AI and Cloud Help Small Businesses Create World-Class Contact Centers

The takeaway from those department leaders: The company was missing out on what appeared to be a contact center revolution. While SSA had been leveraging a VoIP system that allowed agents to make and receive calls on their computers, the platform ran separately from the company’s workforce management and internal communications solutions. There were no advanced analytics capabilities for gauging trends or agent performance, and there was a total lack of tools with artificial intelligence functionality.

“It didn’t have the modern features that our customer service managers really wanted,” Miller recalls. “They could probably get by with the system that we had, but they really thought they should be able to do more.”

GO DEEPER: Why is customer service the focus of most digital transformation projects?

Why Zoom Contact Center Made Sense for SSA

Miller ultimately agreed with his coworkers, he says, and that kicked off a months-long process of product trials and testing. The company put several competing solutions through their paces, eventually selecting the AI-native Zoom Contact Center. The cloud-based system was a good fit for SSA’s dispersed team of about 110 agents, many of whom worked from home.

And as an integrated platform, it would give the company Unified Collaboration as a Service and Contact Center as a Service solutions in one suite.

“It puts all of our communications tools, both internal and external, together in the same place,” Miller explains. Voice calling, videoconferencing and messaging, collaboration over Teams through SSA’s Microsoft stack: “Everything is integrated in the contact center interface.”

Agents can easily launch the new solution from their desktops through the Zoom Workplace app, Miller notes. And with built-in features such as Zoom AI Expert Assist and Zoom AI Companion, they now have access to user-friendly technologies designed to help them do their jobs more effectively.

An information retrieval function, for example, allows agents to instantly pull data from third-party systems when it’s needed to resolve customer questions. The sentiment analysis tool offers real-time monitoring of customer interactions and engagement. Previously, SSA representatives were on their own if a call went sideways, and had to manually enter their post-call notes. Now, the Zoom system can recommend responses and generate call summaries automatically.

“It’s almost too good to be true,” Miller says of the system, which launched in January and is still proving its value.

UP NEXT: Learn why customer experience technology is vital for hybrid work. 

Why Contact Center Modernization Is a Business Imperative

The fact that an IT leader is impressed by the latest developments in contact center technology comes as no surprise to Bernardin Arnason at Frost & Sullivan. Contact center modernization initiatives are consistent with the broader shift toward automation, Arnason says. As contact centers at businesses of all sizes handle a growing volume of interactions with customers, “they’ve been on a quest to cut costs and be more efficient” to better manage the increasing load, he explains. “And one way they can do that is through modernization, which often looks like migrating to the cloud and adopting new tools enabled by AI.”

Vendors such as Zoom, AWS and Cisco have responded to demand for contact center innovation with a host of new cloud and hybrid cloud solutions known in the industry as “customer experience platforms.” These CXPs, Arnason wrote in a 2025 report, are designed to provide “seamless omnichannel experiences, effective self-service, automation, personalization at scale, and meaningful analytics.” The best ones do so with AI features that improve performance and create real value for businesses, he noted. “A well-developed AI strategy and product portfolio for any CXP is now a requirement.”

One company enjoying the benefits of its new CXP is Overhead Door. The Lewisville, Texas-based maker of doors and openers for residential, commercial industrial and applications recently deployed Webex Contact Center to better support its 300 customer service agents.

It had previously relied on an on-premises contact center that was difficult to scale as the company expanded, says John Brown, director of IT services and operations: “It worked well for several years, but we finally reached a point where the growing pains were too much to ignore. It wasn’t a great experience for our customers or our agents.”

Overhead Door made the migration to Webex last July because it had always relied on Cisco solutions, Brown explains. Furthermore, as a cloud solution, the platform would allow the company’s contact center agents to easily work from anywhere, and it would presumably do so without the dropped calls or audio problems that had plagued customer interactions.

Today, those issues are in the rearview mirror, Brown says. When agents don their headsets and log in to the platform through the Webex app, their PCs are transformed into a customer-service dashboard and phone. “It’s a dramatic improvement compared to what they had before,” Brown says. “With respect to stable connections especially, it’s been a game changer.”

While the Webex system includes an AI Assistant that suggests replies for agents and automates certain tasks, Overhead Door’s contact center team has used the tool only sparingly so far — but not because they don’t want to, Brown says: “It’s just that they’re still getting used to the platform and building their business processes around it.” 

Brown notes that the company’s IT service desk, which is integrated with the contact center so customers can get technical help when they need it, is talking about ways to deflect some calls to custom-built AI agents. “There are a lot of things on our radar that we’re really excited about,” he says. “I think that we’d all agree this move has been a big win.”