BIDV Contact Center - The Intersection of AI and EI in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
In the AI era, the competitive advantage of the contact center industry no longer lies in how powerful a company’s AI is, but in the ability to combine machine intelligence (AI) with human emotional intelligence (EI) to create customer experiences that neither side—if acting alone —could not fully and optimally deliver on their own.
The Era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Is Redefining the Contact Center Industry
After more than half a century of development, the contact center industry is witnessing its most profound transformation to date: For the first time, the industry’s transformation is not driven by the emergence of a new communication channel, but by a new “colleague”—Artificial Intelligence (AI). From chatbots and voicebots to GenAI and agentic AI… artificial intelligence is not only changing how a contact center operates but also redefining the future of customer service. “More than 78% of businesses worldwide have deployed AI in at least one business function, with Customer Service being one of the fastest-growing areas of adoption,” reflecting the growing consensus among businesses that AI is no longer just a pilot project but is becoming the new operational foundation for contact centers.
For many years, contact centers were viewed as places to receive calls and handle customer complaints, with operational effectiveness primarily measured by metrics such as Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Average Handling Time (AHT), or Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)... However, with the development of AI, data, and omnichannel capabilities, this model has completely transformed: No longer merely a place for “handling requests,” the modern contact center is gradually evolving into a hub for coordinating customer experiences, supporting sales, fostering loyalty, and generating business value for the organization. Research by DMG Consulting has shown that every business must essentially go through the stages of the Contact Center Maturity Model, from the Reactive/Responsive model—where the center responds to customer-initiated contact—to the Pre-emptive model and the Predictive (Predictive) models.
The long-term goal is to build a Contact Center that anticipates customer needs and takes appropriate action even before customers realize they need support (Predictive)—which is also an inevitable trend—where all operations are coordinated by AI (AI Hub/AI Brain) serving as the “brain” that coordinates agents, chatbots, voicebots, CRM, the knowledge base, and the organization’s business systems.
It is clear that AI is not merely a supplementary technology but is gradually becoming the essential operational foundation of a new-generation Contact Center.
When Emotional Intelligence (EI) Becomes the New Competitive Advantage in the Contact Center Industry
As AI gradually becomes an inevitable choice for organizations, a company’s competitive advantage will no longer lie in whether or not it uses AI, but in how it combines AI with other resources to create a distinctive experience. Whereas in the past, contact centers primarily competed on the basis of staff size, response time, or operating costs, in the AI era, these advantages are gradually diminishing as AI platforms become increasingly accessible and widespread. As technology becomes a “necessary condition,” the decisive factor in a contact center’s competitive edge will shift to a “sufficient condition”—the ability to build trust, maintain relationships, and deliver positive experiences to customers. For this reason, Emotional Intelligence (EI) is projected to become a core competency for contact centers in this new era.
A 2023 McKinsey survey of 3,500 consumers revealed that 71% of Gen Z respondents believe that a direct phone call remains the fastest and most convenient way to resolve issues with a contact center.
This result shows that even in the digital age, when faced with issues that require explanation, reassurance, or thorough resolution, customers still prefer to interact with a human. When faced with a situation involving financial fraud, within seconds, AI can immediately suggest dozens of solutions, assess the severity of the issue, and even recognize emotions through the customer’s tone of voice, speaking speed, and volume…
But what AI cannot provide is the authenticity needed in those moments when customers need a real person to truly listen and walk alongside them. The era of AI, which standardizes services on a large scale, will put customers in a position where it’s difficult to distinguish between businesses based on their products or technology. Consequently, what customers care about most is the emotional connection and experience that a business provides.
The ability to make customers feel respected, understood, and supported during critical moments will determine their level of satisfaction, loyalty, and likelihood of continuing to choose the brand.
