Some (Near) Year-End Customer Service Reflections

And just like that, we’re here and it’s the end of another year! The leaves have fallen, I’ve pulled out my coziest sweaters, and my dog has resumed her daily request for a morning snooze by the fireplace (yes, really).

I thought we could use 2024’s final column as an opportunity to reflect on some interesting themes and offer a dash of sagely advice for the year ahead. So, what am I thinking about as we close out the year?

Voice Still Matters (and Still Will in 2025)

I’ve been working in the contact center basically my whole career. I am pretty sure that from the moment little 20-something Christina made her first cold call to a customer service exec, to this very moment as you read these words, people have been forecasting the death of the voice channel.

Those people were wrong then, they’re wrong now, and they’ll be wrong next year, too.

Voice is an important channel for customer service, and I don’t see that changing in the next several years. Some of my clients handle tens of millions of calls a year—those aren’t going anywhere fast.

But what is moving fast is the quality of voice artificial intelligence solutions. If you’ve read this column before, you might’ve heard me agonize over how hard it is to get voice AI right. From shaky audio and transcription quality to awkward robotic voices and everything in between, voice use cases are just hard. But vendors are recognizing the enormous opportunity in this space (hello, tens of millions of calls!) and are making major investments.

Expect to see more AI vendors investing here in 2025. And if you’re still rockin’ the whole “press one for billing” situation, it’s probably time for you to invest, too.

(Hey, can one of you send this to my hydro company? Thanks!)

Saving Costs Is Still a Major Priority (and It’s Easier Than You Think)

Surprising probably no one, cost savings is still a major priority for most contact center buyers today. We already mentioned those tens of millions of calls—they’re expensive, I get it. But something that has really been itching at my brain lately is that a lot of you are leaving some very serious money on the table.

When clients ask what use cases they should prioritize for cost savings (often looking for “quick wins”) there are two that come immediately to mind:

Post-call summarization. I’m probably not telling you anything you haven’t heard before, but I’ll say it 100 more times: If you’re not already using AI to transcribe and summarize your calls to reduce effort for your agents, you really ought to. Many agents spend one to three minutes on after-call work (ACW). Automating this with genAI represents big money when you’re staring down several million calls a year. And that doesn’t count the side benefits of your agents being more present with your customers on the call now that they’re not scrambling to take notes.

And for those of you who say, “Oh, Christina, we don’t have ACW”: Do your agents take notes? If yes, that just means you have what I call “during-call work,” and your agents are spending a ton of time multitasking during the call to get those notes down. Same goes if you cap your ACW at less than a minute. You’ll likely see bigger benefits than you expect by deploying AI summaries.

Predictive routing. I can hear it now, the chorus of “Predictive routing? Really? 2015 wants its column back!” Hey—hate on it if you like, but I’m serious. If you’ve got high volumes in the contact center and you’re not yet leveraging intelligent routing, you’re leaving money on the table full stop. I just heard from a health insurer that has saved 50 seconds of average handling time per call just by deploying predictive routing. Not too shabby.

I know that many of you have big AI or innovation goals for 2025. But the way I see it, if your contact center platform offers this capability, turn it the heck on and get that money. And don’t stop there! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: It’s a mistake to see efficiency gains as the end goal. They’re a resource.

All right, folks. I will close out the year with the same well wishes as last year: May your queues be short, your feedback glowing, and your eggnog cravings manageable.

Happy holidays and I’ll see you again in 2025! 

Christina McAllister is senior analyst, Forrester Research, covering customer service and contact center technology, strategy, and operations.

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