- Request a demo
- United States
Artificial intelligence (AI) is driving rapid and dramatic change across industries. It’s reshaping business operations, advancing efficiency, and improving service delivery — to name only a few of the transformative outcomes that many organizations using AI are experiencing.
Future-forward contact centers are among the organizations that have moved swiftly to adopt AI tools and embrace AI-driven automation. According to Statista, process automation is the most anticipated use of AI in the contact center over the next two years, followed by voice authentication, speech analytics, and conversational AI. (Conversation intelligence platforms use the latter to derive insights from customer phone calls to the contact center.)
Amid so much change and advancing technology, it can be challenging for call or contact center managers and operators to keep up with the latest contact center automation trends. To help, this post lays out the overall benefits of using AI in the contact center and highlights the call center automation trends to pay close attention to in 2025 — and, in many cases, beyond.
Hopefully, you already see contact center automation as a positive move for your business. If you need convincing, here are several benefits we’ve seen based on our experience helping organizations transform their contact center operations with AI and automation.
Call center customers generally want the same three things: the right person to solve their problem; consistent and professional service; and an efficient, speedy resolution. These sound simple and straightforward, but according to Salesforce, only 13% of customers feel their issues are solved with little effort. Too often, they get the wrong agent, receive inconsistent or unacceptable service, or their issue takes too long to solve — if it is solved at all.
Several call center automation trends around technology are setting the stage for these experiences to become far less common. For example:
AI-driven automation, such as robotic process automation (RPA) and automated QA, can increase operational efficiency in a contact center by streamlining processes and reducing manual work.
RPA takes on routine tasks previously performed by human agents, such as entering and updating customer information in the CRM, managing tickets, generating reports, and identifying callers through database reviews of phone numbers. Meanwhile, automated QA powered by AI streamlines performance monitoring by analyzing interactions, identifying issues instantly, improving scoring accuracy, and ensuring consistent customer service quality.
AI-supported operational efficiency helps reduce costs. It also gives human agents more time to concentrate on resolving complex issues and improving customer satisfaction.
Another top benefit of using automation and AI in the contact center is that it provides human agents with real-time assistance, such as displaying relevant information about a caller’s digital journey before a call starts. Agents can also quickly receive actionable feedback that can help them increase their productivity and up-level their performance.
One key contact center automation use case, which we will discuss in more detail later, is the delivery of consistent training and coaching programs. These programs are based on real-life interactions and scenarios to help agents develop and refine their skills faster, leading to better service and increased customer satisfaction.
Finally, if you don’t adopt automation and AI to address common use cases in your contact center, your operation is at risk of falling far behind the curve. In short, your contact center and team won’t be competitive, and you could end up alienating customers.
Today’s digitally savvy consumers expect the businesses they interact with to have the latest technology solutions, including in the contact center. Businesses that fail to keep pace with change, or get ahead of it when they can, will struggle to meet customers’ high expectations.
Based on our knowledge of call and contact center automation use cases and our experience providing AI-powered tools, we’ve identified 13 trends that contact center managers and operators will want to adapt to, or at least track closely, in the year ahead.
AI and core machine learning technologies like natural language processing (NLP) will continue to revolutionize contact centers in 2025, helping teams handle complex customer interactions more effectively. They will also help managers improve operations.
For example, AI enables the use of predictive and prescriptive analytics in the contact center. When predictive analytics are applied to call volume patterns, it can help managers more accurately forecast required staffing levels. That means there’s less risk of having to frantically search for available staff to cover unexpected workload spikes or rely on core team members to essentially burn the candle at both ends.
RPA automates simple, repetitive tasks, such as data entry and call routing, freeing up human agents to focus on more complicated or serious customer situations.
An example of RPA at work in the contact center is a customer service bot. You can set up these bots to support human agents by responding intuitively with human-like conversational responses to simple customer requests. (It’s essentially a chatbot on steroids.)
RPA is being used in a variety of operational settings through products like Salesforce’s Agentforce. Over time, RPAs can result in reduced operational costs. They can also improve agent productivity by removing mundane day-to-day tasks, allowing for more time to focus on tasks critical to the success of the contact center, such as improving average handling time and first-contact resolution.
AI makes it possible to provide more self-serve options for contact center customers. Online tools like chatbots can perform simple tasks in response to typed customer queries, such as scheduling medical appointments or checking on the availability of products for a home improvement project.
Offline, self-serve options such as IVR systems provide callers with an automated option to resolve simple inquiries, such as refilling a prescription. IVR can also conduct simple and short customer surveys after the resolution of a customer service inquiry. This offers customers more efficient service and frees up human agents to help the next customer. Ultimately, this process efficiency can result in increased customer satisfaction.
While intelligent call routing (ICR) isn’t AI-powered per se, it’s a key software tool that complements and integrates with AI in the contact center. ICR enhances customer experiences by making the call process more efficient.
Tools like Invoca’s intelligent call routing software eliminate guessing by directing calls to the best-suited agents based on accumulated customer data and historical interactions, including online activity. This gives contact center staff a chance to boost first-call resolution and deliver consistent service quality and faster response times.
Maintaining agent performance is one of the biggest challenges facing contact center managers, especially when both are under pressure to respond faster and reduce average call-handling times. AI tools can help here, though, especially by automating call scoring, which reduces a manager’s manual QA workload.
