Dialpad has rolled out a series of updates aimed at improving efficiency, compliance, and digital engagement for contact centres.
Key updates include expanded role-based access controls – with new predefined roles for user management and IVR workflow administration – and a new integration with PCI Pal to allow secure handling of credit card information during live calls.
“Our new feature launch focuses on what matters most: turning your contact centre into a well-oiled machine,” the company said.
Whether you’re managing compliance at scale, unifying digital and voice touchpoints, or coaching agents in real time, this launch was architected to reduce friction, surface insights, and maximize team performance.”
Top Five Features to Watch
Rather than headline-grabbing features, Dialpad’s new features emphasize pragmatic changes that address operational headaches: role-based administration, integrated compliance, omnichannel orchestration, and analytics.
PCI Pal Integration – Enables secure credit card collection during live calls while maintaining PCI-DSS compliance, protecting sensitive data without disrupting customer experience.
Omnichannel Management & Digital QA – Early access tools for managing digital conversations with structured quality assurance and conversation tracking across chat, SMS, and email.
AI CSAT Explanations – Provides agents and supervisors with insights into what drives customer sentiment, moving beyond simple scores to actionable feedback.
Cross-Channel Templates – Templates now work across chat, SMS, and email, allowing agents to maintain consistent messaging and respond faster.
Upcoming Autonomous AI Agents – AI agents that can perform tasks across channels and escalate seamlessly to human agents, introducing automation while preserving context.
These are not designed to impress customers directly – they are designed to keep sprawling operations efficient, secure, and accountable.
Integration as Strategy
For years, the contact centre has been a neglected corner of enterprise IT: critical to customer experience, yet costly, complex, and hard to modernise.
What began as simple call routing has become a hub for omnichannel engagement, regulatory compliance, and workforce oversight.
Boards now expect faster service across more channels – with fewer staff and shrinking budgets.
Equally important is the trend toward tighter integration.
The intent is clear: turn the contact centre into a node in the wider enterprise stack rather than a siloed communications tool.
But the challenge is to ensure these integrations work cleanly – without duplicating data or creating identity-management headaches. Poor execution risks fragmentation, but a good execution can improve insight across the business.
Omnichannel Oversight
The new updates from Dialpad also highlight the difficulty of managing digital interactions alongside voice.
Contact centres increasingly handle chat, email, and SMS, but many struggle to supervise and measure those channels consistently.
The company’s “Digital Scorecards” and “Digital Dispositions” are an attempt to impose the same quality-assurance discipline on written interactions that voice has long had.
For IT leaders, this is less about customer convenience and more about accountability.
Standardising how outcomes are logged across channels enables better reporting and trend analysis.
It also ensures supervisors can coach agents consistently, whether the conversation happened over the phone or in a chat window.
Autonomy at the Edge
Perhaps the most ambitious element of Dialpad’s new features is the preview of “autonomous agents.”
These AI systems are designed not just to support agents with recommendations, but to carry out tasks directly – drawing on integrations with other enterprise systems.
When they reach their limits, they hand off to humans with a transcript and context intact.
If this works in practice, it could cut workloads and raise service consistency.
But it also introduces governance challenges. What happens when an AI agent mishandles a payment or a compliance obligation? How can IT leaders audit a decision executed autonomously across multiple systems?
Efficiency gains are enticing, but accountability must be built in from the start.
Analytics or Surveillance?
Another strand of the launch is more structured agent evaluations. Features such as scorecard sign-off and dispute management promise greater transparency: agents can acknowledge feedback or challenge it.
For supervisors, that may speed coaching. For agents, in workplaces already saturated with monitoring, it could feel like more surveillance.
This is not a trivial issue – IT leaders often frame analytics purely as a performance tool.
But in heavily monitored environments like contact centres, trust is as critical as compliance.
Data may reveal productivity gaps, but without employee confidence it risks damaging morale – and ultimately customer service.
A Playbook for IT Leaders
The themes emerging point to three priorities for IT leaders.
Treat the contact centre as core infrastructure. It is now embedded across sales, service, and recruitment. Governance and data management should be handled with the same rigour as ERP or CRM systems.
Demand transparency from AI systems. Autonomous agents must be auditable, with escalation protocols and human override. “Black box” automation is a liability.
Balance analytics with trust. Use monitoring tools to support and coach staff, not simply to police them. Involving agents in shaping evaluation processes can help maintain buy-in.
The Road Ahead
Dialpad’s latest releases do not, on their own, transform customer service.
But they illustrate the direction of travel for the industry: away from siloed telephony, toward integrated digital platforms; away from manual oversight, toward algorithmic governance; away from human assistance, toward autonomy.
For IT leaders, the challenge is not simply to deploy these tools but to govern them wisely.
Efficiency will remain seductive, but accountability and trust will determine whether contact-centre modernisation delivers on its promise – or simply shifts old problems into new forms.