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21 May 2025 · 6 min read

5 New Customer Expectations for 2025 (and How to Outpace Them!)

Some things never change. Consumers crave convenience, safety, and status as they have for decades. However, the complexity of meeting these baseline needs k...

Charlie Mitchell

5 New Customer Expectations for 2025 (and How to Outpace Them)

Some things never change. Consumers crave convenience, safety, and status as they have for decades.

However, the complexity of meeting these baseline needs keeps increasing. As such, customer experience teams must innovate just to tread water.

Shawn Kanungo, General Partner at Queen & Rook, makes this observation and asks his clients to consider an airplane journey.

In the 90s, the in-flight entertainment system was incredibly basic. One screen flipped down across every three rows. Everyone watched the same movie, and they enjoyed it.

Fast forward to today. Now, there’s a screen in front of each seat. Some airlines even offer tablets from which passengers can access almost every film ever created, alongside music, podcasts, games, television series, etc.

Yet, still, almost everyone finds themselves saying: "I can't find anything to watch."

As another example, consider food orders. Today, customers tap a button and have meals delivered to their doorstep without interacting with the person who made or brought them.

“If someone actually knocks on your door, you might assume it’s a serial killer,” joked Kanungo.

The lesson is that while human needs remain constant, their expectations evolve and become increasingly complex.

As this happens, new expectations arise that CX teams must outpace. Here are five particularly relevant examples for customer service teams in 2025.

1. To Speak to You at Their Own Convenience

Contact centers have become much better at understanding their demand drivers. With this knowledge, they may take a three-pronged approach to convenient customer service:

Isolate and fix the pain point behind the customer query.
Consider how to predict the issue ahead of time and fulfill it proactively.
Give customers the tools to solve their problems autonomously.

As more businesses follow this approach and apply customer-facing AI, their customers – theoretically - won’t need to engage with a live contact center agent as often.

Therefore, customer service will become more convenient.

However, no matter how good the strategy, some customers will escalate to human, and – when they do – the experience stumbles.

Still, customers can't shift channels, easily share multimedia, or engage in their preferred language. It's much different from the communication experiences they've grown accustomed to with family and friends.

So, how can contact centers better prepare for those unexpected queries and deliver convenience? Empowerment is crucial so agents can gauge tangible remediation actions and feel comfortable providing creative solutions.

Yet, providing that omnichannel environment (more on point five) and giving teams appropriate support tools is also critical.

For instance, consider an auto-translation tool, like that offered by Grammarly. Databricks made this available to 100+ technical support engineers who provide frontline customer support. In doing so, it improved time to resolution by 25 percent and increased the average number of cases closed by 10–15 percent.

That’s convenience for customers and employees!

2. To Use New Communication Channels

A customer’s desire to engage on their channel of choice is CX lore. Yet, there are many more channels now than just five years ago. These include RCS, Google Business Messages, Telegram, etc.

Thanks to the cloud, it's much easier to onboard these channels, and customers sense this.

Nevertheless, service teams have grown wary and typically fall short of this expectation.

There are two central reasons for this. First, when they add a channel, they open themselves up to a new base of customers who wouldn't have contacted them previously. This increases engagement and their workload.

Second, it adds complexity. After all, the path to resolving a query can look much different on one channel than another. That makes it difficult to scale the change.

However, many forward-thinking operations still add these new channels; they just don't keep customers there. Instead, they triage them to the best place for resolution.

To do so, they leverage a customer-facing, front-end AI Agent. That leads to expectation three…

3. To Not Get Stuck In a "Press, 1 for..." IVR

Bad IVR experiences trigger customers, especially those expecting a simple conversation.

Thankfully, AI Agents are now intelligent enough to understand customer intent without prior training. As such, they can route customers accurately based on spoken words.

Yet, within an omnichannel environment, these AI Agents can go beyond just passing a customer through to the best-placed rep – live or virtual.

Instead, they can route the customer through to the best-placed channel for their intent, harnessing the capabilities of the modern smartphone.

By doing so, the contact center can design a single experience for every intent. The experience may effectively blend AI, modalities, and live agents.

Of course, CX teams should build an easy escalation path into the experience if customers have additional requests or if something goes wrong. Otherwise, they risk creating the "doom loops" Biden chastised.

Moreover, when the conversation escalates, the live agent should receive a summary of the interaction to continue from where it left off.

Ideally, they'll also have access to an AI communication assistant that works across every communication layer so the agent can always interact accurately and precisely.

4. To Feel Secure & Sense Action Is Being Taken to Solve Their Query

According to research cited by The Conversation, 81 percent of US millennials experience anxiety before summoning the courage to make a phone call.

This statistic highlights how brands provoke negative emotions in customers when forcing them to pick up the phone. These emotions will be remembered and forever associated with the business.

The caveat is that if the contact center can make customers feel safe, show empathy, and offer reassurance, they will instead remember a feeling of relief. This may outweigh their initial insecurity.

All this comes back to the service recovery paradox (SRP), the idea that customers are typically more loyal to a company after a service problem if it's handled with care.

Of course, contact centers have long coached empathy. But, the addition of reassurance is crucial.

Indeed, with reassurance, agents can validate the anxious customer, tell them they were right to reach out, and use active language to assure them they’re working to solve the issue.

Of course, training is critical here. But, now, with assistive technology – monitoring customer moods, not just sentiment - contact centers can also prompt agents to offer reassurance in real time.

Meanwhile, with tools like Grammarly, supervisors may ensure support content for live and virtual agents has a warm, appropriate tone that matches the intent.

As these technologies become increasingly democratized, agents will be better equipped to support anxious customers – which will become more of an expectation than hope.

5. To Never Repeat Themselves

Omnichannel is not a new concept; it’s decades old. Nevertheless, only 31 percent of UK contact centers are omnichannel.

As such, context doesn’t follow the customer as they change channels during a contact center conversation. Instead, they must repeat themselves, which remains a common customer gripe.

Thankfully, generative AI (GenAI) now provides a silver bullet for contact centers that have connected all customer support channels with a central CRM.

Indeed, GenAI auto-summarizes conversations, which agents—live and virtual—can save to the CRM, ready for the next rep when the customer contacts them again.

Alternatively, the agent can funnel the summary to a colleague upon escalation to ensure they can carry on the interaction from the breakdown point.

As this GenAI use case becomes more widely implemented, customers will expect contact centers to recall their previous interactions and – when asked by some to repeat themselves – will become increasingly perplexed.

Of course, this is just one way AI is changing customer service. To unpack more contact center GenAI applications, download the following report: Customer Experience Teams Have the Most to Gain from GenAI.

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