Contact center back-end integrations drive revenue growth
By integrating contact center software with back-office apps, companies can improve employee productivity, customer satisfaction and ultimately their bottom line.
By now, many enterprise C-suite executives have abandoned the notion that contact centers are cost centers. Instead, the C-suite has embraced the contact center as a value center that drives revenue growth and operational efficiency.
However, for too many organizations, the contact center remains a silo disconnected from customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), service management, unified communications (UC) or other business-critical enterprise applications. This, clearly, is a mistake.
Seamless integration between the contact center and enterprise applications is a key characteristic of success for customer experience operations. Metrigy discovered this correlation in its global "Customer Experience Optimization (CXO): 2025-26" research study of 656 companies.
In this study, the majority of the most successful companies -- based on achieving double-digit revenue growth, efficiency boosts and other improvements -- have bridged the gap between the contact center and back-end enterprise systems. Unequivocally, this shows that seamless integration isn't merely a nice-to-have, but it's a foundational requirement for success.
Executives need access to contact center data
The term seamless integration is key. Superficial links between apps won't cut it. Contact center agents shouldn't have to swivel between apps to accomplish any task -- whether it's viewing customer data, conversing with a colleague for customer assistance or initiating a workflow.
With a CRM integration, for example, agents should have a unified desktop for all customer communications and access to their relevant data. Syncing up data is imperative.
When systems are integrated well, CRM data informs routing decisions for contact center engagements, while contact center activities automatically become part of the CRM record and trigger follow-up actions. Seamless CRM integration ensures that agents have instant access to a complete customer history, sales status and previous interactions, regardless of the channel, which improves resolution time and customer service quality.
Tight integration between the contact center and CRM also leads to shared reporting and analytics, enabling C-suite teams to see how contact center performance affects business metrics, including revenue generation. Metrigy research indicates companies will increasingly pull contact center information -- such as customer interaction data -- into company performance dashboards to provide such perspectives directly to executives.
According to Metrigy research, more than 80% of companies said the analysis of customer interaction data should be available to executives as part of company performance dashboards.
How integrations cut costs and boost revenue
Enterprises can also reap the benefits of integrating contact center and ERP systems, which brings together customer interactions and financial, inventory and supply chain data. Agents get real-time visibility into order status and inventory availability, for example, leading to improved fulfillment and lower logistical costs, among other benefits.
The value of integrating contact center and UC platforms cannot be understated, either -- especially when both tools come from the same provider.
For companies in Metrigy's study, the greatest value of a contact center and UC integration is the cost savings from bundled pricing, which is a benefit of clear interest to C-suite executives such as CEOs and CFOs.
60% of companies with an integrated contact center and UC platform said the integration has led to higher revenue.
MetrigyGlobal CX Optimization study
Meanwhile, a chief product officer may want agents and supervisors to provide product development feedback based on customer interactions. At the same time, a chief marketing officer may glean insights from responses to sales and marketing programs. Both these initiatives are cited as top value generators of integrating contact centers with other business platforms.
According to Metrigy's CXO study, 60% of companies with an integrated contact center and UC platform said the integration has led to higher revenue. And about 50% also report improved customer satisfaction (CSAT), reduced costs and greater employee productivity.
AI integrates platforms, automates workflows
Automation and AI are becoming crucial for contact center platform integration.
Most companies in Metrigy's study said a smooth pathway between front-office service interactions and back-end systems is vitally important to them. To establish such pathways, more companies use automated workflows to connect front- and back-office functions than manual workflows.
More than half of companies are also using generative AI prompts to pull information from their contact center platform into another platform, and vice versa. These companies are also using AI agents to coordinate work between platforms.
The most advanced forms of AI -- especially agentic AI, which uses large language models to make decisions, learn and take actions autonomously -- rely on unobstructed access to enterprise data across platforms. Here are two examples of how agentic AI agents could work across platforms to drive positive business outcomes, such as increased revenue:
Behind the scenes, an AI agent assisting a human agent during a customer interaction can work with an ERP AI agent to increase a customer's credit line while the human agent works on an upsell opportunity. With improved upsell capabilities comes increased revenue.
When the contact center links to the core business logic, an AI agent can move beyond simple information retrieval to automate critical workflows, such as managing the logistics of a product return, coordinating the necessary steps with the ERP, and simultaneously sending the return label or issuing a credit to the customer. Improved CSAT leads to greater loyalty, which, in turn, drives revenue growth.
This level of end-to-end service automation is impossible if a contact center platform remains disconnected from the operational core.
C-suite executives must recognize that integrating contact center platforms with back-end enterprise systems is a prerequisite for achieving CX success. Integration reduces operational drag, maximizes the efficiency of human and AI workforces, and converts customer interactions from necessary expenses into demonstrable sources of revenue and insight.
Beth Schultz is vice president of research and principal analyst at Metrigy. She focuses her research on unified communications, collaboration and digital customer experience.
