example, for a healthcare provider to proactively reach out about an appointment or confirm that a patient is taking medication properly through a personalized AI agent experience. For retail companies, AI can also spot delivery issues or known product failures before they become tickets. For telecom companies, agentic outreach can flag unpaid invoices or schedule preventive maintenance before a product breaks, and AI can recognize when a high-value customer’s engagement is slipping and offer a tailored incentive.
AWS and PwC reinvent what’s possible
A next generation contact center is a place to create, maintain, and sustain customer relationships. It’s a strategic tool that can extend the reach of marketing and sales.
Three distinct features support innovation:
- Powerful AI-enabled technology. Amazon Connect includes agentic AI features that can support omnichannel routing and analytics tools from Amazon Bedrock. The platform weaves together voice, chat, tasks, and email through omnichannel AI capabilities and an enterprise-grade governance framework.
- Strategic acumen. PwC brings together leading platforms — including Amazon Connect, CRM solutions such as Salesforce, and other enterprise technologies — to build a unified stack that spans the customer journey.
- Next-generation features. PwC’s framework can detect subtle signals and uses them to deliver a highly-dynamic framework tuned to specific customer and agent needs. The solution incorporates advanced features like sentiment analysis, dynamic agent matching, predictive intent, and real-time translations.
The result is an holistic solution that delights customers and delivers business growth. There’s accountability across the overall lifecycle—as agility, improved decision-making, and resiliency take hold.
Organizations that adopt this model typically achieve a 20% to 50% reduction in contact volumes due to more efficient self-service, as well as 20% to 25% reduction in average handle time (AHT).5 Businesses gain agility, improve decision-making, drive down costs, strengthen security and resiliency, and boost the overall customer experience.
How to make your contact center a growth engine
A leading practice approach centers on three core principles:
- Focus on strategy rather than point use cases. Contact center modernization is more than a tooling upgrade; it’s a complete architectural redesign. PwC’s agentic services architecture builds connective tissue with advanced features like memory, context management, and cross-channel orchestration. This helps AI agents and human agents collaborate smoothly—each doing what they can do effectively.
- Prioritize human and AI collaboration. Technology enables progress; human expertise make it happen. A next-generation contact center technology model replaces IVR specialists with AI engineers, conversation designers, and evaluators. It’s critical to not only address new knowledge requirements, but also to train human agents on how to use tools and manage workflows.
- Elevate customer experience to the #1 priority. Each architectural decision—cloud design, AI components, data structures, and workflows—circles back to a single question: can customers resolve their issues and leave satisfied? An effective contact center moves past the immediate problem and focuses on the big picture: the overall relationship.
The contact center is no longer just a cost center; it has the potential to become a growth engine.
An advanced contact center model can make a significant difference
Within the modern contact center, AI can deliver transformative results across four crucial areas: speed, scale, consistency, and cost efficiency. The proof is in the numbers. Amazon Connect and PwC have delivered 10% to 15% improvements in Net Promoter Score (NPS) along with annual cost reductions as great as 40%.6 More importantly, companies have watched their revenues increase.
As digital channels converge and AI takes hold, the firms that prevail in the customer experience arena won’t be the ones with the most tools and features. The winners will likely be those that deliver dependable and predictable AI at scale — delivering benefits to customers and to the business.
Making connections count: a success story
When a global software company’s core contact center environment reaching the end of its lifecycle, it faced both a hard deadline and a broader operational challenge. Customer service operations were fragmented across countries, each relying on different systems, vendors, workflows, and compliance requirements.
Working against tight timelines, the organization collaborated with PwC to help consolidate multiple platforms into a unified, cloud-based contact center. The transformation included deploying modern contact centers and CRM capabilities across dozens of countries and multiple global regions in a matter of months.
The outcome delivered a 20%–30% improvement in operational efficiency, a threefold increase in deployment speed, and a standardized global architecture. This foundation now drives scalable, AI-enabled sales and customer experience capabilities across markets.
The transformation was enabled through deep platform expertise, reusable delivery tech-enabled solutions, and coordinated program management to help drive speed and scale.
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