How to modernize your contact center in 2026

In an experience-driven economy, the contact center has evolved from a traditional customer service hub into a strategic channel on the front line of brand experience, building customer loyalty and helping your business grow.

Yet, many organizations are still running their contact centers on legacy platforms that hamper omnichannel service and personalized interactions, resulting in slow response times, frustrated customers, exhausted agents and operational inefficiencies.   

By early 2025, NTT DATA’s Global GenAI Report already highlighted the future direction of customer experience (CX), with 94% of organizations agreeing — 46% strongly — that GenAI is a crucial differentiator in enabling predictive analytics and proactive CX.

Only a few months later, agentic AI has emerged with great potential for use in contact centers, where smart agents can analyze, make decisions and act autonomously to deliver excellent CX.

Why contact center modernization matters

Legacy contact center platforms can’t keep pace with omnichannel expectations or the realities of distributed workforces.

Moreover, AI now has the potential to make every agent–customer interaction smarter and faster, but it needs modern systems that support real-time data access and seamless integrations.

What’s the business impact of legacy platforms?

• Service continuity: Legacy contact center platforms face integration challenges, limited support and aging architectures that cause outages and operational disruptions. System failures slow down response times, which lowers the efficiency of human agents and leaves customers frustrated.
• Security exposure: Older systems often lack robust data and infrastructure security controls. This creates gaps that pose compliance risks and increase the probability of breaches — a particular concern in highly regulated industries such as finance, healthcare and manufacturing.
• Employee experience: Human agents need an intuitive, omnichannel platform to deliver exceptional customer service. Legacy solutions with sluggish interfaces and disconnected systems hinder productivity and ultimately erode the customer experience.
• Business growth: Legacy and on-premises systems aren’t built for hybrid teams, and they struggle to support new features such as predictive analytics and real-time sentiment analysis. Therefore, they cannot scale easily to support the evolution of your business.
• High costs, low sustainability: These systems are often inefficient in both performance and energy use, which increases operational costs and makes it harder to reach sustainability goals.

Modernizing your contact center with AI lets you tackle these challenges while growing your business. With cloud-native AI-enabled platforms, you can orchestrate seamless customer journeys and rethink your workforce engagement model at the same time.

5 pillars of a future-ready contact center

Building a modern contact center requires a strategic shift toward agility, intelligence and a customer-first mindset:

1. Embrace cloud-native platforms

Moving to cloud-first contact center solutions unlocks scalability, flexibility and faster innovation. Cloud platforms integrate seamlessly with customer relationship management solutions, enterprise resource planning systems and AI tools that deliver real-time insights. It becomes easier for your organization to scale quickly in response to changing customer needs and improve service quality.

• ALSO READ → The next phase of cloud: Reimagining innovation with AI

2. Infuse automation with AI

The combination of AI agents, intelligent interactive voice responses and real-time, AI-enabled agent assist can take care of routine customer queries, shorten wait times, automate backend processes and improve first-call resolution.

Furthermore, machine-learning models personalize interactions by analyzing customer sentiment and intent, making self-service more efficient and giving human agents time to focus on complex, high-value conversations.

3. Enable omnichannel engagement

Customers pick the channels they want to use — whether it’s voice, chat, email, social media or messaging apps — and expect the context of their previous interactions with your organization to follow. A unified platform carries the full context from one interaction to the next, resulting in consistent, highly personalized experiences.

4. Customer-journey analytics and orchestration

Cross-channel behavior analytics gives you deep insights into customer preferences and pain points, helping you optimize service delivery and improve customer engagement.

5. Workforce engagement management and intelligent routing

Workforce engagement management optimizes the performance of your contact center with real-time resource allocation. For the efficient handling of customer inquiries, staffing levels are automatically adjusted based on demand and availability. AI-powered routing matches customers with agents based on skill sets and context, making human agents more productive and leaving customers more satisfied.

• ALSO READ → Ambient intelligent experiences: A new way of connecting with your customers

A smarter approach to contact center modernization

Modernization isn’t just about upgrading your contact center technology. You also need to transform how your organization engages with customers and supports employees in pursuit of specific business outcomes. This calls for a strategic, phased approach:

Understand your current landscape

Begin with a diagnostic assessment of your current contact center setup, including hardware, software, integrations, licenses, support contracts and lifecycle status.

Think of it as a clinical assessment that reveals what’s working, what’s limiting performance and what’s needed to meet shifting customer expectations.

Build a modernization plan

A future-ready contact center should include:

• Automation and open application programming interfaces for streamlined workflows and integration
• AI-enabled features such as intelligent routing and sentiment analysis
• Sustainability measures through energy-efficient infrastructure and cloud adoption
• Employee-focused intuitive tools that support hybrid work and improve productivity
• Scalability to handle rising AI workloads and customer interaction volumes

Align stakeholders early

Your modernization strategy needs to reflect diverse needs and drive unified outcomes. Assemble cross-functional teams — including IT, customer service, marketing, compliance and more — to create shared ownership.

Phase your transformation

Avoid a one-size-fits-all rollout. Prioritize high-impact areas and schedule upgrades in phases to match your organization’s appetite for change. Focus on agility, scalability and long-term value to reduce risk and demonstrate value quickly.

Why NTT DATA is the CX partner of choice

Around the world, over 10,000 organizations partner with NTT DATA’s Infrastructure Solutions team for infrastructure modernization, including contact center transformation.

With more than 35 years of experience across industries, we’re a trusted digital workplace and CX solutions partner for organizations of all sizes. Our global footprint spans over 70 countries, where thousands of consultants, engineers, architects and lifecycle specialists deliver local insight and global best practices in CX design, maturity assessment, benchmarking, optimization and automation.

We’re recognized as a Leader in the HFS Horizons: Generative Enterprise Services, 2025 report, which provides a competitive analysis of professional services firms and the value they create with enterprise customers adopting GenAI technologies.*

We also collaborate with leading technology providers and software vendors to deliver innovative solutions to our clients, including advanced customer-journey optimization with cloud contact centers, workforce engagement tools, AI and automation.

So, whether you’re modernizing your contact center or improving employee collaboration, we’re here to help you succeed — with experience, scale and innovation. Overall, we’ve enabled more than 400,000 agent seats and supported over 3.8 million users for cloud voice interactions!

Act now to benefit in the long term

The question isn’t if you should modernize your contact center, but how to do it effectively — and how quickly you can start. Taking proactive steps today will minimize risk and position your organization for long-term success in a digital-first world.

Our Infrastructure and Software Lifecycle Assessment offers a thorough evaluation of your current environment and delivers structured insights to help you understand your setup and plan your modernization journey.

Your contact center is critical to the future of your organization. Equip it for what’s next.

* HFS. HFS Horizons: Generative Enterprise Services, 2025. 30 January 2025.