5 Expert Contact Center Predictions for the New Year

Industry veterans share their takes on what’s to come in 2025

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5 Expert Contact Center Predictions for the New Year
Contact CenterInsights

Published: January 24, 2025

Charlie Mitchell

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.  

  1. 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.  

  1. 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.  

  1. 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. 

Meanwhile, they can collect inferred feedback through tools like sentiment analysis. Some still scoff at these. After all, can’t live agents decipher how customers feel? However, as Morrell stressed:  

“More broadly, sentiment analysis can highlight the situations that are most putting customers under stress so that contact centers can do something about them.”

Unfortunately, much of that data is inaccessible via legacy on-prem contact center platform’s technologies. After all, call recording firms used to encrypt conversational data, so contact centers could only use their applications to surface insight. 

Yet, thanks to the rise of CCaaS, that data is open and much more accessible, so brands can use any software to surface insight. 

Additionally, generative AI is helping by summarizing feedback. However, contact centers can also write prompts to surface feeback relevant to a specific contact reason. That can inspire targeted actions.  

Alongside leveraging these contact center mechanisms, CX leaders increasingly connect VoC strategies across customer-facing teams and extend them into the broader business.  

With this beyond-border VoC program, the contact center can collaborate more closely with other departments. So, for example, it can say to the product team:  

“You pushed a new software update out last weekend. On Monday, 30 percent of our queries related to it. Here’s what customers said. Please do something about it.”

That near-time VoC feedback can be useful in driving customer-centricity across the company. 

  1. More Companies Will Integrate Their Unique Data Into CX Apps Across the Business

Data is the currency enterprises will use to be successful with customer experiences. 

Recognizing this, Chief Marketing Officers are becoming more involved in some of the contact center decision-making. They want to know: what sort of data can I get? 

In line with this trend, CCaaS providers are building data lakes over their platforms to blend these data sources and enable CX leaders to create specific, unique data sets. 

Leveraging these data sets, leaders are enabled to surface more accurate insights with AI, deliver personalized experiences, and enhance conversation automation. Yet, Blood warns:  

“Those data sets must be secure and compliant. After all, there are some challenges with existing regulations – like GDPR and the right to be forgotten – and the potential for more.” 

Additionally, on the rise of CCaaS data lakes, it’s fascinating to consider how these will help large enterprise contact centers transition to the cloud in 2025.  

After all, data lakes can essentially act like a bypass machine, ensuring data flows endure as businesses slowly migrate.  

  1. CCaaS Decisions Will Become CX Platform Decisions

Some consider CCaaS an outdated term that fails to capture the breadth of the contact center industry. Keith Dawson, Director of Research for Customer Experience at ISG, is one such person.  

“Contact center buyers today prioritize orchestration and data usage,” he told CX Today when sharing ISG’s latest industry evaluation 

In doing so, Dawson recognizes that data management, enterprise integrations, and workflow automation are now the core differentiators of a cloud contact center platform.  

Meanwhile, the more conventional pillars of CCaaS, such as call routing, are a commodity.   

Buyers should consider the broader ecosystem and the opportunity to pull in data sources, orchestrate new experiences, and – ultimately – automate much more of the contact center.    

Blood cautions: “That doesn’t mean a customer is buying CCaaS technology because they already have the UCaaS solution from the same provider.  

“Sure, if it’s one throat to choke, it’s a lot easier to manage, but – at the same time – is that meeting the needs of service leaders and the broader CX ambitions?”  

CCaaS providers that can match these ambitions by closing the CX ecosystem, offering that data layer, and providing an orchestration engine are perhaps best placed to meet the needs of forward-thinking organizations.  

Learn More from Five9 & ContactBabel  

The predictions from this article stem from a fascinating webinar entitled: “The New CX: Top EMEA Predictions for the Contact Center in 2025. 

Alongside these predictions, Morrell and Blood dissected the current state of contact centers, discussed Five9’s place within the market, and participated in an engaging Q&A. 

Watch the webinar on-demand to dive deeper. Or, if you’d like to familiarize yourself with some of the technologies discussed in this article, visit Five9. 

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Brands mentioned in this article.

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