Contact center trends 2025: The three big shifts shaping customer experience

Contact centers are the bastions of customer expectations and customer satisfaction. They thrive with the right tools but – as our 2025 Contact Center Trends research shows – only if those tools are used in the right ways, and for the right customer interactions…

In the world of customer experience, it pays to know what today’s consumers expect and position yourself well ahead of the curve. That’s especially true for frontline teams, who often act as both the last line of defense against customer churn and your biggest asset in the fight for CX excellence.

Our 2025 Contact Center Trends research, which surveyed over 23,000 consumers and 3,072 employees, shows that – more than ever – consumers expect that the brands they buy from can make good on that promise. And that means building a contact center offering that delivers game-changing experiences.

Full Report: 2025 State of the Contact Center

But what’s shaping those expectations? And what role will AI continue to play alongside human customer service agents? Here’s our rundown of the biggest contact center trends shaping the next 12 months – starting with a quick look at some of our report’s most important stats…

Vital statistics

Here’s a quick look at the numbers behind the trends. These statistics paint a picture of changing consumer opinions on the importance of contact center excellence, the role of AI, and the difference great experiences can make.

Contact center satisfaction

• Consumers are 2.6x more likely to purchase more if wait times are ‘satisfactory’
• With ‘satisfactory’ wait times, people become 3x more likely to recommend
• 53% of bad experiences result in customers cutting spend
• First-call resolution makes customers 2.1x more likely to recommend

Agent knowhow

• Consumer satisfaction with contact center agents’ knowledge is up 2.6% pts YoY
• Consumer satisfaction with contact center agents’ helpfulness is up 1.4% pts YoY

AI concerns

• More than half of consumers are concerned AI will replace human agents
• 61% of consumers prefer to complete their tasks through human channels
• 74% would rather resolve an issue or get technical support via human channels
• Consumer comfort in using AI overall is down 11% YoY
• Only 20% of agents are actively using AI to resolve customer issues

The stats show consumer wariness of AI, but that’s perhaps because we have a contact center environment that isn’t making the most of its abilities. So, instead of being seen as a replacement for those all-important human call center agents, AI can, and should, be used to boost key satisfaction drivers like agent knowledge and helpfulness.

Get that balance right, and the numbers prove that you’ll see an uptick in both repeat purchases and customer recommendations.

2025’s biggest contact center trends

Ok, let’s dive into the contact center trends that will shape frontline teams and CX professionals over the next year and beyond…

1. AI-powered agent assistance shifts gears

Our stats point to a problem: customers are wary of AI replacing people, but leaders also want to be able to use AI in the contact center to streamline workflows and help prioritize.

So maybe it’s time we rethink the role of AI in the contact center? Or at least think about how it can enhance existing experiences, rather than replacing some wholesale.

Instead of rolling out endless AI chatbots or virtual assistants and making them handle customer interactions, 2025’s winning contact centers will position AI as an agent’s best friend and most-used tool.

That means summarizing huge volumes of information, automating time-consuming post-call writeups, spearheading quality management processes, and bridging data divides to surface next-level customer context, history, and personalization.

There’s no such thing as “good enough” with AI. If it’s not great – exceeding the standards that your brand has set – your customers will associate it negatively with your brand, and accordingly reduce spend. So think carefully about what channels you want to offer, the plan today, and in the future, for Human vs AI. And create a quality plan that ensures your customers always get the service level they expect, regardless of human, AI, or channel.

- Brandon Hanson, Contact Center Practice Leader, Qualtrics

In 2025, the contact centers that deliver the biggest uptick in customer satisfaction will do so with AI behind the scenes, working in ways that customers won’t see. And, as AI capabilities evolve, that will unlock next-generation ‘agentic’ use cases.

Agentic AI stops being a blunt instrument for one job and instead becomes a coworker, able to connect dots and perform more complicated tasks in the back end.

That takes AI from something that needs to be prodded:

“What is this customer calling about?”

…To something that proactively fixes things before they escalate:

“This customer is calling about a billing issue, but the problem is that they haven’t updated their payment method. We’ve sent them a new payment authorization.”

That proactive ability to join information together, combined with robotic process automation, will help take some of the strain off your human support agents, giving them time back to do what they do best: help customers in person, whenever self-service isn’t the best approach.

