Customer experience inefficiency does not always appear in financial statements, but its impact is very real. Learn how a revenue-ready contact center can turn a P&L drain into a P&L driver.
In your financial statements, some numbers are visible: revenue, operating expenses, and margins. But there are also numbers you do not see — revenue that should have been captured, but never made it to the top line. This revenue leaks through slow customer service, conversations that fail to convert, and customers who leave without ever filing a complaint. This is what we call CX inefficiency, one of the most overlooked sources of business waste.
From Cost Center to Strategic Asset
For years, contact centers have been viewed as departments responsible for handling complaints and controlling costs. The logic was simple: the fewer interactions, the better.
That paradigm is now outdated.
Companies that optimize their contact centers as revenue drivers — not merely cost centers — have the potential to increase top-line revenue. For instance, businesses can achieve significantly higher sales conversion simply by changing how agents interact with customers, supported by the right data and analytics.
In addition, service leaders who consistently integrate customer value, product adoption, and revenue growth into their operations can successfully transform the contact center from a budget burden into a tangible business driver.
Where the Leakage Happens
CX inefficiency appears in many forms that are not always easy to identify. Agents spend too much of their time on administrative tasks instead of high-value conversations. Teams lack real-time data that helps agents make better decisions during customer interactions. Revenue-related KPIs are absent from the contact center, meaning teams are never measured by their actual business impact. Processes remain largely manual, causing human capacity to be consumed by repetitive tasks.
McKinsey projects that generative AI could automate 30% of total working hours in customer operations. Gartner has also estimated that AI adoption in contact centers could reduce global labor costs by USD 80 billion by 2026. Companies that have not started moving in this direction are not only missing efficiency gains. They are actively carrying a significant opportunity cost.
Building a Revenue-Ready Contact Center
Becoming revenue-ready is not about adding more features or purchasing a more expensive platform. It is about ensuring that every element of the contact center — technology, processes, and people — is aligned to create value, not merely manage volume.
In practical terms, this means equipping agents with real-time customer insights before and during every conversation. It means using AI systems that can identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities contextually — not through generic offers, but through recommendations that are relevant to each customer’s specific situation. It also means implementing analytics that measure the contact center’s contribution to revenue, not only CSAT and first call resolution. And it means using automation to free human teams to focus on conversations that truly require empathy, creativity, and judgment.
A contact center built this way is not only more efficient. It becomes one of the hardest business assets for competitors to replicate, because it is built through the integration of systems, processes, and culture — something that cannot be copied overnight.
On the other hand, a contact center that still operates as a pure cost center in 2026 is not merely inefficient. It is a strategic liability: a source of leakage that continues working quietly while the rest of the market moves forward.
It is time for your contact center to work for your P&L, not against it. Share your current operational challenges with the KPSG team. We will help you identify where the greatest value can be unlocked. Learn more with KPSG’s team of experts: https://kpsg.com/en/contact-us/
