Contact-center AI insights: from handle time to relationship orchestration
SiliconANGLE rounds up theCUBE's coverage of the "AI ROI in Contact Center Summit," where analysts and vendors argued that customer-service success metrics are shifting away from average handle time and first-call resolution toward "conversation to completion" — actually resolving the customer's issue. Executives from Cisco, Zoom, Five9 and Talkdesk described agentic AI that preserves context across AI-to-human handoffs and orchestrates customer relationships rather than just completing single transactions. Five9 cited its own research finding 99% of business practitioners deploying AI think their contact centers improved, while only 66% of end users agree, with more than half of the dissenters saying they want access to a human and can't get it.
The discussion signals that enterprise customer-service AI is being judged less on automation efficiency and more on customer experience and human fallback.