How to remove silos and get full value from your contact center data
Every team across your business – marketing, sales, customer success, support – wants the same thing: a complete picture of the customer. After all, it’s the holy grail for delivering a seamless, personalized service.
And while many departments have made big strides towards this so-called ‘single view of the customer’, there’s one huge source of insight still flying under the radar: the contact center.
Contact center data: the missing puzzle piece
Contact centers generate some of the richest, most descriptive data about customers. Every interaction is a goldmine of context: what the customer’s thinking, feeling, struggling with – and how they respond to your brand in real time.
The problem is, too often, that insight stays locked away. It’s rarely connected to other customer data across the business, meaning key teams can’t use it to identify pain points, or shape future strategy.
So why has the contact center been left behind?
Cost center or profit center?
Historically, contact centers have been seen as cost centers – necessary, but not necessarily strategic. The goal has been to resolve issues quickly and cheaply, not to build a deep, lasting understanding of the customer.
That mindset has shaped much of the technology too. Many contact center platforms were designed with cost-efficiency in mind: answering calls, logging issues, and measuring things like average handle time or first contact resolution. These are no doubt valuable, but those metrics tend to be useful to the contact center only.
But contact centers capture tons of qualitative data too – and here is where data sharing has immense value to the wider business.
Unstructured data, untapped potential
One of the big challenges for contact centers is that most of the data produced is unstructured. It lives in call recordings, chat logs, and agent notes – not in neat spreadsheets or structured databases.
Trying to fit that rich qualitative data into predefined categories (like disposition codes) often strips away nuance and oversimplifies the customer story.
To make things more complicated, many contact center tools treat each conversation as a standalone unit. They don’t map that conversation back to the individual customer across other interactions or channels – missing a huge opportunity to add context and continuity.
How to unlock the full potential of your contact center data
Today’s technology – particularly advances in AI and conversation intelligence – offers a way forward. But tech alone isn’t enough. To truly unlock contact center insight and connect it to the broader customer view, you’ll also need to rethink how you operate.
1. Embrace AI that keeps the nuance
Not all AI is created equal. Look for solutions that go beyond basic categorization and can extract detailed, meaningful insights from conversations – without flattening the richness of what customers actually say and feel.
2. Hire for data awareness, not just contact center operations
Bring in other leaders who understand how to leverage customer data. If your team has marketing or product experience, they’re much more likely to spot opportunities to connect the dots – and advocate for investment where it matters.
3. Prioritize data portability
Choose tools and platforms that integrate well with the wider business. Strong APIs, open standards and flexible data exports aren’t just IT concerns – they’re critical to joining up your customer view.
Opt for vendors with an open, technology-agnostic approach that won’t box you into closed ecosystems.
From cost center to profit driver
When contact center data is integrated into the wider customer view, it becomes more than just a record of what went wrong – it’s a strategic asset. It can power proactive outreach, inform better product design, and help you spot churn risk before it’s too late.
It also reinforces the case for the contact center as a profit center; a place where real business value is created, not just costs managed.
The tools are ready. The insight is there. All that’s missing is the mindset shift to bring the contact center into the heart of the customer experience strategy.
Want to learn how QA can play a bigger role in breaking down silos and unlocking customer insight? Book a demo today.
