In 2024, many contact centers started pulling in more data from the enterprise ecosystem, made significant AI progress, and placed greater emphasis on journey orchestration to deliver better customer experiences.
These trends will likely make further headway in 2025. However, others will also come to the fore as technology advances, AI becomes more intuitive, and economic strains linger.
Against this backdrop, Steve Morrell, MD of ContactBabel, and Steve Blood, VP of Market Intelligence and Evangelism at Five9, joined Thomas John, VP EMEA at Five9, on a recent webinar to discuss the contact center of 2025.
In doing so, they shared the following top five contact center predictions for the New Year.
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Contact Center AI Adoption Will Streamline Operations and Drive Cost Reductions
In the UK, agent costs will rise with the hike in National Insurance and the minimum wage. According to ContactBabel, the latter will impact between 60 and 65 percent of UK contact centers.
Furthermore, inflation is driving cost issues for global service leaders, and the primary way of handling these is by cutting headcount.
But doing this at scale isn’t feasible. After all, critical service metrics are already poor at an industry-wide level. Those include queue times, call abandonment rates, and hold times.
Morrell notes that such metrics “are far higher than the historical average.” As such, businesses need to rethink their customer service strategies to balance costs and service quality.
For some, a logical step could be to implement more self-service capabilities across digital channels. But is it the best strategy to ship many customers to a cheap, automated channel – even if this would be against their preferred interaction method?
“Over the past seven years, we’ve tracked consumer preference for specific channels, particularly in cases of high emergency, emotion, and complexity,” said Morrell. “The type of interactions that make a difference to long-term loyalty and customer advocacy and there’s a clear message: customer preference for the telephony channel has massively increased. Businesses cannot ignore that.”
As a result, contact center leaders face a real paradox: how to cut the costs of a customer service experience that’s already under pressure. Keep in mind that one bad experience is enough to lose customers – getting them back is a big challenge.
The answer most vendors will provide is to implement AI technologies like agent-assist solutions to lower contact durations. These may well drive significant efficiency gains by automating customer authentication, knowledge gathering, post-call processing, and more.
However, Blood spots cost-cutting opportunities beyond the agent role.
“In the contact center, there’s a lot of people in the background – in QA and BI - supporting very traditional models associated with analyzing and surfacing insight,” he said. “AI is making that easier.”
“We will get to a point where it is easier to service insights and – therefore – action them, so there isn’t such a need for data scientists and people working in the back office.”
There may also be other cost-reduction opportunities. Yet, as people make up 65 to 70 percent of a customer service environment's costs – as per Blood – there will always be a laser focus in that area. Don’t expect this to change in 2025.
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GenAI Will Boost Business Outcomes in Customer Self-Service Use Cases
Consumers have grown tired of self-service experiences. Some still give chatbots a go, with ContactBabel finding that 23 percent of customers engage with a bot before picking up the phone. Yet, most don’t bother.
Ultimately, that underlines the bad reputation that comes from previous generations of chatbots that aren’t conversational, only handle a small percentage of requests, and can’t handle changing intents.
With the conversational capabilities of generative AI (GenAI), made available through large language models (LLMs), service bots are enduring a seismic transformation. As Blood noted:
“We no longer have to train the bot; we’re now training the model to make it relevant to the specific industry and company.”
Consider the new-look Five9 AI Agents, previously its Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA).
When leveraging this next-generation bot, businesses may ground it in trusted knowledge sources so it delivers contextual answers without prior training.
Of course, guardrails are essential here, and contact centers should first limit the AI Agent so it only resolves queries that correspond with robust, trusted knowledge content. When otherwise, elevate the customer to a live agent interaction.
Nevertheless, businesses can quickly scale the AI Agent’s scope to self-serve more interactions while – in some cases – leveraging those old-school decision trees for rule-based resolution paths. In other words, they can balance the best of both worlds.
Another helpful GenAI-enabled feature is evident in how the AI Agent may pull conversations back on track when customers change their intent, boosting containment. However, there are many more.
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The Contact Center Will Become the Primary Source of Unbiased Customer Feedback
Contact centers often collect customer feedback through surveys. Yet, only the extremely happy or angry people will typically complete them.
As such, service leaders are expanding their voice of the customer (VoC) mechanisms to go beyond biased direct feedback, gathering indirect and inferred feedback, too.
For instance, contact centers may strip indirect feedback from customer engagements without specifically asking for it. In doing so, they gain a more accurate interpretation of how customers feel.