How Unified Data Turns Contact Centers from Cost Centers into Value Drivers

For decades contact centers have lived with the stigma of being cost centers.

Necessary expenses that keep customers happy but don’t directly contribute to the bottom line. The focus remained relentless: reduce average handle time, optimize agent efficiency, reduce overhead costs.

These are fair contact center objectives, but they miss one crucial element. Your contact center is sitting on a treasure trove of data—one of your most valuable business assets. Every interaction—whether it is a frustrated customer calling about a billing issue, an agent searching an internal knowledge base, or a virtual assistant escalating an issue to an agent—generates data.

The problem isn’t that contact centers can’t be value centers. It’s that for the majority of organizations this data is locked away in data silos. And with the advent of AI—which is only as good as the data it is trained on—unifying contact center data becomes even more of a business priority.

Siloed Data Keeps Contact Centers Stuck as Cost Centers

If you think of the average contact center, you’ll find data everywhere and nowhere all at the same time. Interaction transcripts live in one system. Quality scores sit in another. Workforce engagement runs over there. The CRM doesn’t capture real-time customer sentiment.

This fragmentation creates blind spots, meaning managers don’t have access to the information required to answer basic questions. Where are we seeing customer churn? What are the top issues that are increasing calls into the contact center? Which products are resonating with customers but not driving purchases? This data exists, but often in diverse systems—and in diverse formats—across the organization.

9 Ways Unified Customer Interaction Data Can Improve Business Metrics

1. Discovering the top intents for customers contacting the contact center: When customer conversations are unified across channels, you can clearly see why customers are reaching out—not just in one channel, for full conversational intelligence.
2. Reducing customer churn risk due to issues with products or services: Conversation interaction data often reveals early signs of frustration long before a customer cancels. Unified data makes it easier to identify anomalies and problem areas, understand where users struggle, and uncover barriers to successful conversion.
3. Improve the effectiveness of offers and upsells: Every conversation contains buying signals—interest, hesitation, objections, timing. Unified data captures these patterns, enabling supervisors to build coaching prompts to help agents spot these signals during live conversations.
4. Tracking the response to marketing campaigns: Contact centers are often the first port of call if a customer has a query about a promotion— particularly if there’s any confusion. Capturing the customer response—good or bad—and communicating it to broader departments means marketing can learn directly from the voice of the customer and support can respond appropriately.
5. Unearthing indicators of fraudulent activities: Fraud attempts, social engineering, and threatening behavior often appear first in customer interactions. Unified data makes these signals easier to detect and act on, helping pre-emptively stop risk threats before they get out of hand.
6. Gaining crucial information about competitors: Customers frequently mention competitors—pricing, features, service quality, or switching considerations—in conversations with contact center agents. A centralized data hub enables all other functions of the business to leverage this conversational intelligence.
7. Using buying signals to upsell more effectively: When CRM data is unified with customer interaction data, the contact center becomes a powerful revenue engine. Instead of relying on chance or agent intuition, organizations can systematically identify the best moments to upsell—especially during high‑intent events such as annual renewals, contract anniversaries, or product milestones.
8. Signs of an urgent issue emerging: When customers struggle on a website or digital property, they leave behind a trail of behavioral signals—hesitation, repeated clicks, abandoned flows, error loops, or sudden spikes in help‑seeking behavior. When these signals are unified across the entire digital ecosystem, organizations can detect urgent issues early and intervene before they impact the bottom line.
9. Regional differences in agent performance and indicators: When interaction data is unified, organizations can compare performance across regions with clarity and fairness. Instead of relying on isolated metrics or anecdotal feedback, leaders can see how agents perform in different markets, what challenges are unique to each region, and where targeted support can drive improvement.

How to Unify Your Data

Transforming your contact center from a cost center to a value driver does not require ripping out your entire tech stack. It requires a unified engagement data hub—a central place that brings together user behavior, interaction volumes, agent performance, and sentiment (from both customers and employees).

Verint’s Engagement Data Hub brings all customer interaction, experience, and workforce performance data into a single AI‑ready layer. By connecting previously siloed systems, it gives organizations a real‑time, holistic view of customer engagement.

This shared data foundation powers Verint applications and AI bots, enabling faster insights, smarter automation, and more informed decision‑making across the business. The result is a more connected, efficient, and insight‑driven customer experience ecosystem.

The New Unified Data Mandate

The contact center’s reputation as a cost center is based purely on its limitations to prove strategic value. Unified data changes the equation. When you can unify your contact center, branches, online presence, and overall enterprise data, you’re able to transform into an efficient, data-driven organization and increase customer lifetime value.