Shalima Bhalla

Shalima Bhalla started her career with her hands in the machinery of contact centres, configuring agent routing systems and writing code that determined how customer calls flowed through organisations. As an engineer at companies like Avaya, she witnessed first-hand the complexity that made even simple changes feel impossible.

“I built real contact centres with my bare hands,” she says. “I worked with customers at banks and telecommunications companies who had to plan for months just to change one IVR workflow, because if they made one change, it would have a domino effect on the entire workflow.”

That early technical foundation proved invaluable as she transitioned from engineering to customer-facing roles, where she began working directly with enterprises to understand their problems and build solutions around them. The shift gave her a perspective that few in the industry possess: deep technical knowledge combined with an understanding of business requirements and customer pain points.

After mastering both the engineering and customer sides of the equation, Shalima moved into partnerships, building the contact centre ecosystem across Asia for Avaya before joining startup Afiniti to run technology partnerships. There, she forged relationships with major providers including Genesys, Cisco and AWS, understanding how different pieces of the customer experience puzzle needed to fit together.

From cost centre to revenue driver

That two-decade journey gives Shalima a unique vantage point on the industry’s evolution. She has watched cloud infrastructure compress timelines that once stretched into years down to days. What required months of planning and careful dependency mapping now happens through modular, plug-and-play architecture.

But the technology shift represents only part of the transformation. The more significant change involves how operators think about contact centres themselves.

“When they move from just providing bandwidth to a complete suite of customer experience applications – CCaaS, AI and analytics under one brand – they not only increase margins but also improve customer loyalty and stickiness, because they embed into customer workflows,” Shalima says.

Telcos internally operate some of the largest contact centres in the world, serving their vast customer base across wireless, broadband, enterprise and wholesale.

Most operators still treat contact centres as cost centres measured by call volumes and average handle times. Shalima sees operators leaving value on the table by not mining contact centre data systematically for the business intelligence it contains.

“Rather than just looking at contact centre data as call volumes or performance metrics, if you take that richness of data and extrapolate patterns, you can see in real time what's going on and what your customers are telling you,” she says.

A sudden surge in billing queries signals something beyond normal call volume fluctuations. It might indicate a product pricing problem requiring immediate attention or an opportunity to design targeted retention campaigns before customers churn.

Making agents into super agents

Shalima’s engineering background surfaces in how she discusses agent experience. Contact centre work involves managing difficult conversations with unhappy customers throughout the day, often while juggling multiple screens to access different systems. Her solutions focus on reducing that burden rather than adding complexity, and when agents are empowered to do their best work, customer experience rises with them.

Before customers reach human agents, modern systems can surface complete transactional history, sentiment scores and probable intent. AI tools prompt agents on what to say to de-escalate situations and handle after-call summarisation automatically.

“If I know what to say next, it makes my life much easier,” she says. “You’re empowering agents and taking away those things they struggle with every day.”

This represents what Shalima calls making every agent a “super agent”: raising the floor by giving all agents access to information and prompts that previously only the most experienced intuited through years of practice.

The technology exists. Cloud architecture has matured from early adoption into mainstream deployment, while AI capabilities have moved from experimental to production-ready. What separates successful operators from others now, Shalima argues, is organisational change beyond technology deployment.

“Customer experience is a responsibility of each and every part of the business,” she says. “Businesses that understand that and leverage platform, technology and partnerships to enable it are the ones that will succeed in the next decade."