As we go into 2025, contact center trends will continue to be impacted by technology changes, namely artificial intelligence (AI). AI is poised to be transformative in ways most would not have considered possible just a few short years ago. All vendors now have an AI story, and contact centers cannot move fast enough to embrace it.
NTT Data’s Global GenAI Report 2025 notes that organizations investing in GenAI are most motivated by improving productivity and efficiency. In 2025, customer experience demands will require contact centers to fully embrace AI, but they will need a strong omnichannel foundation to start and the ability to provide efficient, hyper-personalized experiences to stay competitive.
Trend 1: Mastering Omnichannel in 2025
This has been a topic we’ve discussed in 2024, and it will continue to be a focus for contact centers in 2025.
Today’s customer landscape requires that contact centers have multiple ways to connect with customer support. Not only do contact centers need several channel options, but these channels must be integrated in a way that allows for seamless and continuous customer journeys across channels and all touch points.
For example, a customer might use a chatbot on a company website. The chatbot will escalate the issue to an agent if it can’t find a resolution. The agent might suggest a co-browse session to help the customer navigate the company website, and the customer may choose to ask for a follow-up phone call the next day. During that phone call, the agent and customer agree to switch to a video call so the agent can offer enhanced personalization and better understanding.
For the customer, these conversations should be low effort with smooth transitions between channels, so they don’t have to repeat themselves. Advanced omnichannel solutions also provide agents with consistent tools and context-data to easily respond in the moment to changing customer preferences in communication channels.
The need to master omnichannel in 2025 intensifies to ensure a consistent and continuous customer experience across channels, including voice, email, chat, messaging, social, video, co-browse and more.
Trend 2: Omni AI Innovation
Omnichannel is also the foundation that AI and automation capabilities can build upon. The integration of AI into contact centers will be one of the defining contact center trends for 2025. True omnichannel provides a native toolset to seamlessly shift from channel to channel with context and consistency. Having a unified and integrated desktop enables a quick and full view of the customer, their CX journey and historical interactions across all touchpoints. Once you implement AI into your existing omnichannel platform, it can draw from the totality of your customer experiences, and that data set will become an asset in providing real-time agent guidance. AI will also provide that information back to your channels.
Without the proper infrastructure, AI will only add complexity. By layering AI on top of your unified omnichannel desktop and channels, you will gain the ability to track and optimize the customer journey and use an AI application without having to retrain hundreds or thousands of agents.
However, true omni AI capabilities go beyond this. To ensure AI success, your contact center will need AI orchestration capabilities that operationalize your AI application integrations and enable multiple uses of AI, including real-time agent guidance like sentiment, intent, transcriptions and conversation summaries. These AI-powered tools and assistance will change the agent experience and how they interact with customers, with the potential to exponentially enhance CX. As automation increases, it allows agents to focus on more complex tasks and high-value interactions, allowing them to further personalize interactions.
Your contact center should also have the flexibility to choose your own AI, and the ability to integrate with multiple AI applications as needed to further your automation and agent assist capabilities.
Omni AI will play a key role in 2025 and will continue to expand with advances in AI capabilities and automation to further improve operational efficiency and enhance customer service.
Trend 3: Hyper-Personalizing Customer Experiences at Scale
Personalizing customer experiences has been a priority for contact centers for many years, but changing customer needs mean that businesses need to take this up a notch to hyper-personalize every interaction.
Part of this does require AI. AI-powered agent assistive features, for example, can predict customer needs and help agents provide personalized experiences across all channels. The agent desktop can further encourage personalization by offering quick access to customer journeys and past interactions, including transcripts and conversation summaries. AI and agent assist can also suggest responses to agents in real-time, helping agents provide a more efficient and personalized response.
Video capabilities are another great way to offer hyper-personalized customer experiences. Video offers customers humanized, face-to-face interactions that allow agents to provide empathetic resolutions. Agents can easily offer step-by-step troubleshooting while seeing the customer’s actions or using video during high-stress situations to offer compassionate and meaningful support. Remote agents can be situated anywhere in the world and can provide high-quality service and support to customers who can be in the comfort of their own homes.
In 2025, customer experiences will benefit from businesses that take a customer-centric approach with personalization strategies and proactive service that meet changing customer needs and expectations, resolve issues efficiently, and increase CSAT scores.