From answering contacts to resolving customers.
Contact centre and customer experience covers every way an organisation serves its customers: the platform that routes conversations, the people and AI that handle them, the data that measures them and the journeys around them.
The contact centre has moved to the cloud, picked up digital channels and, more recently, AI agents that handle whole conversations rather than menu options. The platform question has become an orchestration question: how people, AI and back-office systems work on the same customer issue without passing it round.
The measures are changing too. Deflection and handle time are giving way to resolution, effort and outcome, because a conversation that ended quickly is not the same as a problem that got solved.
Then and now
If your picture of CC & CX is a few years old, this is what moved.
| It used to mean | It now means | |
|---|---|---|
| The platform | On-premises ACD and IVR | Cloud CCaaS with AI agents, digital channels and open integration |
| Self-service | Press 1 for billing | AI agents that understand the request and complete the task |
| Quality | A supervisor scoring two calls a month | Every interaction scored automatically, with people reviewing what matters |
| Agents | Scripts, and the knowledge base in another window | Real-time assist that surfaces answers and next steps during the conversation |
| Success | Calls answered and average handle time | Resolution, customer effort and business outcome |
The landscape
The cloud platforms that route voice and digital conversations, and increasingly orchestrate AI agents, people and back-office systems on the same journey.
Voice, chat, email, messaging and social in one conversation history, so a customer who switches channel does not have to start again.
Virtual agents that resolve tasks rather than signpost them, with a clean handover to a person when they cannot.
Real-time help for human agents: live transcription, suggested answers, next-best actions and automatic after-contact notes.
Forecasting, scheduling, quality and coaching, increasingly automated, and increasingly aimed at keeping good agents rather than filling seats.
Understanding why customers get in touch at all, where journeys break, and what to fix upstream so they do not need to.
Verifying callers without frustrating them, stopping fraud, taking payments safely, and keeping recordings and AI within regulation.
Running in-house teams, outsourcers and AI capacity as one operation with shared standards and shared data.
What is emerging
The developments the CC & CX programme is built around, and the ones every exhibitor will be asked about.
Several specialised AI agents working on one customer issue, coordinated by the platform, rather than one chatbot at the front door.
Business cases moving away from how many contacts avoided an agent towards how many problems were actually solved.
Automated quality across all conversations becoming standard, with supervisors coaching from evidence rather than samples.
Agents practising difficult conversations with an AI before they meet them for real.
Knowing which AI agents can reach which systems, who approved them and how to stop them.
Contact centres becoming a target for AI-generated voices, and caller verification changing in response.
CC & CX sessions
Every PACKETLOSS session is Level 200 to 400. These show the depth, not the final programme, which members help shape.
Who should come
For the people who run customer service and the people who build what it runs on.
For exhibitors
Visitors to the CC & CX zone include the people who run contact centres and the people who will have to integrate what they buy. They want to see a platform or an AI agent handle a realistic customer conversation, including what happens when it goes wrong.
What works: live demonstrations, technical people on the stand, and a straight answer about which platforms you work with. Nothing at PACKETLOSS is Level 100, and that includes the stands.
The other disciplines
The phone system moved to the cloud. The job got bigger.
Explore →Software that listens, speaks, sees and understands.
Explore →Where work happens, and increasingly where AI does too.
Explore →Communications as building blocks.
Explore →PACKETLOSS 2028 · CC & CX
Two days. Every platform. No beginner content.
Register your interest, put a session forward for the CC & CX programme, or ask about exhibiting.
The next PACKETLOSS is in 2028. The date, venue and exhibitor packages are announced once confirmed.