Invoca’s AI-driven, automated QA has multiple benefits in the contact center. First, it scores every call your agents handle, not just a sample. It provides a complete and objective picture of agent performance that managers and agents can trust.
Second, it delivers actionable feedback based on those scores. Third, it helps pinpoint coachable moments from each conversation. This allows managers to deliver training on the fly and constantly encourage performance improvement.
In addition to helping call and contact centers automate an array of time-consuming and tedious manual tasks, AI can collect and analyze all forms of customer communication at scale, including offline interactions like phone calls.
The ability to gather and integrate data across every communication channel provides customer service managers and agents with the information they need to more efficiently tailor customer interactions and achieve deeper customer relationships.
AI can handle huge volumes of data; in fact, it thrives on it. But what about the sensitivity of that data? Is private customer information secure? The answer is yes if automation tools comply with rigorous data protection standards, as they must or should.
For example, Invoca’s call tracking, transcription, and analysis tools comply with European Union General Data Protection Requirement (GDPR) standards as well as the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA). Our tools are also SOC 2, Type 2 certified for data security and customer confidentiality.
In addition, our technology complies with industry-specific regulations such as the payment card industry’s PCI DSS certification and the healthcare industry’s requirements for handling protected health information (PHI).
A major contact center automation use case is operational efficiency. AI’s delivery of predictive analytics, or using data to forecast what will happen in the future, can lead to better workforce management. You can create employee schedules more strategically based on when call activity is expected to be especially robust or potentially slower than usual.
This technology can also be used to analyze individual workloads and suggest when and where call center managers should adjust staffing and workloads to maintain balance and reduce stress. Easing agent stress is critical to minimizing the risk of call center burnout, and increasing agent productivity, job satisfaction, and tenure.
AI lets managers drill deep into agent-customer interactions, revealing actionable data even from voice communications. Speech analytics is an essential real-time tool for monitoring customer interactions. AI flags potential issues to allow managers to react immediately. So, if an agent’s conversation is going south, managers can step in and call an audible via text or chat.
Sentiment analysis is another trend to watch. Neural network models provide real-time insights into customer and agent emotions based on language and speech patterns. If a customer uses keywords that suggest they are becoming frustrated, the AI detects and flags it for the agent, who might be unaware because they are focused on the problem, not the interaction. Agents can then temper responses during the call to improve customer satisfaction.
One contact center automation use case that can benefit any business is creating personalized customer experiences through interactions tailored to individual needs. Every customer wants to feel special. By personalizing their call center experience, you can achieve that goal.
Invoca PreSense provides details of a caller’s digital journey so that the agent is up to speed on who is calling and why before they even pick up the phone. The agent can greet the caller by name and get straight to the point of the call without a lot of explanation from the customer. Making each engagement more personalized and efficient can lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
A major trend in the call and contact center industry that is only likely to expand in the years ahead is the shift to the cloud. Cloud-based contact center platforms offer flexibility and scalability. They also allow operators to create a more adaptable workforce through remote working and drawing from a global rather than local talent pool.
Even better news for call and contact center managers is that most AI and automation tools integrate easily with cloud-based platforms. Invoca, for example, integrates with major cloud contact center solutions like Five9.
Call and contact centers have traditionally been reactive, responding to customer complaints when they arise. Automation and AI provide the ability to be more proactive moving forward. How? Predictive AI uses historical data and customer behavior to identify potential issues, allowing agents to reach out before a problem arises.
Let’s suppose that a customer has forgotten to renew a home insurance policy on time in the past, allowing it to lapse before realizing their mistake. This has resulted in higher insurance premiums. Using this data, an agent can set an alert and reach out with reminders across multiple channels, such as text, email, and voice, well in advance of the renewal deadline. The homeowner renews on time, saving another premium increase. Result: a satisfied customer.
CRMs, like Salesforce, and unified communication platforms, like Slack, are vital operational components for many businesses because they focus customer data in a single place for ease of access and workflow efficiency throughout the organization. Contact centers and their agents are among those who can benefit from these powerful tools.
AI can be trained to update the CRM, but as with cloud integrations, it can also easily integrate other tools with these essential components of the tech stack. Invoca’s integration with Salesforce allows phone call data to quickly and easily be moved to the CRM to update customer profiles and log interactions. Similarly, our platform integrates with Slack and many other components of a typical business tech stack.
If you are a contact center manager or operator, you want to stay informed about, and ideally ahead of, the latest call center automation trends. Keeping up with your peers or gaining an edge over them is one reason, of course. But it’s also vital to be in the know if you want to continually improve customer interactions and provide the highest level of service.
Invoca’s AI and software can get you there. We can help you deliver optimal service to your customers by routing calls intelligently and then collecting and analyzing data from 100% of those phone conversations. Those insights, along with our many tools, from automated QA to PreSense, can help you improve agent performance, provide consistent service quality, and personalize every customer interaction.
By taking advantage of Invoca’s AI and automation innovations for the call center, not only will you be able to keep your organization on trend in 2025, you’ll be better positioned to help your operation stay at the forefront of contact center automation trends in the future, too.
Would you like to dig deeper into how Invoca’s AI and automation can help improve your contact center operations, including agent performance? If so, check out these resources, and then contact us to set up a tailored demo:
