How to Scale Your Contact Center Operations with AI

Key Takeaways:

• If your contact center is facing rising queue times, high abandonment and missed call rates, declining CSAT or NPS scores, and growing agent burnout, these are clear signs that it’s time to scale your contact center operations with AI.
• You can scale your contact center cost-effectively by implementing AI voice bots and/ or AI chatbots that can operate 24/7, resolve customer requests end-to-end, and handle multiple interactions at once without any delays.
• VoiceSpin helps contact centers scale effectively by offering a unified, cloud-based platform that allows you to deploy advanced AI voice bots for inbound/outbound call automation and AI chatbots across digital channels.

As your business grows, so should your capacity to handle an increasing volume of inbound calls and chats. Otherwise, longer wait times (and increased customer frustration that comes with it), dropped calls, and missed sales opportunities are inevitable. Fortunately, scaling your contact center operations no longer means hiring more agents or burning out your existing team. AI can handle calls and chats automatically, so you can actually scale your contact center without having to bring in new team members.

In this blog, we’ll talk about when it’s time to scale with AI, how AI voice bots and AI chatbots can help you handle a growing number of customer requests effectively, and what to consider when choosing the right solutions for your contact center.

When is it Time to Scale Your Contact Center Operations with AI?

So, how do you know that it’s time to scale your contact center with AI? Here are some KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and operational indicators that signal the need to scale with AI:

Longer wait times

If you notice that your average hold times keep increasing and your reps struggle to answer customer calls quickly, that’s a clear sign that your team can’t handle the load. Implementing an AI voice bot can change that dramatically. It can answer calls immediately, handle multiple calls at once, no matter how many customers call in, and help you eliminate hold times altogether.

High call/ contact abandonment rates

Statistically, nearly 30% of callers would disconnect within five minutes of being placed on hold. When too many customers hang up or close the chat before reaching a live agent, that’s an even bigger indicator that it’s time to automate your first-line support with AI. Otherwise, customer satisfaction will continue to drop alongside abandonment rates.

Declining CSAT and NPS scores

Declining Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT) and Net Promoter Scores (NPS) are certainly a red flag. When your reps aren’t able to respond to customer requests instantly, customer satisfaction inevitably decreases. AI voice bots and chatbots can provide 24/7 support, helping you meet your customers’ expectations for immediate assistance.

Increased missed calls

Did you know that, according to a survey by Invoca, around 26% of calls never get answered? And it’s not just customer service calls – many of those are leads ready to buy. Naturally, the more calls you miss (and that number increases as your call volume grows), the more sales opportunities simply slip away. If you’ve noticed this happening, it might be just the right time to bring an AI voice bot to change that.

High agent burnout and turnover

When your team is stretched too thin, burnout and turnover are bound to rise – and so will your operational costs, because hiring and training new reps isn’t cheap. If that’s already the case, it’s just about time to bring AI into your contact center. AI voice bots and chatbots can handle repetitive tasks and take a big chunk of the workload off your team’s shoulders.

AI Tools for Scaling Contact Center Operations

Now, let’s take a closer look at how you can scale your contact center operations with AI voice bots and AI chatbots – and how to make sure you pick the right tools for your specific needs.

AI Voice Bots: Automate Your Phone Calls 

If your business depends on phone calls, implementing an AI voice bot is the smartest way to scale your call center operations. These solutions have recently become so advanced and sophisticated that it’s no wonder the market is booming right now. In fact, based on a report from Market Research Future, the global voice bot market is projected to grow from 7.1 USD Billion in 2024 to 66.9 USD Billion by 2035.

What exactly are AI voice bots?

Though AI voice bots (also commonly referred to as AI voice agents or AI phone agents) have been around for a while now, many businesses still confuse them with conversational IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems. The reality is that AI voice bots are much more advanced and intelligent. While conversational IVR systems rely on basic speech recognition, they are still pretty much limited in their ability to handle customer interactions naturally.

AI voice bots understand conversational language rather than requiring specific keywords or menu selections, maintain the context of the conversation, and even adjust their response if you interrupt them mid-sentence. And they sound so real that many wouldn’t even be able to tell if they are interacting with a voice bot or a human. Our quick video does a great job explaining the fundamental differences between conversational IVRs and AI voice bots:

What can AI voice bots actually do?

