Home > Columns > CRM Columns
Contact Center Key Technology Trends for 2025 - AI Leads the Charge
Based on findings from a recent DMG Consulting
survey, 2025 is shaping up to be an excellent year for technology investments
in contact centers. In December 2024, DMG issued a worldwide survey through our
network of media partners designed for enterprise, customer experience (CX),
contact center, and IT executives. We asked about business and technology plans
for the upcoming year, as we’ve done for the past ten years (with the exception
of 2019), and we requested insights into the benefits they are receiving or
expect to realize from leveraging artificial intelligence (AI). Below are our
findings concerning the systems, applications, and technologies garnering the
most attention for the year.
Contact Center Technology Investment Priorities
for 2025
Survey respondents’ top 10 contact center
technology investments for 2025 are a combination of systems built from the
ground up as AI-based applications and others have been greatly enhanced with
these capabilities. The primary focus of most CX and contact center technology acquisitions
in 2025 will be solutions that add intelligence and automation to the operating
environment. Given this, it’s not surprising that AI/generative AI (GenAI) is
the top-rated technology investment category for service organizations for the
year, selected by 43.2% of survey respondents. GenAI’s ability, along with
large language models (LLMs), to identify intents, understand, and respond to
unstructured conversations has made it foundational technology (along with
other AI capabilities) for multiple contact center applications.
Workforce management (WFM) came in second
place, identified by 40.8% of survey participants. These solutions remain an
essential productivity, management, and oversight tool in contact centers, which
utilize them for forecasting, scheduling, real-time adherence, and much more. The
addition of AI technologies in many WFM modules amplifies their benefits while
finding a balance between the needs of the company and its employees. Recently
released or updated AI-enriched WFM solutions have the potential to transform
the perception of contact centers by empowering agents to select and manage
their own schedules, giving them the flexibility preferred by employees across
generations.
Self-service solutions (interactive voice
response (IVR), intelligent virtual agent (IVA), conversational AI (CAI), web,
and mobile) were the third-highest technology investment priority for companies
in the survey (36.0%). This is a significant decrease from last year’s results,
when it held the top position at 51.8%. Delivering enhanced customer-facing
self-service continues to be important to enterprises, as reflected by its
second-place position in the business goals portion of DMG’s survey. Companies
remain dedicated to improving their self-service capabilities, as this is the
most effective way to increase contact center productivity and reduce operating
costs while scaling the operation.
Automated quality management (AQM) came in
fourth place as an IT investment priority in 2025, selected by 28.0% of survey
participants. These solutions have been in the market for over 10 years, but
GenAI elevated their benefits by vastly improving the validity and usefulness of
their findings. The timing is great, as AQM solutions deliver on AI’s core
value by automating, standardizing, and enhancing the QM process, enabling
contact centers to review 100% of voice and digital interactions
cost-effectively.
Automatic call distribution (ACD) solutions are
in fifth place, chosen by 25.6% of the people responding to DMG’s survey. While
this category could include both on-premise and cloud-based acquisitions, it’s
likely that most respondents are interested in a cloud-based contact center
infrastructure solution, as this is where innovation is taking place. AI
technology is being used to enhance the routing intelligence of these contact
center systems, better positioning companies to deliver on their goal of hyper-personalization.
Sixth place is held by three IT segments,
interaction (speech and text) analytics (IA), knowledge management (KM), and
real-time guidance (RTG)/next-best-action (NBA), each of which were selected by
24.0% of survey respondents. As is the case with AQM, the growing interest in
these solutions has been greatly influenced by the functional intelligence of
GenAI and LLMs. IA solutions were already considered mission-critical for
contact centers, but GenAI has increased their ability to uncover deep insights from customer interactions and help them operationalize
findings.
KM solutions play a dual role in the AI market: they function as a vital input
source for many AI initiatives, and the applications also leverage these
technologies to strengthen many of their core system features including content
creation, maintenance, and search. Lastly, RTG and NBA applications are two of
the newer agent augmentation tools helping to improve CX, employee engagement,
and productivity.
Seventh place, with 22.4% of survey responses,
is a three-way tie between business intelligence, contact center as a service (CCaaS),
and customer relationship management (CRM). CCaaS and CRM are the two foundational
contact center systems; CCaaS platforms manage the routing and delivery of
voice and digital interactions on an inbound and outbound basis, and CRM
solutions track the customer’s relationship and activities with an
organization. Business intelligence capabilities analyze data from all contact
center systems and applications. Each of these solutions have benefited from
major AI enablement investments and have increased their contributions during
the past few years. The enhancements have been so effective that they are
driving a wave of purchases.
Automated post-interaction summarization came
in eighth, gamification/coaching/ eLearning was in ninth, and reporting was in
tenth place with 21.6%, 20.0%, and 19.2% of survey responses, respectively. The
first two applications are designed to help agents and improve the employee experience
(EX). The third, reporting, is a topic that consistently shows up in survey
findings, as companies look for better information to manage their systems and
operations.
Top 10 CX and Contact Center Technology
Investment Priorities in 2025
Source: DMG Consulting LLC, January 2025
Final Thoughts
The survey findings are clear: companies are
investing in AI, with an emphasis on GenAI and LLMs, to enhance their CX and
contact center functions. Innovations in recent years have vastly improved the
effectiveness and boosted the benefits of existing systems and driven a number
of new and transformative capabilities. Companies are investing in their futures,
and while they are counting on AI/GenAI technologies to increase contact center
productivity, they are also gaining from its ability to enhance the CX and EX.
About Donna Fluss
Donna Fluss,
Founder and President of DMG Consulting LLC, provides a unique and unparalleled
understanding of the AI, people, processes, and technology that drive the
direction and performance of the dynamic and rapidly transforming CX, contact
center, and back-office markets. As the foremost analyst and visionary
dedicated to these markets, Donna has provided expert guidance for over 30
years to operations and technology leaders as well as disruptive newcomers,
investors, and enterprises that want to build AI-enabled contact centers. She
can be reached at Donna.Fluss@dmgconsult.com.