Where to Invest in CX for 2025

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Original post written by Robin Gareiss here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/where-invest-cx-success-2025-robin-gareiss-erque/?trackingId=RPPy31SfRTOkYS2uGMdGgg%3D%3D

At Metrigy, we conduct research all year long, through interviews with IT and customer experience (CX) leaders, as well as surveys. One thing's for sure: There is no shortage of technology investment areas for improving the customer experience--and companies are investing significantly in many of them.

Nearly 80% of companies plan to increase their spending on #CX technologies, as well as AI applications to support their CX initiatives. On average, companies spend $3,624 per employee on CX technologies, and $1,402 on AI for CX (of course, numbers vary based on company size).

So where are they spending, and what are the big areas you should be evaluating for 2025? Here are my top recommendations:

1. Agentics - OK, so here's a relatively new term that basically captures a few key areas that have been around for a while. Agentics is the combination of two words - agent and analytics. The agent side can be AI agents or human agents, but either one leverages any combination of generative, predictive, and conversational AI. The analytics side includes the data analysis that results from every conversation, knowledge base change, macro change, and more. So, agentics includes and integrates familiar CX products, such as agent assist, AI chatbots, AI voicebots, interaction analytics, personalization, and more. Expect to see all the key vendors announce and enhance their agentics offerings in 2025. The benefit? Increased revenue (through suggestions for upsell that either live agents or AI agents can pitch, all based on solid analytics), better customer satisfaction (by personalizing the interaction and making it more efficient), and improved agent efficiency (through AI-powered recommendations). Companies such as Cognigy, Cresta Five9 NICE, Salesforce, and Verint are just a sampling of the vendors already entrenched in the agentics space. It's not just limited to CX vendors: NVIDIA recently announced a blueprint for companies to build their own AI agents.
2. Voice of the Customer - Yep, this has been around for quite some time. But VoC is way better now than it was before because of AI. Inferred sentiment leverages AI to provide a CSAT or NPS score for every call, even if the customer hasn't responded to a post-interaction survey. By using sentiment analysis, speech analytics, Natural Language Processing, and more, AI can (with about an 85% to 95% accuracy) assign a score. Already, 43.7% of companies use AI-enabled inferred sentiment to track customer experience, according to Metrigy's Customer Experience Optimization 2024-25 global study of 544 companies. Gathering customer feedback can involve other practices, such as 1:1 conversations and focus groups. Increasingly, companies also evaluate passive metrics, such as length of interaction, interaction channel, time to resolution, and more, and correlate those data points with the CSAT or NPS score to help identify success. In addition, companies are using generative AI to analyze unstructured data when customers provided open-ended comments in their reviews. Some companies look toward survey and analytics companies, such as Alchemer, Qualtrics, or QuestionPro, to help guide their strategy. Others invest in focused CX vendors who have an integrated VoC offering, such as Dialpad, NICE, orVerint.
3. Voice as a Channel and a Bot - In our consumer research studies, we continue to find an affinity toward using voice when communicating with businesses. In fact, 77% of all interactions start in or are escalated to a voice channel. But voice goes much further than simple phone lines. Voice also can be served as part of a video or screen-sharing call. More than 90% of consumers want businesses to offer video and/or screen-sharing as options for them to interact. This is where companies with UCaaS and CCaaS offerings, such as 8x8, Dialpad, RingCentral, Webex, Zoom, and others, demonstrate strength. Voice increasingly is becoming a staple with AI. Though chatbots had a jumpstart in customer interactions, growth rates for voicebots are even higher now, driven largely by the success and sophistication of generative AI. Whether a live agent or an AI agent, customers generally prefer to interact over voice, for now. Sure, there are times when chat is a must (i.e., when you're at work or on a train), but there also are times when voice is a must (i.e., when you're driving or when AI can't solve your problem). Expect to see vendors pair AI and voice in various ways: To help live agents serve customers better and improve the overall voice interaction; to deliver more insightful video experiences (be on the lookout for AI videobots, which Huawei offers widely in Asia-Pacific); and to provide conversational, human-like interactions with voicebots.
4. Workforce Engagement Management - Contact center management is becoming more complex, as supervisors must schedule and forecast for both live and AI agents. What's more, companies that leverage AI for quality management, training, and scheduling are at a competitive advantage. For example, supervisors who use AI to listen to calls and provide analysis for QM save an average of three hours per week. Those that use AI for training agents save 11 hours per week, according to Metrigy's research! That's why we expect an increasing focus on WEM in 2025 from companies including Alvaria CX , Calabrio, Inc. , Five9, NICE, ujet.cx, and Verint.