AI voice bots aren’t just answering FAQs and providing basic information about your business, products, or services. They can integrate with CRM, calendar software, helpdesk systems, order management platforms, and other back-end tools and trigger specific actions in these systems. Today, you can build AI voice bots for literally anything from customer support to cold calling and lead qualification. Here’s what AI voice bots can potentially do:

• Provide 24/7 customer support
• Schedule appointments/ meetings
• Process orders and track order statuses
• Handle product returns and refunds
• Modify user subscriptions
• Run cold calling campaigns
• Qualify leads automatically
• Follow up with prospects
• Automate payment reminders and debt collection
• Provide personalized product recommendations
• Collect customer surveys and feedback

How to choose an AI voice bot provider?

When choosing an AI voice bot solution, look for providers offering these features and capabilities (though you might not necessarily need them all):

• Ability to automatically handle both inbound and outbound calls
• Ability to train the voice bot on your internal knowledge sources
• Low latency to ensure natural conversations without noticeable delays
• Ability to handle interruptions and changes in conversation direction
• Contextual call handoffs to your reps when human assistance is needed
• Ability to handle conversations in multiple languages
• Real-time and post-call analytics and advanced reporting
• Ability to handle multiple calls simultaneously and scale on demand
• Seamless integrations with CRM and other back-end systems and APIs
• Data security and compliance features (for highly regulated industries)

Top 5 contact center AI voice bot providers to consider

Recommended reading: 10 Best AI Voice Agents for Business in 2025

AI Chatbots: Automate Interactions Across Digital Channels

If most of your customer interactions happen online, implementing an AI chatbot is the easiest and most effective way to scale your contact center operations. The market for AI chatbots is also booming right now as more businesses are increasingly adopting them to automate customer service operations, speed up response times, and improve service quality and customer experience. According to a report from Market Research Future, the global chatbot market is expected to grow from USD 7.5 billion in 2025 to USD 33.7 billion by 2034.

What exactly are AI chatbots?

Traditional rule-based chatbots have been in use for decades – and, let’s be honest, they were often more frustrating than helpful. Relying on preset rules, keyword triggers, and rigid decision trees, their capabilities were extremely limited compared to today’s AI-powered chatbots. Modern AI chatbots can understand natural language and respond in a way that feels genuinely human, making users feel like they’re chatting with a real person. They’re far more flexible, can adapt to each conversation, and deliver a much better customer experience.

It’s also worth noting that the term ‘AI chatbot’ is now being gradually replaced by ‘AI agent’. The shift in terminology reflects how much these tools have recently evolved and improved. They are no longer just answering basic questions – they understand context, take action across multiple systems, and handle conversations from start to finish, much like your human reps.

Recommended Reading: Customer Service Chatbots: A Complete Guide for 2025

What can AI chatbots actually do?

Similar to AI voice bots, today’s AI chatbots go far beyond simply answering common questions and providing product information. They are intelligent enough to handle customer conversations end-to-end – all while interacting with users in a natural, conversational way. And thanks to direct integrations with back-end systems, they can perform multiple actions autonomously without requiring human intervention. Here are some specific examples of what AI chatbots/ AI agents are capable of:

• Support customers around the clock
• Schedule/ reschedule/ cancel appointments
• Update account information
• Process payments and resolve billing issues
• Renew or cancel user subscriptions
• Help customers during checkout to reduce cart abandonment
• Track orders and provide order status updates
• Process returns, exchanges, and refunds
• Provide product recommendations based on customer data
• Send reminders, updates, and promotional messages
• Collect customer feedback
• Qualify leads and capture lead information

How to choose an AI chatbot provider?

