CCW Digital’s 2025 CX Predictions

Between the constant infusion of new AI technology into the CX space and the impact of digital on customer preferences, change is inevitable. As we look forward to what 2025 will bring, we recognize that many customer contact leaders are faced with important decisions that will impact their organization and teams for years to come. Navigating these uncertain, exciting times will require a dynamic approach to folding in new tools and technology while remaining tuned into employees’ sentiments.

As we consider the dimensions of customer experience, the CCW Digital analyst team has identified our top predictions for how things will unfold in 2025.

Companies reluctant to adopt omnichannel will be left behind

In 2025, customers still want options. At a time when AI agents and chatbots are taking over, customers consistently want to speak with a live person. Keeping channel options accessible, then, is something that customers value in the digital environment.

Yet, companies are more bullish about self-service than ever before. Agentic AI is poised to transform contact center operations, leveraging reason and independent action to solve customer concerns. With this opposing dynamic, there is now strain building between customers and brands. To create a more seamless transition, companies must prioritize omnichannel experiences.

Giving customers the autonomy to engage on their own terms and self-serve when it makes sense will enhance satisfaction over the long-term. Additionally, maintaining logical transitions between channels will mitigate customer frustration when they do escalate or channel switch.

Organizations that oppose omnichannel and continually eliminate channels will ultimately struggle in 2025. New technology and tools will only be useful if they add value to the customer experience. Maintaining context and consistently recognizing intent across channels will boost adoption and increase engagement.

-Brooke Lynch

Traditional CS benchmarks will be devalued in favor of a “scorecard” of metrics

One major trend we’ve observed across seminar series and digital events has been customer contact leaders' reluctance to rely on the traditional CS metrics for a reliable assessment of customer experiences and agent performance. Contact center leaders frequently cite AHT and FCR as metrics that still prove valuable, but no longer offer an at-a-glance measure of customer service.

In some ways, AHT is a hallmark of a now archaic customer service model: provide good service by resolving concerns as quickly as possible. In the digital age, interfacing with customers is far more convenient and expedited for this measure to outweigh the other aspects of the quality of the interaction. Looking towards a future in which chat becomes preferred to voice calling, we will see further de-emphasis on the duration of the interaction as it becomes harder to accurately measure and even less relevant in terms of the customer effort required.

FCR will continue to serve a purpose for the foreseeable future, but digital and omnichannel customer experiences have deprioritized the singularity of the first contact. As interactions with customers shift towards a fluid, ongoing dialogue, there is significantly more to measure.

Because assessing agent performance is an essential element of this business, even without an individual measure as the North Star, there needs to be a way to quickly and quantitatively see how different agents and customer experiences stack up. While many companies may put their own spin on the idea of a CS scorecard, we will certainly see more dimensions of service being measured. 

-Audrey Steeves

CX data will continue to be leveraged by more departments

In our September 2024 market study focusing on the next-gen omnichannel CX strategy, we found that only 7% of customer contact leaders believe their organization’s departments are in total harmony when it comes to designing customer experience. For a long time, this has been a major obstacle to success in larger companies, wherein there is plenty of valuable data being collected but it remains siloed and inaccessible. 

Making the most existing resources will be a critical area for growth in 2025, particularly as economic contractions make new investments challenging for some. Personalized digital experiences and offering proactive, outbound CX is a relatively new standard on which organizations compete for customers’ attention, and these experiences require robust data sets.

The future of omnichannel customer experiences relies on highly tuned calibration of customer information and intuitive processes that are designed to be frictionless and efficient. Building these functions extends beyond CX teams–product teams, IT departments, and strategy managers will find themselves working more collaboratively to orchestrate attractive customer journeys. 

-Audrey Steeves

Creative workforce management initiatives will provide meaningful ROI

It remains a tumultuous time for agents and contact center leaders, with the pervasive fear of AI replacing jobs top of mind for many. This fear, along with the rapid infusion of new technologies and AI into the contact center and the long-standing difficulties of engaging with frustrated customers, has led to record levels of disengagement and attrition in our industry. These challenges cannot be left unchecked in 2025. 

Thankfully, there are a great deal of evidence-based practices and initiatives that can elevate engagement and bring down churn. We recognize that it can be difficult to measure the ROI of agent engagement initiatives, especially when they aren’t directly tied to hiring and onboarding, but the impact of such programs consistently demonstrates value. 

As agent upskilling becomes a higher priority in AI-augmented contact centers, attrition poses a greater risk. Ensuring employees are engaged and enthusiastic about their work should be a prerequisite to training initiatives, otherwise considerable risk is taken on. There are a myriad of powerful workforce management products on the market, but the greatest value will be uncovered by leveraging the insights of your VoE program.

-Audrey Steeves

A subpar knowledge base or help center will come back to bite 

AI is only as good as the framework on which it is built. Unfortunately, many contact centers lack the appropriate foundation.

That statement itself should not come as news. Our community laments its lack of access to real-time, 360-degree views of customers. It criticizes the data silos and fragmented systems that prevent effective collaboration and cohesive experience design. It mocks the conflicting, out-of-date, and unintuitive content that weakens knowledge bases.

What will change this year – and in the years ahead – will be the extent to which we see the costs of this shaky foundation.

In traditional contact center interactions, an agent was always present to “save the day” when the data or technology stack fell short. Their experience enabled them to translate confusing knowledge base entries. Their humanity, moreover, allowed them to compensate for an absence of personal data with an abundance of conversational warmth.

The AI-powered contact center will, unfortunately, lose this luxury.

Self-serving customers, for example, are entirely reliant on the quality of knowledge in the database. If they encounter confusing or inconsistent information, they don’t have an experienced agent to cover for the error–they will simply have to deal with the bad information (and all the frustration that comes with it).

And as agents pivot to more complex, unfamiliar inquiries, they too will become more reliant on guidance from the knowledge base–and less capable of spotting and remedying errors. They will also be serving customers who already answered numerous questions and attempted to seek a resolution in self-service, thus heightening the demand for speedy, confident, consultative answers – and the consequence of insufficient agent preparation.

The takeaway here is simple: brands that want to harness the power – and competitive advantages – of AI technology can no longer procrastinate on their data harmonization and knowledge optimization projects. They can no longer accept that fragmentation “comes with the territory.” They must build foundations for empowerment.

-Brian Cantor

Image by Kadir Avsar on Pexels.