The enterprise customer experience (CX) software world is changing. A quiet but intense battle has been unfolding for decades in the enterprise CX/contact center industry. At its core lies a fundamental question: Who owns the agent desktop?
For years, telephony vendors—and later contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) providers—argued that the center of the agent experience is the voice interaction itself.
According to this perspective, every other digital channel should ultimately converge around the moments when a customer speaks directly with an agent.
If a customer emails a company and later calls about the same issue, the experience is clearly poor if the call reaches a different agent who cannot see the email context or who provides a conflicting answer.
CRM vendors, however, have long taken a different stance. Their arguments have been that the real problem isn’t voice or channels: it’s data fragmentation.
In large enterprises, customer information often exists in dozens of systems. Records are duplicated, incomplete, or outdated. Consequently, agents spend large portions of their conversations searching for the right information across multiple tools.
From this perspective, the key to efficiency is not optimizing voice interactions, but creating a single source of truth: a clean, centralized customer record that eliminates the friction caused by fragmented data.
Today’s Landscape
Fast forward to 2026, and the landscape looks very different.
If software was once said to be “eating the world,” today AI is increasingly eating the software world itself.
Companies are starting to question why they should pay millions in software-as-a-service (SaaS) seat subscriptions for functionality that can increasingly be assembled or automated using AI-driven development tools.
Recent moves by major vendors illustrate how much the boundaries between systems are blurring. For example, Salesforce recently introduced Agentforce Contact Center, a platform that effectively merges CRM and contact center functionality.
When a CRM vendor of its prominence starts expanding directly into CCaaS territory, it is a clear signal that the traditional divisions between systems are breaking down. At the same time, the priorities of CX organizations themselves are changing, as I will discuss next.
The Shift from Inbound to Outbound
Beyond the technological shifts occurring in the vendor landscape, there is another major transformation underway: the move from inbound reactive service to proactive engagement.
This shift goes by many names. Some describe it as moving from inbound to outbound. Others refer to it as proactive service, lifecycle engagement, or customer health management.
Regardless of the terminology, the core idea is the same. Instead of waiting for customers to contact you when they have a problem, businesses increasingly need to reach out to customers first.
That outreach might take the form of a phone call. It might also be a text message, a reminder, or a proactive in-app service notification. But the principle is the same. Businesses must take initiative if they want to maintain strong customer relationships.
This is not happening simply because organizations have suddenly decided it’s the right thing to do. It’s happening because market dynamics and customer expectations demand it.
Competing Against Customers’ Experiences
One of the biggest misconceptions among CX leaders is misunderstanding who they are actually competing with. Yes, if you sell cereal, jewelry, insurance, or enterprise software, your direct competitors are other companies selling those same products.
But when it comes to CX, the comparison set is far broader.
Customers don’t compare their experiences with your company solely against your industry peers. Instead, they compare them against the best experiences they have ever had anywhere.
- The convenience of overnight shipping.
- The concierge who handled everything perfectly at a boutique hotel.
- The legendary returns policy of Zappos.
- The hyper-personalized advice of a great coach or consultant.
Those experiences shape expectations across every industry.
For large organizations operating at scale—with complex processes, legacy systems, and layers of bureaucracy—competing with those experiences can feel almost impossible.
But one simple action can go a long way, and that’s proactively reaching out to customers:
- A quick check-in about a subscription.
- A call informing a customer about a new package that might better suit their needs.
- A notification that their account balance is running low.
These gestures demonstrate that the business is paying attention and is actively invested in the relationship.
Proactive engagement is not a new concept. Over the past 15 years, digital-first CX platforms have introduced many tools to automate these interactions through email, (social) messaging, and in-app notifications.
...the move from inbound reactive service to proactive engagement...because market dynamics and customer expectations demand it.
Yet despite all these digital channels, the phone remains a powerful medium. At least for the foreseeable future, many situations will still require a human conversation. And of course, nearly everyone has a phone with them wherever they go.
The challenge is that most CX organizations are not well equipped to run outbound engagement programs. To do so effectively, they may need to borrow lessons from an industry that has long specialized in this area: telemarketing.
Reading the Telemarketing Playbook
The term “telemarketing” often carries negative connotations. For many people, it evokes images of spam calls or fraudulent schemes.
Yet the reality is more nuanced. Many legitimate businesses rely on outbound calling because their customers actively want those conversations.
Millions of U.S. consumers, for example, are researching major purchases every day: new roofs, mortgage refinancing, insurance policies, solar installations, and other significant financial decisions.
These consumers often don’t have time to call multiple businesses themselves and wait in IVR queues. Instead, they welcome outreach from companies offering relevant solutions.
Customers often appreciate learning about solutions they were not aware of or discovering products that better fit their situations.
The companies that succeed in these high-velocity outbound sales environments have developed sophisticated operational capabilities. These are capabilities that modern CX teams can learn from, as I will discuss later.
The Operational Challenges of Outbound
However, running an outbound contact center comes with several persistent challenges.
1. Number Flagging
The first challenge is simply reaching customers in the first place.
Contact rates—the percentage of outgoing calls that lead to a live conversation—can range anywhere from less than 1% to roughly 15%, based on our two decades of experience.
Consumers are busy. They are in meetings, commuting, picking up their kids, or otherwise unable to answer the phone (law enforcement really doesn’t like drivers picking up their phones either).
On top of that, major carriers such as AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have implemented aggressive spam detection systems. Many outbound calls are automatically labeled as “Spam Likely” or “Scam Likely.”
