Executives who have spent tens of millions of dollars on call-center technologies can be forgiven for being wary of big investments to overhaul their systems if they don't have a clear picture of the expected benefits. They are all too familiar with horror stories about large outlays that have yielded no returns—for instance, the tale of the telecom company that spent more than $50 million on new customer-relationship-management (CRM) technology for its frontline agents but saw no improvements in revenue or customer satisfaction, because those agents ignored the system.

Nonetheless, executives know that strategic investments, when rolled out in waves and funded by the savings and extra revenues they generate, can deliver substantial improvements. What executives may not realize is that, in recent years, key technologies such as voice recognition (VR), interactive voice response (IVR), call routing, customer information management, middleware connectivity, and workforce management have become more powerful and less expensive. Companies that invest in these technologies are seeing their operational expenses tumble even as revenues grow. A transportation company, for example, invested less than $5 million in VR, IVR, call routing, and workforce-management technology and managed to boost customer satisfaction by 30 percent while saving more than $20...