Watch the podcast to understand how Amazon Connect and agentic AI are redefining customer experience and why the real transformation happens behind the front door, requiring a partner like Persistent that understands the complexities of modern-day CX.

For years, contact centers ran on a familiar model. You bought a platform, paid the license, waited for vendor upgrades and measured success by how quickly you could get a customer off the phone. Customers learned to work around it: pressing buttons, repeating themselves and asking for a human agent at the first opportunity.

That model is breaking. Customer tolerance has collapsed and experiences that were aspirational a few years ago are now table stakes. If a competitor already knows why the customer is calling, the customer will notice when you don’t. Meanwhile, aging on-premises infrastructure can’t deliver the scale or the data that AI-driven service depends on. Many enterprises that have adopted a life-and-shift approach to CX modernization find that the new contact center works much like the old one.

Featured Speakers

Jing Zhang, Partner Development Specialist, Amazon Connect, AWS, brings the platform view from inside AWS. She explains how Amazon Connect grew out of Amazon’s own customer service operations and how its pace of innovation now outruns most enterprises’ ability to absorb it. She also covers what separates CX programs that deliver from those that stall.

Hemnath Prabhakaran, Solution Consulting, CX Practice, Persistent Systems, brings the delivery view. He covers what it takes to migrate a contact center without losing years of embedded logic and how purpose-built accelerators shorten the path. He explains why continuous engineering after go-live determines whether a platform becomes a business outcome.

The Front Door is the Easy Part

Agentic AI has made it possible for a contact center to understand customers before they speak, complete tasks rather than just answer questions and get smarter with every interaction. But capability alone doesn’t transform anything. If self-service is flawless while agents still copy and paste between systems behind it, the experience has only been decorated, not redesigned. Real transformation means rethinking processes, bringing agents along and treating migration as the starting line rather than the destination.

Six Realities of CX Transformation Explored

  1. Customer tolerance has collapsed: Customers expect to be recognized and understood without repeating themselves. That expectation now spans every industry and falling short costs loyalty.
  2. AI now acts, not just answers: Identity verification, refunds, appointments and claims can be completed end-to-end, with humans kept in the loop for the decisions that need them.
  3. Happy agents make happy customers: Real-time guidance replaces the hunt across multiple applications, helping agents follow best practice while keeping the authority to override.
  4. Every interaction trains the system: A unified data layer improves self-service, knowledge and agent performance and powers proactive, personalized outreach before customers ever call.
  5. Process matters more than platform: Lift-and-shift reproduces yesterday’s contact center on today’s technology. Value comes from understanding the old system and redesigning the work around AI.
  6. Go-live is the starting line: With hundreds of new features shipping each year, continuous engineering, IVA fine-tuning and managed services are what keep a platform aligned to business outcomes.

Join the conversation. Contact us at podcasts@persistent.com.

Speakers

Jing Zhang, Partner Development Specialist, Amazon Connect, AWS

Hemnath Prabhakaran, Solution Consulting, CX Practice, Persistent Systems

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