If there was any lingering hope that CX leaders might get a quiet planning cycle, CMP Research has politely thrown that idea into the Nevada desert. Its new 2026–2027 Customer Contact Executive Benchmarking Report puts improving customer analytics and insights at the top of the priority list for the next two years, followed by increasing adoption of self-service and improving agentic AI capability. In other words, the modern contact center is being asked to see more, automate more, and somehow still feel more human.
What Are the Top CX and Contact Center Priorities for 2026 and 2027?
That ordering matters because it says something bigger about where the market is now. This is no longer just an AI story, or just a cost story, or just a self-service story. It is a coordination story.
Leaders want better analytics because they need cleaner visibility into journeys, failure points, and resolution outcomes before they can scale self-service without creating digital dead ends that customers immediately try to escape. CMP’s findings suggest the industry is shifting from “launch more AI” to “prove it works, prove it resolves, and prove customers will actually use it.”
Related Articles
The Modern Contact Center: From Legacy Platforms to Cloud CCaaS and AI–Led Operations
Is Your Omnichannel Strategy Just Spreading the Same Broken Experience Across More Channels?
Customer Journey Fragmentation Is Becoming Too Expensive to Ignore
Why Customer Analytics Has Become the Top CX Priority
The report’s biggest signal is that customer analytics is no longer a supporting capability. It is now the strategic foundation for CX decision-making.
Without stronger analytics and insight tools, leaders cannot properly understand customer journeys, measure friction, personalize self-service, or prove whether automation is improving outcomes. In that sense, analytics has moved from dashboard fodder to board-level priority.
Why Self-Service Adoption Still Defines Contact Center Strategy
CMP’s findings make clear that self-service remains one of the defining battlegrounds for contact center leaders. That is partly about convenience, but it is also about efficiency, cost, and scalability.
The issue, of course, is that poor self-service experiences often do the exact opposite of what they promise. Instead of reducing effort, they create friction, push customers back into live channels, and leave brands paying twice for the same interaction. That is why self-service adoption is not just a channel metric. It is a test of whether the wider CX strategy is actually working.
How Agentic AI and Generative AI Are Reshaping CX Investment
The report also shows that reducing costs, improving generative AI capability, and improving agentic AI capability sit firmly in the high-urgency zone. This is where the market gets especially interesting.