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Welcome to 2025!

January 2025

2025 is positioned to be an especially AMAZING year for customer experience (CX), contact centers and service organizations as artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled technologies begin to deliver on their promises. The timing is ideal, as the need to fill the gap between customer expectations of a great CX and what most companies deliver has never been greater. The following are a few areas where AI and innovation, along with industry best practices, are aligning to deliver to the market the tools and knowledge to enhance the customer and employee experience while improving productivity (reducing cost or increasing revenue). Investing in these areas should deliver quantifiable benefits for your organization.

  • Customer-facing self-service – conversational AI (CAI) systems, which are generative AI (GenAI)-enabled intelligent virtual agents, have reached a maturity level at which they can and should increase self-service (voice and digital channel) automation rates while improving the CX. Although the contributions of CAI solutions can be significant, these applications must be carefully monitored to ensure the system stays within its parameters and delivers appropriate and accurate responses. Companies should start these initiatives with an intent study to identify and prioritize use cases to address and tasks to automate. After that, companies should start with a pilot to make sure it meets their needs before doing a full roll-out of their CAI solution. The key to ongoing success of a CAI initiative is selecting a solution that supports a continuous improvement process. 
  • Agent augmentation/assist – these are relatively new agent-/employee-facing solutions that improve their performance, quality, and the CX. This expanding group of applications include transcription, real-time guidance (RTG), next-best-action (NBA), and automated post-interaction summarization. (Automated quality management (AQM) solutions are part of this category since they use many of the same technologies and techniques, but they are tools that also assist supervisors. Another tangential area attracting a great deal of investment is the user interfaces (UIs) in many of the 45 – 50 different systems used to support contact centers; they are being enhanced to improve their intelligence, workflow, and automation capabilities.) GenAI enables these applications to determine the intent of each conversation (voice or digital), and then delivers the assistance agents need to correctly address the issue in real-time. This frees agents to spend their time helping customers instead of searching for information or writing summaries. 
  • Workforce management (WFM) – new capabilities in WFM solutions that empower agents to select and easily change their working hours, time off, breaks, and lunches are now available in the market. While the functionality and degree to which agents can modify their own schedules varies greatly between the WFM applications, these enhancements are altering the perception of contact centers and helping to address one of their longstanding and most expensive challenges: reducing agent attrition. In addition, improved functionality is now available to better address scheduling challenges associated with digital and asynchronous interaction handling, e.g., long durations (hours, days, weeks, or months), concurrency, channel migrations, etc. Many of these new capabilities are enabled by a variety of AI technologies. 

The cloud is an essential building block for AI technologies, as it provides the massive amount of processing capacity needed to support most of these enhancements and capabilities. And when it comes to contact center and customer service operating environments, moving to the cloud gives companies the opportunity to rethink their IT infrastructure and become more agile and responsive to business needs that are changing at an increasingly rapid rate. 

Final Thoughts

The transformational possibilities enabled by AI give companies and their contact centers a path to a vastly improved and personalized customer journey where the CX is enhanced and the cost of service is reduced. To get there, companies need to reimagine and redesign their servicing strategy, delivery, operations, and technology, as it cannot be business as usual. Addressing the areas above is a great way to start. But to position servicing organizations for lasting change, contact center and customer service leaders need to assess and evaluate every aspect of their operating environments; many activities and systems used today are or should become obsolete in AI-enabled contact centers.

At the end of January 2025, DMG will release a special report entitled 2025 CX Mega Trends and Projections: Charting the Course for Excellence. This strategic yet practical report identifies mega trends driving the CX market and lays out projections to enable contact center and customer service leaders to build short- and long-term roadmaps to successfully transition to AI-enabled organizations. Please reach out to us if you’re looking for help creating your CX, contact center, or customer service strategy; to conduct an operational assessment and determine the ways in which AI can enhance your contact center; or to evaluate your current technology and systems to help you build a plan and roadmap for the future.