The Contact Centre Without Walls
*Updated 15 September 2026*
The contact centre no longer needs to be defined by a room full of dedicated agents.
Cloud platforms, unified communications, intelligent routing and AI now make it possible to connect customers with employees across offices, homes, specialist teams and the wider organisation.
That creates a different type of contact centre. One built around access to expertise and customer demand, rather than where employees physically sit.
Hybrid working is now established across the wider UK workforce. ONS research published on 11 June 2025 found that 28% of working adults in Great Britain were hybrid working, with the proportion gradually increasing since 2022.
For contact centre leaders, the opportunity is bigger than remote working. The aim should be to create a service function that can flex people, skills and technology around what customers actually need.
Does A Contact Centre Still Need To Be A Physical Place?
Not necessarily.
Cloud contact centre platforms give agents and supervisors access to customer interactions, routing, analytics and workforce tools without requiring everyone to work from the same location.
However, replacing an office-based contact centre with employees working remotely is not transformation on its own.
The bigger opportunity is to rethink who can serve the customer.
A billing specialist, engineer, account manager or housing officer may not need a full contact centre desktop, but their expertise could still be critical to resolving an enquiry.
Modern customer service therefore needs to connect dedicated agents with specialists across the organisation rather than keeping customer interactions inside one operational silo.
How Can Customer Service Extend Beyond The Contact Centre?
This is where the boundary between unified communications and contact centre technology is becoming less rigid.
8x8 Engage, for example, allows employees outside the core contact centre to handle queued customer calls and interactions through the applications they already use, without requiring every employee to become a full contact centre agent.
Similarly, 8x8 Contact Centre for Microsoft Teams can connect frontline agents with Teams-based employees across the wider organisation, giving agents visibility of colleague availability and making it easier to involve the right specialist without moving the customer through multiple disconnected teams.
The benefit is not simply flexible working.
It is flexible expertise.
Customer service becomes an organisational capability rather than the responsibility of one department.
Why Does Flexible Resourcing Matter?
Customer demand rarely arrives at a constant rate.
Contact centres experience peaks caused by incidents, seasonal demand, campaigns, billing cycles, service disruption and unexpected events.
Maintaining enough dedicated agents to cover every possible peak can be expensive.
ContactBabel's 2026 UK Contact Centre Decision-Makers' Guide puts the average cost of an inbound call at £6.17, 25% higher than email and 83% higher than webchat. It also found that 78% of contact centre leaders rank AI among their five highest technology investment priorities for the next two years.
An agile operating model can combine:
- Dedicated contact centre agents
- Employees working remotely
- Office-based specialists
- Subject matter experts
- AI-powered self-service
- Digital channels
- Automated workflows
This allows organisations to match the type of resource to the type of interaction.
Routine demand can be automated or handled digitally. Complex enquiries can reach employees with the specialist knowledge to resolve them.
How Can AI Support A More Agile Contact Centre?
AI can help determine where customer interactions should go and what support employees need when they receive them.
Useful applications include:
- Understanding customer intent
- Intelligent routing
- Virtual assistants
- Agent guidance
- Interaction summaries
- Knowledge recommendations
- Quality management
- Demand forecasting
- Conversation analytics
The purpose should not be to remove employees indiscriminately.
AI should help the organisation use human expertise where it adds the greatest value.
When customer intent, employee skills and availability can be connected intelligently, the contact centre becomes more responsive without relying entirely on a fixed number of people sitting in one location.
What Does An Agile Contact Centre Need?
Britannic recommends focusing on five areas.
| Priority | Key Question |
| Access | Can employees support customers securely from the locations and devices they need? |
| Skill | Can customers reach the person with the right expertise, wherever they sit? |
| Context | Does customer information follow the interaction between teams? |
| Capacity | Can resources flex when demand changes? |
| Insight | Can leaders see performance and improve the model continuously? |
A contact centre can only become genuinely agile when these areas work together.
What Does This Look Like In Practice?
Britannic's work with Plus Dane Housing demonstrates the value of creating a more flexible customer service environment.
Britannic implemented an 8x8 cloud contact centre across teams including customer access, repairs, income, lettings and welfare, with employees working across offices, schemes and colleague homes. Different licensing levels were used so employees received the capabilities their roles required rather than everyone being placed into the same contact centre model.
The organisation also introduced WhatsApp, workforce management, analytics and automation.
The results included more than 10% additional calls answered without increasing headcount and average waiting times reduced by almost 60 seconds.
This is what agility should deliver in practice. Not simply more flexible working, but better use of people, technology and capacity.
How Should Businesses Review Their Contact Centre Model?
Organisations should consider:
- Which enquiries genuinely require a contact centre agent
- Which interactions could use self-service or automation
- Where specialist knowledge sits outside the contact centre
- Whether agents can involve those specialists easily
- Whether remote employees receive the same tools and customer context
- How customer information moves between teams
- Whether licensing reflects different employee roles
- How easily capacity can increase during peaks
- Whether workforce planning reflects changing demand
- How service quality is monitored across locations
- Whether employees can work securely outside the office
- Which processes still depend unnecessarily on physical location
The question should not be “Where should the contact centre be?”
It should be “How should the organisation bring the right expertise to the customer?”
From Contact Centre To Connected Service Function
The physical contact centre is not disappearing completely.
Some organisations and employees will continue to benefit from centralised workplaces for collaboration, coaching and operational support.
What is changing is the assumption that customer service needs to remain inside those walls.
Cloud platforms can connect distributed employees. AI can route interactions and support agents. Unified communications can bring specialists into customer conversations. Workforce tools can help organisations respond to changing demand.
The result is a contact centre that operates less like a fixed asset and more like an agile service function across the organisation.
Britannic helps organisations design and integrate cloud contact centre, unified communications, AI and customer engagement technology around their existing teams, processes and business objectives.
Organisations reviewing how their contact centre is structured can book a complimentary meeting with a Britannic CX specialist to assess where cloud technology, flexible resourcing and wider enterprise collaboration could improve service.
