Voice at the heart of the customer experience

By Bertrand Pourcelot, CEO Enreach for Service Providers

For more than a decade, companies have focused their efforts on automating customer journeys. This challenge, presented as a strategic priority, was aimed at improving operational efficiency while reducing costs and meeting the demands for immediacy imposed by the digital world. This approach has led to a proliferation of self-service solutions, conversational chatbots, and standardised interfaces designed to cover all customer needs, sometimes within a context of a full outsourcing of these services. As a result, customer relationships have gradually become codified, at times to the detriment of their very substance: human contact.

Gradually, the voice channel faded into the background. It did not disappear, but became diluted within interaction funnels, pushed behind drop-down menus or confined to soulless scripts. Yet whenever a situation calls for empathy, nuance, or genuine support, this channel regains its full legitimacy. Urgency, complexity, and trust are still conveyed through the voice. And it is precisely here that artificial intelligence can bring new value—not by replacing humans, but by augmenting their capabilities.

This conviction underpins a new approach: Smart Contact, a term describing this new generation of interactions in which the voice regains its central role in the customer experience, enhanced by AI but always serving human use cases. This is not just another technological promise; it is a genuine driver of transformation, particularly relevant for small and medium-sized enterprises.

In practice, SMEs demonstrate a high level of pragmatism and often seek to retain full control over their customer relationships by managing them in-house. With fewer staff and smaller budgets than large corporations, they look for solutions with measurable efficiency. This is precisely what AI applied to voice enables. It frees teams from repetitive tasks, enhances service quality, and streamlines interactions without adding technical complexity. Contrary to common belief, smaller organisations are often the quickest to adopt these tools, because they immediately perceive the benefits for both customer experience and internal operations.

However, this technology must be both accessible and easy to integrate. That is why Smart Contact has been designed as an open ecosystem, enabling operator and integrator partners to offer it without disrupting existing architectures. By embedding AI directly into the voice channel, they can deliver value-added services such as automated ticket creation, call qualification, post-call summaries, and contextual assistance, with a range of possible customisations and specialisations, for example for specific vertical industries, without the need for bespoke development.

Several real-world cases illustrate this capacity for specialisation. In the Netherlands, a taxi company implemented Smart Contact to automate bookings via WhatsApp. This initiative enabled the company to digitise its entire customer journey, streamline the experience, and regain competitiveness against international ride-hailing platforms. Such rapid and effective deployments demonstrate that voice AI is not reserved for large contact centers.

Far from pitting machines against humans, Smart Contact reconciles speed, efficiency, and personalisation. Each interaction becomes richer, each exchange more contextualised. The voice regains its status as a strategic channel, no longer isolated, but connected to the company’s entire information system. The challenge is no longer about adding tools, but about better interconnecting and orchestrating those that already exist. From this perspective, conversational AI can become a decisive differentiator, provided it is designed as an accelerator of humanity, rather than merely a lever for automation.