For this reason, workforce requirements in the contact center industry are facing a transformation greater than at any time in decades. As repetitive tasks—such as providing information, conducting operational lookups, verification, or customer surveys and care—are gradually taken over by GenAI chatbots, GenAI Voicebots, and other automation tools, the value of customer service agents is no longer measured by the number of support requests they handle but by their ability to address issues that AI cannot yet replace—issues that involve emotion, complexity, risk, and high value in terms of the customer experience (“4 High” – High Emotion, High Complexity, High Risk, and High Value).
This reality places customer service representatives in a position where they must adapt and develop to fully leverage their emotional intelligence (EI) advantages in the contact center industry. The shift is from a script-based role (service operator) to that of a financial advisor—one who understands the context, provides personalized advice, accompanies customers throughout their journey, and builds long-term relationships with them. This requires advisors to simultaneously develop the ability to effectively utilize AI tools (AI Literacy) and enhance their communication, listening, empathy, and exception-handling skills (EI).
Looking to the future, a Contact Center that delivers an exceptional experience is not the one with the most powerful AI, but rather the one that knows how to leverage and integrate AI with human agents to best harness the unique capabilities that only humans possess.
BIDV Contact Center—the intersection of AI and EI in the AI era
The question is no longer “AI or humans?” but rather “How can AI and humans collaborate most effectively?” Based on this perspective, the BIDV Contact Center is gradually implementing the AI + EI model by using AI to support humans rather than replace them.
At BIDV Contact Center, AI is first and foremost deployed to automate repetitive tasks, such as providing advisory support and addressing simple customer requests (GenAI Chatbot), automating outbound calls for surveys, customer care, and communication about BIDV’s products and services (GenAI Voicebot), and automatically summarizing and quickly retrieving business information (GenAI Search). At the same time, AI serves as a powerful “assistant” that enhances work efficiency through features such as speech-to-text conversion, automated sentiment analysis, the ability to score call quality at scale; and is currently researching and developing features for summarizing conversation content, near-real-time alerts in AI Quality Assurance (AI QA), proactively identifying customer pain points (Customer 360), and automatically recommending products and services based on personalized data (Next-Best-Offer).
Above all, BIDV Contact Center identifies human development as a key priority in its current operational model. The unit successfully organized the “Art of Emotional Management and Complaint Handling” course, combined with a 28-day post-training mentoring program, to help advisors hone their soft skills, manage their emotions, and effectively handle real-life situations.
In just the first six months of the year, the unit organized a total of 39 internal training courses totaling nearly 1,750 training hours, attracting more than 1,200 participants, with the aim of continuously training the team in communication skills, empathy, complaint handling, and complex situations that AI cannot yet replace.
The unit has also implemented a two-tier support model for customer service representatives: Tier 1 focuses on receiving, processing, and providing optimal solutions to customers, while Tier 2 handles specialized tasks such as complaint resolution, tracking responses to inquiry requests, and other exceptional cases. At the same time, the unit has reviewed and adjusted KPIs and evaluation mechanisms to recognize the collaborative role between humans and AI, encouraging agents to effectively utilize AI tools rather than evaluating them solely based on the volume of manual processing.
This focus on optimizing the synergy between AI and EI has gradually yielded positive results in the operations of the BIDV Contact Center. The average Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) reached 9.2 points, an increase of 0.1 compared to 2025, reflecting improvements in service quality and the customer experience. These transformation efforts have also been recognized by the international contact center community, as BIDV Contact Center has been honored for two consecutive years with the “Best Contact Center in the Asia-Pacific Region” award presented by Contact Center World.
In the long term, having AI handle repetitive tasks has enabled the BIDV Contact Center to focus more on high-value activities, gradually realizing its transformation strategy from a customer service unit to a business (business platform)—where every interaction contributes to creating business value for the entire system.
It can be said that in the era of artificial intelligence, the Contact Center is not merely a point of contact with customers but is becoming the intersection of AI and EI—where technology drives efficiency, people build trust, and the combination of these two elements creates sustainable value for both customers and the entire BIDV system.
