According to McKinsey, engaged and satisfied contact center agents are 8.5 times more likely to stay than leave within a year. It is well documented that poor experiences lead to customers cutting spend and, according to some research, a single negative contact center interaction can permanently change how up to 78 percent of customers feel about a company. This puts huge pressure on agents who are, in this context, responsible for brand reputation and, ultimately, future revenue.

It is, then, essential for businesses to understand and acknowledge the value agents bring and shift focus from Contact Center as Cost Center to Contact Center as Potential Profit Center. Keeping agents engaged and satisfied is the key to retaining them, is the key to high-quality, consistent service.

In this session, our expert panelists will discuss how to keep agents engaged – and what can go wrong when they're not. We'll delve into the importance of flexibility, learning and development and acknowledgement and explore strategies to execute these successfully.

Attendees will learn:

• The key pillars of keeping agents engaged and satisfied and improving retention
• Where so many businesses go wrong, resulting in high turnover and mounting hiring costs
• Strategies for improved engagement and boosting job satisfaction

Chatbots are increasingly common and can handle simple customer interactions relatively seamlessly, but they can fall short in times of stress when human empathy is required. With super-fast response times (down to the millisecond) and real-time context awareness, voice AI is emerging as the go-to solution for contact centers seeking to remove the frustration that can come with ineffectual chatbots during emotionally charged interactions. Accuracy, however, is varied but essential, and increased concern around security and compliance can be a barrier to investment for many organizations.

Voice AI usage grew 9x in 2025, and production voice agent implementation was found to have increased by 340 percent across 500+ organizations. With voice interactions now priced at around $0.40, brands are increasingly keen to capitalize on this new, cheaper way to deliver immediate and empathetic support at scale with voice AI deployments. It is no surprise that voice AI is set to grow even more in the coming years.

In this session, we'll take a deep dive into the benefits of implementing voice AI in the contact center, drawing on real-world examples from brands at the forefront of the voice AI revolution. We'll explore potential deployment pitfalls and cover key topics around deployment including internal – and external – change management, governance and security and the long-term impact on customer loyalty.

Attendees will learn:

• How voice AI works in practice in your contact center, and what this means for demand planning.
• The human + AI approach that ensures efficiency, empathy and brand consistency during surge times.
• Key learnings from successful deployments and pitfalls to avoid

When running a marketplace with over a million sellers, contact center challenges can feel overwhelming. Especially with new features rolling out constantly, and when every update generates a fresh wave of support tickets (sometimes up to 50,000 per week). Without a strong knowledge base or AI-powered workflows, resolution times can reach seven or eight days.

In this session, Sujit Mohanty, Senior Program Manager for CX at TikTok, will share how he has built AI-enabled workflows to give agents solid context when a ticket comes in, with suggested next best actions. Combined with an improved knowledge base and better agent training, initial results during testing have been striking, with a 150 percent reduction in resolution times.

When dealing with dozens of different lines of business, however, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, with some ticket types being straightforward enough for automation to handle cleanly, while others full automation struggles with. In the session, we will discuss Sujit's approach to rigorous experimentation that helps to find the right solution for each unique context.

Sujit Mohanty

Senior CX Program Manager
TikTok

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In many contact centers, supervisors spend up to 80 percent of their time listening back to calls, producing a just handful of evaluations per month that may not be representative. It's a small and context-dependent sample that often says little about actual performance.

In this session, Allen Crane, currently Executive Director, Operational Excellence and Strategic Analytics at GEICO, will share how he has sought to change this. He'll walk us through his experiences transforming AI-driven agent evaluation systems, discussing how, in three months, he rolled out a gen AI evaluation framework across contact centers for 15,000 agents. In doing this, Allen enabled millions of calls to be assessed and gave supervisors a holistic view of agent performance.

We'll discuss how this approach can be fine-tuned, mitigating AI hallucinations and maintaining a commitment to keeping humans in the loop.

Attendees will learn:

• How to move from a small, unrepresentative sample to millions of fully evaluated calls and what a representative picture reveals
• Why human-in-the-loop isn't a compromise and what makes AI evaluation trustworthy enough to act on
• How to responsibly tie AI-driven evaluation to business KPIs and staffing decisions

Allen Crane

Executive Director, Operational Excellence and Strategic Analytics
GEICO

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• Why investing in AI without investing in culture risks a talent crisis and a race to the bottom on differentiation
• How hiring practices and training must evolve now that AI is handling tier-one interactions
• The role CX leaders must play in bridging IT and HR to build the contact center of tomorrow

Heather Arthur

VP, Global Client Experience Centres
Scotiabank

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The Federal Communications Commission recently voted for contact centers outsourced by US companies to return to American soil in the name of protecting jobs and data security. The Chair has said that offshore contact centers lead to "confusing service, delayed support and even security risks".

The likely result of this vote, rather than lots of new US-based contact centers opening up, is that US companies will turn more staunchly towards AI-driven automation. There is fierce debate in the CX community about whether this will mean improved – or worsened – customer experiences.

In this session, we will bring together industry experts on opposite sides of the fence to unpack the vote and it's potential consequences for BPOs, contact center leaders, agents and, of course, customers. We'll also explore how businesses can navigate this shift with the minimum possible impact on CX and brand reputation.