2. Next-level customer intelligence becomes make-or-break

The contact center is an informational goldmine, rich in customer data and packed with potential insight. But that’s all for naught if you can’t make use of the data available to you – and if you can’t sift through it all to surface the most valuable insights.

The big issue here has always been scale. Customers talk at, with, and about you – on calls, in live chat, by texts, via email, on social media platforms, and on third-party review sites. That’s while customer behavior on and offline hides tons of other data points that are easy to miss without the right technology.

AI is the key to unlocking this data. With tools like natural language processing, behavioral analytics, and effort scoring, AI contact center and experience management tools can sift through and combine every data point to form a crystal clear picture of customer needs, wants, and pain points.

One of the single biggest blockers of improving CX is ‘what should we fix first’. Stakeholders have competing priorities and it’s difficult to accurately identify those moments that matter, that will drive the greatest customer impact. Deeper and broader customer intelligence will help leaders prioritize their efforts and investment to unlock greater ROI.

- Leonie Brown, Lead Product Scientist, Customer Care

Where that becomes game-changing is in the ability to draw ironclad conclusions from typically disparate data points. If, for example, you can combine data from touchpoints that highlight an emerging issue with deliveries, you can proactively fix things before they escalate into reputational damage.

Or, if a mix of behavioral and session replay data correlates with what’s being raised in emails or mentioned online, an AI tool will be able to flag that there’s a problem with your website’s checkout process way before you’d otherwise spot it.

Information in siloes is scattered and hard to parse. Combined data points, on the other hand, lead to next-level customer intelligence – and that’s how contact centers can stand out in 2025.

3. 1:1 customer service gets serious

The data makes one thing clear: people want to deal with people. To us, that highlights an important point: the best person-on-person connections won’t be built with a one-size-fits-all approach. Customers expect better.

An experience designed for everyone satisfies no one. Historically, limited resources forced organizations to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to customer support. But with AI, that's no longer necessary. AI can analyze vast amounts of data to automatically segment customers based on their unique needs and preferences. This allows companies to create tailored experiences that cater to people’s individual psychographic needs. For example, AI could differentiate between customers who value empathy versus those who prioritize efficiency, and then automatically route them to human agents or chatbots according to those inferred preferences.

- Isabelle Zdatny, Head of Thought Leadership, Qualtrics XM Institute

Our report highlights the growing need to meet customers…

On the channel they choose

If somebody wants to dive into an issue on Instagram, then you not only need to meet them there, but you need to be equipped to offer the same level of customer service as on any other channel. In this sense, contact centers are becoming a metaphorical concept, rather than a place. To customers, the contact center is anywhere they choose for it to be, without the need to be bounced to a channel or touchpoint they don’t want to use.

With their needs already understood

Customer expectations dictate that your tools tell you what their issue is before you have to ask. Customers shouldn’t have to repeat themselves, and the best contact centers will have systems in place to prevent them from needing to. That requires software that can build up a robust customer history, giving agents everything they need to satisfactorily resolve an issue.

On the front foot

Proactivity is key, and personalization is paramount. To that end, contact centers need to automatically filter the priority cases and put the urgent cases in front of a human agent. That will sometimes mean reaching out before customers contact you. From there, success rests on the ability to effectively close experience gaps and give aggrieved customers personalized attention or even compensation for their trouble. If you know, for instance, that they’re a fan of a specific product line, then a discount for that kind of product might go a long way.

Download the full report

There’s a lot more to get to grips with as we head into 2025. Contact centers are ever-changing places, the technology that powers them is always evolving, and the customer interactions they receive are transitioning at exactly the same pace.

That change is fuelled by shifting expectations, so knowing what those expectations look like can be game-changing for customer service strategies – and for customer satisfaction.

Download the full report to learn…

• What customers expect from tomorrow’s contact centers
• How to deploy AI in a way that customers trust
• What AI means for today’s human support agents
• How new AI regulations will affect every customer interaction
• How to improve the customer experience on a truly personal level

Our full contact center industry trends report not only dives deeper into the trends highlighted here, but also explains what that means for the people on the ground – the frontline staff in contact centers who can make or break the customer experience.

That’s alongside data-driven insight on how consumers want to have their issues resolved, on which platforms, and by which tools. And, importantly, our report also explores the intersection where AI, self-service, and other call center tools meet emerging AI regulations in different markets.