8 Contact Center Automation Trends to Watch for in 2025

8 Contact Center Automation Trends to Watch for in 2025

From autonomous AI agents to voice AI, these are the top 8 trends to help you improve your contact center performance now and beyond.

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Customers today want personalized, efficient service, and they don't have time to wait around. In fact, our research finds that a whopping 78% of service reps say customers seem more rushed. So how can you speed things up and still deliver a quality experience?

This is where AI-powered contact center automation comes into play to help your team work more quickly and efficiently, all while focusing their attention on the customer. It encompasses everything from automating service workflows to making voice a digital channel to adopting autonomous AI service agents - and much more. It's important now and will only become more so as we move into the future, as AI changes the way we work and ultimately, what customers expect from support teams.

Let's zoom in on eight major contact center automation trends that are already making waves in customer service and are set to get even bigger in 2025 and beyond.

8 contact center automation trends for 2025

AI-powered customer service automation is already delivering increased efficiency and customer satisfaction in the contact center today, and will continue to transform how contact centers operate into the future. Let's dive into some of these exciting AI innovations:

1. Autonomous AI agents

These AI-powered agents work directly with customers to help them resolve their issues. Unlike the chatbots of the past, which worked through rules and pre-programmed scenarios, autonomous agents like Salesforce's Agentforce Service Agent understand the context and intent behind a customer's inquiry. They use advanced AI technology like natural language processing (NLP) to parse what a customer has said, and can respond in a context-appropriate, conversational manner, and come up with a plan to help. AI agents act as independent members of your team, deflecting cases from ever reaching a service rep or seamlessly handing off conversations to your contact center reps when an inquiry is out of scope. Note: autonomous AI agents are a technological leap forward and actually replace chatbots.

2. Assistive AI agents

These AI-powered agents act as personal assistants to your service reps. For example, before jumping into a call a service rep might ask an assistive AI agent like Agentforce to summarize a customer's most recent conversation with the support team. The assistive agent can spin up a quick summary, whether the conversation occurred between the customer and a different service rep or the customer and an autonomous AI agent. At the end of the interaction, the assistive agent can also generate a summary of the case, saving the service rep time.

3. Enhanced insights

AI is changing how supervisors monitor and manage the contact center. For example, with AI-generated summaries, supervisors can get up to speed on an ongoing conversation - whether it's between a customer and a service rep or a customer and an AI agent - before jumping in to help. Or, contact center managers might ask Agentforce for contact center analytics. They can get answers fast to direct questions like "How is my contact center performing today?" Or, "How many customers are on calls right now? What's the average hold time? What's the channel mix right now?" Agentforce quickly scans the data and serves up relevant stats.

4. Customer feedback management

Customer feedback is essential for improving your products, services and customer experience. AI automates the otherwise time-consuming process of collecting and analyzing customer feedback across channels and surveys.

With Salesforce Feedback Management, you can save time building and translating engaging surveys with AI survey generation and translation customized to your goals and audience. Salesforce's Customer Experience Intelligence helps you analyze customer sentiment across service interactions and feedback surveys to quickly understand what topics, products, service issues, or team members drive customer sentiment in a positive or negative direction. Agentforce can quickly summarize sentiment data for you, by customer, theme, or channel. It can also draft responses for service reps, based on past closed cases, so that your team can address feedback as quickly as possible.

You can get ahead of customer churn with enhanced case prioritization based on negative sentiment. Plus, service reps get visibility into historical customer sentiment right in the console and AI-generated summaries of the customer's most recent feedback survey. This helps them put the current interaction into context and personalize their response.

5. Voice AI

The phone may be an old school customer service channel, but that doesn't mean you can't ask AI to help your service reps work more efficiently and personalize phone calls. When you integratevoice into the Salesforce platform and make it a digital channel, you get real-time call transcription that frees up your contact center to focus on the customer instead of on taking notes. Given that phone is still the most popular channel, AI can really accelerate the way your contact center responds to calls. And just as with any other channel, Agentforce creates conversation summaries after the call.

6. Knowledge management

Knowledge base articles have long been an important tool for both support teams and customers. Service reps use them to help solve cases, and customers can access them on your self-service sites. With AI coming to the fore, knowledge articles now have an additional function: they help train your AI! You can make your AI-generated content more accurate and specific to your organization by connecting your AI model to trusted sources of information like your knowledge base. This process is known as AI grounding.

To answer all of your customers' questions, you'll need to incorporate knowledge from sources across your organization. For example, you may have relevant support procedures documented in PDFs in Google Drive, product documentation in Confluence, and even key information on your website. Thanks to Unified Knowledge, you can capture all of this information in Salesforce, and enable it for generative AI grounding. You can even use Agentforce to draft the first version of a new knowledge article! Of course, always have service reps review and edit any AI-generated article.

7. Omni-channel routing

Customers expect you to meet them where they prefer to be served - whether that's the phone, SMS, WhatsApp, or another option. Service Cloud's omni-channel routing allows you to automatically route cases from any channel to the right rep based on skill set, availability, or capacity. When you use Salesforce customer service management software, your team has all the context it needs, regardless of the channel the customer chooses.

8. Automated service workflows

If your service reps are repeating tedious manual processes all day long, we've got great news: you can make this better with service workflows! Loads of customer service processes are prime candidates for automation with customer service workflows. You can use workflows to automate both simple and complex tasks. Eliminating manual steps saves time and boosts productivity. What's not to like?

How to prepare for contact center automation

If you'd like to get started with contact center automation, there are a few things you need to do first to lay the groundwork.

1. Develop a digital strategy. What are the channels that you currently offer, and how do your customers feel about this? Would your business benefit from offering more channels, or different ones? Do you want your customers to be able to share visual data like photographs? Would you like to offer asynchronous messaging - meaning customers can start a conversation, and come back to it later? Also, does your voice channel offer real-time transcription, so that it can process data and use AI just like a digital customer service channel? In general, you can't go wrong with digital customer service channels. Our research shows that 53% of customers prefer to engage digitally. Plus, digital service is a prerequisite for many contact center automations.
2. Set up self-service. Our research finds that 61% of customers would rather use self-service for simple issues. Self-service channels - your help center (also known as your knowledge base), customer portal, and customer community - meet this need. They help you deflect simple cases from your service reps, who can then focus on more complex work. And they're also needed for automation - as discussed above, knowledge in particular is essential.
3. Tidy up your knowledge base. Already have knowledge in place? If so, it may be that your knowledge articles need a glow-up. Take the time to prune duplicative articles and update those that need it. This is the first step before relying on your knowledge base to serve a key role in many contact center automations.

Contact center automation is exciting, and brings the opportunity to boost efficiency and productivity, and achieve cost savings. Why not get started today?

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Zoe Sitrin is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Salesforce. She focuses on marketing, messaging and customer engagement for Service Cloud's contact center solutions, including Service Cloud Voice.

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