The call center seems to be like the standard MBA case of a cost center to optimize but where efficiency is only half correlated with positive customer experience. I mean if you can route people to the right place, and get peoples questions answered quickly it's great, but that leaves a long tail of people in the nightmare situation of digging through phone trees, dealing with untrained staff, or having someone try to cut a call short rather than give you the best experience.
The only real advance for the customer (if you don't count voiceprint authentication, natural language IVR, agents having all your customer details ready as the call connects saving lots of tedious dictation).
On the business side, you have real-time load metrics to feed your automatic workforce management, rerouting of calls based on staffing and load, highly accurate transcription and sentiment analysis that's always on (even when you think you're on hold, always mute your phone), the accessibility of enterprise-grade contact centres to SMB, and about a dozen other things that weren't possible 20 years ago.
My dentist has a PBX setup so that when you call and you don't get anyone or leave a voicemail, you get a link in a SMS with a link to schedule a call back.
