CX Predictions & Expert Insights for Leveraging Strategic AI Automation in the Contact Center 

As 2025 ramps up, businesses around the world are digging deep into current trends, past strategies, and the technology they need to deliver amazing outcomes for their customers. Now is the perfect time to reflect on what the year ahead has in store for contact centers and CX, so your company can stay competitive and build confidence in your new goals and strategies.

We all know AI is here to stay, so this year is about learning how to embrace it across your business. By strategically leveraging AI, you can create better customer experiences, lower costs, and increase revenue. AI is no longer just a standalone tool; it’s becoming a trusted partner, seamlessly integrating into the tools we use every day to make us more efficient and empowered to tackle real-world challenges, from complex workflows to improved collaboration.

Nextiva’s Kate Hodgins, Senior Director of Product Marketing, sat down for an insightful discussion with our featured speaker, Forrester Senior Analyst Christina McAllister, to explore crucial topics like 2025 CX predictions, the role of AI in customer service, and actionable steps you can take to advance your AI strategy for huge wins. 

Let’s dive in!

CX Predictions from the Experts

1. CX differentiation will be easier than ever

According to Forrester, there will be plenty of opportunities for CX differentiation in 2025. They predict that differentiation through customer experience will be easier than ever, meaning that forward-thinking companies can leverage this trend and pull ahead of the pack.

“You might be familiar with the Forrester CX index, which tracks CX quality of brands across 11 different industries across a bunch of different geographies, and what the CX index has been telling us is that CX quality has been slipping, according to consumers, and it’s been slipping pretty significantly,” explains Christina. 

As more companies invest strategically in customer experience, the opportunities for those who excel in this area will grow exponentially in 2025. Businesses that avoid complacency and short-term thinking in favor of long-term investments to improve the customer experience will be poised for significant payoffs this year.

2. Businesses have a more grounded outlook on the ROI of AI

49% of AI leaders expect ROI on AI investments within 1 to 3 years, and another 44% of them expect it within 3 to 5 years, according to recent AI pulse surveys conducted by Forrester. This reflects a return to more reasonable and realistic expectations when it comes to AI’s ROI. 

With the initial hype around AI beginning to settle, leaders should now focus on leveraging the tools that truly benefit their specific business needs, rather than chasing the latest trends. By aligning metrics, workflows, and AI capabilities while enhancing human efficiency, you can prepare your contact center for the future.

3. Predictive AI is back

According to Christina at Forrester, “We expect the AI pendulum to swing back to predictive AI for 50% of use cases in 2025. GenAI was certainly getting a lot more love in the past couple of years due to the newness and eagerness, but we’re coming back down to earth a little bit and realizing that good old predictive algorithms…are sometimes the best way to achieve certain tasks. And in some cases, having a combination of both techniques…is going to be what makes the biggest splash.”

The era of AI experimentation is calming down, and businesses have realized that AI is not a one-size-fits-all solution, instead shifting to prioritize use cases that align with their specific needs and deliver measurable value. Proven use cases like predictive routing in the contact center shouldn’t be discounted or forgotten, otherwise you’re leaving money on the table.

4. Proven GenAI use cases like call summarization will be utilized more

There are several tried-and-true use cases for GenAI in the contact center that will continue to flourish. Automated call summaries and transcription are easy ways to save agents time and achieve consistency in note-taking which Forrester believes will continue in 2025. 

“This is a really big win for a lot of folks and it’s one of the first use cases that they might deploy in the contact center with GenAI,” says Christina. 

“The next piece is really knowledge enhancement, and this is a little bit more pragmatic and tactical because you’re not going to get very far with GenAI if you don’t have an OK set of knowledge; it has to be pulled from somewhere. There’s a lot of investment in ramping up knowledge capabilities to make sure that future AI deployments have safe and trusted knowledge to leverage and folks are using GenAI to enhance that knowledge machine.”

5. AI and automation are moving beyond reactive problem-solving to proactively elevating customer experiences

Although it’s crucial to maintain a human touch in your customer interactions, there are many examples to look at that demonstrate how a digital solution can swiftly, easily, and proactively enhance the customer experience—without another human ever being involved. 

Examples of this AI evolution include airlines automatically rebooking flights and notifying passengers of disruptions, or healthcare companies sending automatic reminders to patients to avoid missed or late appointments. 

