What’s Next for Contact Centres? Key Industry Trends to Watch in 2025

As the contact centre industry navigates a rapidly evolving landscape, innovation and technology continue to redefine how organisations operate, engage their workforce, and serve customers. In 2025, key contact centre trends like self-scheduling, shifting agent attitudes, the rise of AI-powered voice bots, and advancements in workforce management (WFM) are set to transform the industry further.

Two of our experts in workforce engagement share their insights on these crucial industry trends and shed light on what else the future holds for organisations. From empowering agents with autonomy to leveraging advanced analytics for operational efficiency, these predictions highlight the opportunities and challenges shaping the next phase of contact centre evolution—and can help your organisation make the most of the year ahead.

“Over the past 12 months, contact centres who have embraced self-scheduling capabilities have noticed a huge improvement across their organisation. Its ability to put agents in the driving seat and give them the autonomy to move their breaks and add extra time or take time off of calls and tasks has proven to empower agents, improve adherence rates, and reduce attrition rates. Yet, according to Calabrio’s latest research, 46% of agents in European contact centres do not have the ability or influence to self-schedule.

“In 2025, there is a big opportunity to reduce this number so that more contact centres and their agents reap the benefits that self-scheduling has to offer. This will be the first step in moving towards the automation of schedules where agents have complete autonomy over their shifts. This will be a huge paradigm shift for contact centres which have traditionally been command and control organisations, where only 6% of agents manage their schedules autonomously. To manage this change with confidence, smart technology is going to be needed. But the good news is that we’re on the way to making this happen. A lot of contact centres are already semi-automated so, while not in the next 12 months but over the next few years, we will certainly see full automation when it comes to schedules. I believe intelligent technologies, such as work location optimisation, will play a role, assessing where agents work most effectively and automatically scheduling them there. Similarly, we can expect to see shrinkage action suggestions that not only recognise when an agent is having a quiet day and suggest, for example, that they complete some coaching, but will automatically assess their quality scores and recommend the exact learning they should be doing to improve their performance.

“This change won’t happen overnight, but in the near future, we will see scheduling capabilities utilise the whole suite of workforce engagement technology to ensure contact centres are working at maximum productivity and efficiency. The first step will be for those contact centres, who aren’t already, to embrace self-scheduling – that will be a major trend in 2025.”

“Recent research from Calabrio revealed that agents in European contact centres are feeling positive about working in the industry – 70% would recommend the job to a friend and 64% say that they are proud to work in a contact centre. It also revealed a flexibility within the working environment that didn’t exist before the COVID pandemic. 36% of respondents chose the job because of the flexible hours it offered, 67% feel that management cares about their work-life balance, and 77% can take breaks after difficult customer interactions. As we reach the end of 2024, it is great to see the progress that has been made to make contact centres a positive working environment. Agent wellbeing should continue to be a priority as we move into 2025, where the use of AI to handle the basic customer request will grow, and agents will be faced with a growing proportion of complex and emotional interactions.

“Although the contact centre industry is moving in the right direction when it comes to agent wellbeing, our research also flagged areas for improvement to focus on in 2025. Whilst 47% of agents can see themselves having a long-term career in the contact centre industry, 62% don’t have a career progression plan. Most agents meet with their manager and receive coaching on a monthly basis, but with the majority of contact centre workforce being millennials and Gen-Z, who are used to the instant feedback of social media, these should be occurring more regularly. This will enable managers to set a career progression plan, with achievable goals and milestones, and check in regularly to provide the necessary support and coaching to help agents get there.

“Another means of improving this process is to give agents access and visibility into the analytics and quality management of their performance. Enabling agents to self-assess empowers them to proactively take action to improve, often without any management intervention. Integrating this process with AI allows AI-powered coaching to be provided and tailored to each individual agents’ needs and preferences. If contact centre managers take these steps in 2025, it can revolutionise the motivation of agents and ensure that they enjoy a successful long-lasting career in the industry.”

“2025 will be a breakthrough year for the broader adoption of voice bots powered by AI-based analytics within the contact centre industry. Previously a major challenge with voice bots has been the overwhelming volume of interaction data they generate, often too complex and time consuming for human teams to fully interpret and take action on. However, as AI becomes more integrated into contact centre tooling, voice bot management will become more efficient and effective in extracting actionable insights from this data.

“Using analytics tools to delve deeper into customer interactions, contact centres will be able to compare engagements with chatbots and voice bots, and identify the exact moment where escalation to an agent is required. This level of insight will enable contact centres to allocate resources with greater precision and identify where to invest more or less resources into chat and voice bots to ensure customer enquiries are always handled by the most appropriate channel.

“As the adoption of this technology becomes more mainstream, contact centre managers will be able to make more data-based strategic decisions to enhance customer experience, ensuring all enquiries are dealt with while empowering their team of agents to address the increasingly complex enquiries with a more efficient and streamlined approach.”

“Next year we can expect to see an acceleration in automation and analytics to help make sense of all the data being collected in the contact centre. For many contact centres, answering “why are our customers contacting us?” isn’t possible. Human analysis simply cannot keep up with the quantities of data created, but smart analytics can. AI-based analytics tools can review vast amounts of data, highlight themes and make recommendations to improve operations and customer experience.

“This shift will redefine Workforce Management, moving from human-managed to human-supervised process, where intra-day management can be automated. This enables areas of improvement to be quickly identified and the integrated AI technology can alert the agent and offer a choice of solutions to address the situation. And, this will be done immediately rather than waiting for analysis to be completed, minimising wait times – a top customer frustration.

“Enhanced WFM will not only ensure correct staffing and therefore reduced wait times and improved customer experience, but will enable dynamic resourcing to handle spikes in demand during peak times efficiently, quickly and cost effectively while meeting evolving customer expectations.”