Top 5 Trends in Contact Center for 2025

What a year 2024 has been for the world of the contact center. Though GenAI has topped the headlines, the contact center sector has also seen the continued rise of contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS). Vendors like NICE and Genesys have been migrating their customers from on-prem to cloud, Five9 has gained some big wins and Cisco and Avaya continue to play a role for their existing clients. And then there is big tech like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Zoom, winning new business and claiming to be transforming customer experiences despite data showing the opposite. Many of the key metrics, such as average time to answer and customer satisfaction, don’t exactly support their claims.

But will 2025 actually be the year when new technological advances click in the contact center? Or will we continue to see digital iteration instead of transformation, chatbots instead of AI agents and investments instead of budget cuts?

Here are the top five predictions for 2025 in the contact center:

1. Insight-led transformation becomes a reality. As AI gets better and better at understanding the subtleties of verbal and written conversations, it will become more and more cost-effective to mine the huge volumes of data generated in the contact center. This means organizations that use this technology in client interactions will, for the first time, be able to label every interaction, down to the individual subtleties of subintent and sub-subintent – and do so at scale. By proactively capturing product feedback, competitive analysis and process failures, the contact center can create pathways to pass this insight on to other departments at scale and on a regular basis. This level of detail will provide tremendous insights that will enable true transformation – not just in the contact center but also in wider parts of the business.
2. Knowledge management becomes strategic. It’s not common knowledge yet, but GenAI can be kryptonite to tribal knowledge and knowledge management in the contact center. For decades, the human brain has bridged the missing links between bad processes and poor knowledge management in customer operations. Important knowledge was passed down between experienced and unexperienced agents over the years. Although this has been a little-talked-about way of working, it has been – and still is – a way new human agents “come up to speed.” Enter GenAI, which consumes all the written content about the work we complete – and, needless to say, does not consume content that is not written. This means critical gaps are missing for the tool, which can’t just ask a friend, the internet or its supervisor what to do. It misses all the details that were never written down or updated in the workflow. Knowledge management isn’t the sexiest subject, but it just became one of the most important areas to focus on in 2025.
3. AI is everywhere and more confusing than ever. A recent review of a contact center trade show claimed more than 90% of the vendors in attendance were showing off AI capabilities, from workforce management to chatbots. Of course, not all AI tools are equal. And buyers need to get clear on how they are going to differentiate between tools – how the terminology is being used and what capabilities are being offered under differing terms. As the hype continues to rise, and AI shows up everywhere, the contact center industry will need to ensure it is not blindsided by clever marketing, lured into lackluster results or taken for a ride with inflated costs.
4. AI agents move beyond internal use cases. The rise of GenAI and large language models (LLMs) in 2023 led to the increased use of agentic AI in 2024. Most initial use cases were internally focused. This year will be the year of customer-facing AI agents. Enterprises will need to become more comfortable with what an agent can do, the problems it can solve and how to put the right guardrails in place. They will also need to land on a thoughtful definition for agentic AI. It’s possible we will begin to understand agentic AI as a catch-all term under which levels or rankings will designate various capabilities.
5. Enterprise vendors consolidate. A few existing contact center juggernauts continue to try to be everything to everyone. The rise of CCaaS did lead to at least some consolidation in places, but we have also seen others – workforce management tools, surveys and insights tools, and conversational platforms – all expand capabilities. It shouldn’t be a surprise that, of the tens if not hundreds of platforms and capabilities in the contact center, we start to see a big move toward further consolidation with the motivation of lower cost and greater simplicity. Will we get better capabilities by slimming down on vendors? No, not really. But don’t forget the first prediction around data-led transformation: enterprises need to figure out ways to knit together different data sources, and one way to make that easier is to consolidate vendors and reduce individual threads of data that need to be tied together. Organizations should consider working with three to five bigger vendors vs. ten to 20 smaller ones.

The start of a year is always a great time to get your thinking cap on, reflect on the past year and get a handle on where you are headed. ISG helps enterprises navigate the rapidly changing contact center sector and make decisions that put them out front. Contact us to discuss how we can get started.