“There are times when you want to proactively alert customers and let them know you’ve identified something on their behalf,” explains Kate, Nextiva’s Senior Director of Product Marketing. “By understanding the customer’s profile, preferences, intents, and needs, you can use AI and automation to enhance the human experience across digital channels.”

A Framework for Determining the Best AI Strategies and Tools for Your Business

With all of the different AI technologies at your fingertips, it can be difficult to discern which tools you need—if any at all. Christina’s advice is to begin by considering the strategic context of your business. 

“The strategic context of your business will hold a lot of weight in determining what you can do with your interactions,” explains Christina. “So that might be your risk appetite or literal laws and regulations that restrict how you handle certain data or how you participate in certain use cases, or it might be influenced by how valuable each interaction is to you. You might also consider your customers’ expectations in the competitive landscape.”

Next, you can focus on the nature of your customer interactions, specifically focusing on volume, frequency, complexity, and consistency to identify where you can align AI solutions and maximize value through automation or augmentation. If you have a high volume and high frequency of low complexity interactions, this is the ideal use case for automation. But if you have a low volume and low frequency with complicated requests that take a long time to resolve, that may not be the best case for automation. 

In these situations, Christina suggests pursuing augmentation of your expert employees to support them with AI and allow them to be more productive and effective. It’s all about balance and knowing what your customers need!

While AI can be a powerful tool, it’s important to keep in mind that not all problems can be solved by AI alone. One common challenge is when customer data is siloed across multiple systems and platforms, making it difficult to get a complete view of the customer, including real-time data of their historical interactions. 

When customer data is fragmented and not readily available in a unified system, AI tools won’t be able to provide the full context needed to deliver a seamless, personalized customer experience.

In cases like this, implementing a unified customer experience management platform like Nextiva can be a game-changer. By consolidating all customer data and interactions into a single system, you can empower your team with the contextual information they need to provide exceptional service. And this unified data foundation can then enable you to maximize the value of AI-powered tools, as the AI—and your humans—will have access to a comprehensive customer profile.

Successful AI Case Studies from Nextiva 

Kate shared some insightful real-world examples of the successful use of AI in the contact center, starting with Nextiva customer Cedar Financial, which needed a solution to improve their automated outreach and campaigns.

Instead of jumping straight to a full-scale generative AI solution, Kate explains that they took a more pragmatic approach. They carefully evaluated their business needs and decided on the most effective solution. 

“What they really needed was to build in efficiencies and ensure customers get routed to the right agent,” says Kate. “They were able to achieve this by using intelligent automations and quick, smart responses via SMS that automatically directed customers to the appropriate agent based on their input.”

💡Using SMS and intelligent responses ultimately helped Cedar Financial improve its response rate by 25%!

Another impressive customer success story is Tech Savvy, a company that handles a lot of online payments. Agents have to think through security and compliance on every phone call, so there are several steps in this manual process. 

“What Tech Savvy has done is they implemented our native solution for secure payment agent assist that actually takes all of those steps out of the process and automates it. So, it uses an AI solution to do automatic redaction and to make sure that, in a flow-based kind of workflow, all of the appropriate steps are taken so that the agent doesn’t have to manually go through that process, but instead can just monitor,” explains Kate.

Overcoming Obstacles: Tips for Mitigating AI Resistance 

Unfortunately, implementing AI in the contact center has its downsides as well. Not everyone at your organization will be excited about or receptive to these new technologies. Resistance to AI in contact centers often stems from fear of job loss, ROI, or implementation. 

But don’t worry! You can overcome this by proactively communicating what you’re investing in and why. Transparently communicate with your employees about AI’s role in augmenting human efforts, showcasing success through quick-win pilots, and actively involving teams in shaping AI applications to address their needs and build trust.

Final Words of Advice

Kate and Christina wrapped up this fascinating conversation with a few words of wisdom for companies looking to leverage AI.

Kate and Christina wrapped up this fascinating conversation with a few words of wisdom for companies looking to leverage AI.

“When we’re thinking about tracking the success of AI metrics, my guidance would be to get really laser-focused on the problem that you have in the business,” says Christina. “Prioritizing measurable outcomes that determine whether the technology actually solves that central issue is worth aiming for above all else.”

Wondering how to unlock the secrets to creating amazing customer experiences, growing revenue, and changing the way you work?