If you’re looking for an AI chatbot solution for your business, the following feature list might be helpful (but again, not all of these features and capabilities might be absolutely necessary for your specific use case):

• Ability to deploy a chatbot across different channels (email, web, social, WhatsApp)
• Easy set-up and user-friendly chatbot builder interface (important for non-tech users)
• Ability to train the bot on your company’s unique data to reduce AI hallucinations
• Customizable conversation flows and the bot’s personality to match your business needs
• Chat handoffs to human agents with a full conversation context
• Ability to hold conversations in multiple languages
• Integrations with helpdesk systems, CRMs, calendar tools, and other back-end systems
• Ability to handle increasing chat volumes without performance issues
• Detailed reporting and analytics to track your chatbot’s performance
• Ability to monitor website visitors and initiate chats proactively
• Ability to provide personalized responses based on customer data
• Data security and compliance features to comply with industry-specific regulations

Top 5 AI chatbot/ AI agent providers to consider

Next Steps: Scale Your Contact Center with AI and How VoiceSpin Can Help

Scaling your contact center operations with AI-powered voice bots and chatbots is an excellent way to handle your growing call/ chat volumes effectively without increasing headcount. When properly set up and trained, these tools can automate up to 80% of basic requests, so your human reps don’t get overwhelmed by repetitive inquiries. If you’re ready to get started, here’s how VoiceSpin can help:

• AI voice bots for inbound/ outbound call automation: Our AI voice bot can automate both inbound and outbound calls, handle thousands of calls at once, speak 100s of languages fluently, handle interruptions like a real human, and escalate calls to your human reps without losing any context.

• AI chatbots that work across all digital channels: Want to automate digital customer interactions? Our AI chatbot can work across different digital communication channels, support your customers in the language of their preference, and perform real actions besides just answering FAQs.

• Instant scalability with a cloud-based infrastructure: Our cloud-based infrastructure ensures you can easily and instantly scale your contact center operations to meet the growing volume of calls or chats – without having to worry about system downtime or long setup times.

• Advanced AI speech analytics and reporting tools: With the built-in AI speech analytics module, you can monitor 100% of your inbound and outbound calls – both handled by AI voice bots and your human reps – and measure performance and the quality of customer interactions based on your specific metrics that matter most to your business.

• Unified platform for all your contact center needs: You don’t need to implement dozens of disjointed AI tools to scale your contact center – VoiceSpin offers a unified AI-powered contact center platform for all your customer communication needs. And it seamlessly connects to your existing tech stack through out-of-the-box integrations and APIs.

Book a demo call now to see VoiceSpin’s AI contact center solutions in action and learn how they can help you meet your scalability needs.

Frequently Asked Questions

What’s the difference between scaling a contact center and growing it?

Growing a contact center means adding more resources (hiring more reps, buying more equipment/ tools, and increasing operational costs) to meet the rising demand. Scaling, on the other side, means increasing your contact center’s efficiency and capacity to handle a growing volume of customer interactions without proportionally increasing operational costs or headcount. Scaling is typically achieved by implementing AI and automation.

What are the benefits of contact center scaling with AI?

Scaling your contact center with AI helps you meet growing customer demand and rising customer expectations for instant support without sacrificing your service quality and dramatically increasing your operational costs. By automatically handling repetitive customer interactions, AI helps you optimize essential contact center metrics, improve customer satisfaction, and ultimately drive stronger customer loyalty, which fuels your business growth. On top of that, AI tools improve your agent performance by automating repetitive tasks so they can focus on higher-value activities.

What are the challenges of scaling my contact center with AI?

The main challenge of scaling your contact center with AI is integrating AI tools with your existing tech stack (like CRM and other back-end systems) so data flows smoothly between the systems. Another key challenge is data quality and training. AI tools like voice bots and chatbots rely on accurate, well-organized data to provide helpful responses. And the third key challenge is change management. Your contact center team may resist new technology or worry about being replaced by AI, so it’s important to communicate that AI is here to assist, not replace them.

How can I scale my contact center without AI?

You can scale your contact center without AI by optimizing your existing processes and human resources. For example, you can add more self-service options like FAQs, a comprehensive knowledge base, or an IVR system, so your customers can find answers to their questions and resolve issues without needing to contact your team. Additionally, you can improve agent training to ensure your human reps can handle more requests as your call/ chat volumes grow – but that can easily lead to increased burnout.

Can AI replace my contact center team?

Absolutely not! AI tools like chatbots and voice bots may excel at handling FAQs and automating tasks like appointment booking, order tracking, lead qualification, surveys, and more. But they aren’t smart enough to successfully handle more complex customer interactions that require deep expertise, critical thinking, empathy, and human judgment. The best strategy is to leverage both – let AI automate the basic tasks while your human reps take care of the rest.