While these systems successfully block many fraudulent calls, they also impact legitimate businesses trying to reach their customers. When a call is flagged this way, very few recipients will answer. The result is a dramatically reduced contact rate.
2. Idle Agents
Low contact rates create another operational challenge: idle agents.
Imagine an agent manually dialing phone numbers one at a time. With the very low contact rates noted previously, they spend most of their time listening to ringing tones or voicemail greetings.
Few things destroy productivity faster than agents waiting for calls to connect with a human.
3. Compliance Complexity
Outbound calling and texting are also subject to extensive regulatory oversight:
- The primary governing laws and regulations in the U.S. are the FCC’s Telemarketing Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and the FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR).
- Many states impose their own–and often stricter–calling restrictions, including permitted call windows, allowable calls per day, and additional consent requirements.
- Outbound teams must also scrub their calling lists against the National Do Not Call (DNC) Registry as well as various state registries.
Another complication is phone number reassignment for calls and texts. Over 35 million phone numbers change owners every year, according to FCC data that we’ve received. The FCC requires organizations to check their lists against the federal reassigned numbers database.
For companies trying to proactively engage customers while remaining compliant, the complexity can be daunting.
4. Fragmented Data
Finally, many outbound operations suffer from the same problem that has long plagued enterprise CX: fragmented data systems.
Agents often need to navigate multiple applications while speaking with a customer: CRM systems, billing tools, marketing platforms, and internal knowledge bases. In some environments, agents literally work across multiple monitors just to gather the information required for the conversations.
But when agents are focused on navigating systems instead of listening to the customers, the quality of the interaction inevitably suffers.
How Best-in-Class Outbound Teams Operate
Organizations that run large outbound operations successfully have developed solutions to these challenges.
1. Intelligent Number Management
At first glance, placing outbound calls might seem straightforward: simply dial a number and wait for someone to answer.
In practice, it is far more complicated.
Carriers rely on constantly evolving algorithms to determine whether numbers should be flagged as spam. These algorithms are essentially black boxes; no one outside the carriers fully understands the exact logic.
To maintain high contact rates, outbound teams must carefully manage large pools of phone numbers across different geographic areas. They must continuously monitor which ones remain “healthy” and which have been flagged.
This requires sophisticated number management systems that dynamically assign healthy numbers and rest unhealthy numbers (pausing the usage of flagged numbers) for a period of time to maintain deliverability.
The past practice of frequently replacing flagged numbers with newly bought numbers is counterproductive and might even put your business at risk.
2. Predictive Dialing at Scale
Because contact rates are so low, outbound operations rely heavily on predictive dialing technology.
Predictive dialers automatically call multiple phone numbers simultaneously and connect calls to available agents only when a human answers. This ensures that agents spend most of their time speaking with customers rather than waiting for calls to connect.
While this can be relatively easy to implement with small teams of 10 or 20 agents, it becomes significantly more complex when managing hundreds of agents and many campaigns.
While specialized outbound sales call centers operating at scale may have access to state-of-the-art technologies, the reality is that the aforementioned CX contact centers looking to shift to outbound are running on CCaaS platforms that were simply not built for outbound.
These platforms offer preview dialing, power dialing, and, in some cases, even predictive dialing functionality that simply lacks the power to ensure performance.
3. Campaign Workflow Automation
Successful outbound engagement requires more than a single call attempt. Reaching a customer often requires a structured sequence of outreach attempts across multiple channels.
This is why outbound teams think in terms of campaigns rather than individual calls. A campaign is a coordinated series of actions designed to achieve a specific objective. Outbound engagement campaigns involve a sequence of calls, messages, and follow-ups designed to reach the desired outcomes.
Modern outbound platforms provide automation tools that manage these workflows, ensuring that each contact follows the appropriate engagement sequence.
4. Built-In Compliance Guardrails
Given the regulatory complexity surrounding outbound communication, compliance cannot be an afterthought.
Organizations must implement systems that automatically enforce compliance rules: such as call time restrictions, consent management, and DNC list scrubbing.
Because the TCPA allows private lawsuits, violations often result in class-action litigation. Beyond financial penalties, the reputational damage to a company’s brand can be significant. Robust compliance guardrails, therefore, become essential for any organization operating at scale.
The Human Challenge
There is also a more subtle challenge in the shift toward proactive engagement: people.
Many contact center agents have spent years focused purely on customer service. Their role has traditionally been to solve problems, answer questions, and assist customers.
As organizations move toward outbound engagement and revenue generation, these agents are increasingly asked to adopt a more commercial mindset.
This can be uncomfortable. The image of a friendly service representative helping a customer solve a problem feels positive and familiar. The image of a pushy salesperson can feel far less appealing.
But the reality is more nuanced. At its core, selling is simply helping customers solve problems by connecting them with products or services that meet their needs.
When done correctly, proactive engagement and thoughtful sales conversations can actually improve the CX. Customers often appreciate learning about solutions they were not aware of or discovering products that better fit their situations.
To help agents with this transformation, contact center leaders should invest in two areas.
First, there will be agents for which this sales mindset will come more naturally than others. Leverage these resources as examples and coaches. Agents will learn better from peers they work with daily and respect.
Secondly, I would recommend investing in the many AI-driven QA and coaching technologies available. These AI tools allow for previously unseen levels of coverage and real-time feedback loops.
The role of the customer service agent is evolving. And so are the expectations placed on CX organizations.
The future of customer CX will increasingly require organizations to blend service, proactive engagement, and revenue generation in ways that were previously separated.
And that future will almost certainly involve picking up the phone.