Customer service was traditionally viewed as a cost center rather than a strategic business function. It had little strategic importance, and companies wanted to reduce contact volume. This created three major challenges:

1) Pressure to cut costs while volumes increased: Contact volumes have continued to rise, while requests have become more complex. Contact center leaders were therefore faced with a dilemma: reduce operational expenses while volumes kept growing. Affordable AI offered a solution by handling standard requests automatically and routing complex cases directly to the right subject matter expert. This allowed contact centers to manage higher volumes and improve first-call resolution on more complex cases.

2) Reputational challenge: In a digital world, companies can no longer differentiate themselves through product offerings alone; they must also deliver outstanding customer service. Bad reviews are often driven by emotion, especially when customers feel unfairly treated or ignored. As a result, customer service has become a key reputational factor that can determine whether a company is chosen or overlooked.

3) Strategic challenge: Contact centers are often the place where companies truly “feel” the customer. Because customers proactively reach out, this is where organizations gain the clearest insight into satisfaction and expectations. Customer service is therefore not just a cost center; it is one of the most valuable touchpoints and plays a strategic role in shaping the future of the company.

Customers are confronted not only with more self-service options, but also with increasingly complex product and service offerings. This trend is dramatically increasing the complexity of customer requests and changing the employee requirements profile.

Customer service employees no longer need only basic product knowledge. Instead, they need to be able to help customers with IT issues related to self-service offerings, handle emotional situations, and know each product and service in such detail that the answer cannot simply be found online. This requires a very diverse and demanding skill set.

The second challenge lies in the interconnectivity of technology and the pace of technological development today. The operational landscape has become so complex that any technological change on one end may affect operations elsewhere and must therefore be selected and implemented carefully. Moreover, the technology and use case must be chosen wisely so that they not only fit into the overall landscape, but also remain sustainable and flexible over time, avoiding obsolescence in the short term.

The main driver of successful digitalization overall, not only for AI initiatives, is rethinking the process. A common mistake is to keep the traditional workflow and simply automate part of it. This not only adds complexity but also fails to deliver efficiency because some steps may still be performed manually.

Therefore, implementing AI initiatives that deliver ROI requires the courage to challenge and reshape the status quo, with a vision for the future and the right steps to build a foundation for continuous expansion and improvement.

In short: people and technology. To this day, Spitch still retains all its original founders and investors, which is proof of our strong company culture and team spirit. Moreover, we have had successful collaborations with customers for almost a decade, and it is a great pleasure to continue working with them.

The technology field we have chosen is evolving so quickly that it motivates us to keep growing, making every day so diverse that it is impossible to lose excitement. I remember that when we started, people asked us what guarantee we had that we would still be around the following year – and now, more than 10 years later, we are more successful than ever.