Zoom’s Mohannad AlKalash on the interplay of AI, human-centered support

Picture this: The phone rings at 2am. A customer’s critical system has failed, and they need immediate help.

In yesterday’s contact centre, this scenario meant long hold times, multiple transfers, and frustrated agents scrambling through disparate systems to piece together the customer’s history.

Today, artificial intelligence can transform this interaction into a seamless, empathetic experience where technology amplifies human capability rather than replacing it.

The modern contact centre faces an unprecedented challenge with customer expectations evolving far beyond simple issue resolution.

Demands on contact centres today

Today’s consumers demand empathy, personalisation, and lightning-fast responses across every channel. They expect agents to understand their history, anticipate their needs, and resolve complex issues on first contact.

Meeting these expectations requires more than good intentions – it demands intelligent technology that puts human connection at its core.

Traditional contact centres operated as reactive support hubs, responding to problems after they occurred. This model created a perpetual cycle of frustration for both customers and agents.

Customers experienced long wait times and repetitive explanations, while agents struggled with incomplete information and disjointed tools – all of which hindered rather than helped their ability to provide exceptional service.

How AI is switching up things

Already, AI is switching up this dynamic, transforming contact centres into proactive engines that power customer success. Beyond simply answering calls, intelligent contact centers anticipate needs, prevent issues, and deliver genuine personal experiences.

Consider how AI-driven insights now work behind the scenes during every customer interaction. When a customer contacts support, advanced algorithms instantly analyse their entire relationship history, recent product usage patterns, and even sentiment indicators from previous conversations.

This comprehensive mapping helps agents to understand not just what the customer is asking, but why they’re asking it and how they’re feeling about their experience.

Central to this transformation lies conversational intelligence – AI’s ability to understand, analyse, and enhance human communication in real-time.

Modern platforms use this technology to provide agents with live coaching, sentiment analysis, and contextual suggestions to make every conversation richer and more effective.

When an agent speaks with a frustrated customer, the conversational AI embedded in these centers, can detect emotional cues in tone and language, alerting the agent to adjust their approach while suggesting specific phrases proven to de-escalate tension. If a customer mentions a technical term the agent isn’t familiar with, the system instantly provides relevant information and suggested responses.

This isn’t about replacing human judgment, it’s about empowering agents with superhuman awareness and support.

This is also a reciprocal exchange as the technology learns from every interaction, identifying patterns to improve future conversations. If certain phrases consistently lead to successful resolutions, the system shares these insights across the entire team.

The fear that AI will replace human agents misses the fundamental truth about effective customer service – at its core, support is about human connection, empathy, and problem-solving. The most sophisticated AI cannot replicate the emotional intelligence, creativity, and genuine care that define exceptional customer experiences.

Instead, intelligent automation handles routine tasks that traditionally consumed agents’ time, updating customer records, routing calls to appropriate specialists, scheduling follow-ups, and gathering preliminary information.

Human interaction enhanced

Agents are now free to focus on what humans do best: building relationships, solving complex problems, and providing emotional support that nurtures loyal customers.

Smart routing is an example. AI analyses incoming requests in real-time, considering factors like customer history, issue complexity, agent expertise, and current workload to ensure each interaction reaches the person best equipped to help.

A longtime customer with a billing question connects with an agent familiar with their account history, while a technical emergency routes immediately to a specialist who can provide expert assistance.

Today’s customers engage with companies across multiple channels – phone, chat, email, social media, and messaging apps. Each channel has its own context, conventions, and customer expectations. Intelligent contact centers ensure they maintain consistency and continuity across all these touchpoints – without the customer needing to repeat their story each time – while adapting to each channel’s unique characteristics.

AI’s proactive outreach adds value rather than leading to annoyance. When usage patterns suggest a customer might benefit from a particular feature, or when maintenance might affect their service, intelligent systems can initiate helpful communication through the customer’s preferred channel at the optimal time.

Organisations implementing intelligent contact centre solutions report transformative results that extend far beyond traditional metrics. First-call resolution rates increase dramatically when agents have comprehensive customer context and AI-powered suggestions at their fingertips

Customer satisfaction scores improve as interactions become more personal and efficient. Also, agent satisfaction rises as employees feel empowered by tools that make their jobs more rewarding and less frustrating.

AI systems are getting better

As AI systems learn from continuous interactions, their recommendations become more accurate, their predictions more reliable, and their ability to enhance human performance more pronounced. The result? A virtuous cycle where better tools enable better service, which generates better data, which improves the tools further.

Looking to the future, success for customer support functions won’t be about choosing between human agents and artificial intelligence but rather, about creating synergies between human empathy and machine intelligence. The most successful organisations will be those that use AI to amplify their agents’ natural capabilities while preserving the authentic human connections that define exceptional service.

Training programmes that help agents work effectively with AI tools, privacy protections that maintain customer trust, and ongoing refinement to ensure technology serves human needs are crucial in strengthening intelligent contact centers.

Technology here doesn’t distance us from human connection; it helps shape customer experiences that are efficient and authentic while strengthening brand equity for the company. Even resolving challenges at 2am.

Read: How AI-driven solutions are revolutionising customer service in contact centres