“The 2025 US Contact Center Decision-Makers’ Guide” is based on a survey of 192 U.S. organizations and 1,000+ U.S. customers. This is the 17th annual edition of the report.
This article looks at three major findings from the report – which is free to download:
- Operational performance is under severe pressure
- The move to digital and automation seems to have stalled
- Live voice is still the gold standard of service.
Operational Performance Is Under Severe Pressure
The following chart shows historical figures for average speed to answer and call abandonment rate.
From 2012 onwards there was a gradual increase in average speed to answer, with a considerable uptick in 2020 and 2021 caused by pandemic-related working practices and an increase in demand experienced by some businesses. While this dropped slightly in 2022, the rise has continued in the past two years.
Call abandonment rate did not show any particular upward trend until the same time period, with 2024’s abandonment rate being the highest yet recorded. (SEE FIGURE 1)
This trend – which negatively impacts customer experience (CX), as the length of the call queue has been shown to be one of the major factors driving customer satisfaction – has been driven in large part by the increase in call durations. The typical service call is now taking over seven minutes: 38% longer than when we began tracking this metric in 2012.
One of the main strategies for alleviating long queue times and high call abandonment rates is call deflection...
Contact centers report that call duration is a far less important success metric than it has historically been, as organizations have allowed call times to increase as CX becomes more important and self-service now takes up a greater proportion of the easier short calls.
However, because agent headcount has not increased at the levels that support customer wait times of seconds rather than minutes, these longer call durations have impacted on queue times, which affect CX.
One of the main strategies for alleviating long queue times and high call abandonment rates is call deflection: moving some interactions away from the live voice channel and onto self-service or live digital channels.
...the telephony channel is holding firm, despite the rise in AI-enabled digital channels.
The following section looks at how successful this has been, although suggests that the industry may be experiencing a pause in this process.
The Move to Digital and Automation Seems To Have Stalled
While there has certainly been a long-term movement towards digital channels – email has risen from 7% of interactions in 2007 to almost 19% today, and web chat from 1% to 8% in the same period – we can see that the telephony channel is holding firm, despite the rise in AI-enabled digital channels.
Live telephony accounts for 62% of inbound interactions at the end of 2024, with a further 9% coming through telephony self-service (of which the large proportion is touchtone IVR). (SEE FIGURE 2)
Recent years have seen great strides being made in the use of chatbots or virtual assistants to handle web chats, whether as a front-end gathering of relevant information before passing it to a live agent, or in more sophisticated cases trying to handle the entire interaction.
Whereas only 15% of web chats had any automation involved in 2019, this has grown to 39% at the end of 2024. This is mainly as a result of initial handling by automated chatbots which may then hand off to live agents where appropriate, although fully-automated AI-enabled web chat has increased significantly as well.
However, the past two years have seen little increase in the level of automation (a pattern that has also been seen in U.K. contact centers). It may well be that most of the chatbots being used are static rules-based applications, and can only move onto the next level if generative AI applications are used and businesses organize their data in a way that enables the bot to provide more sophisticated and personalized service to customers, rather than generic and limited functionality.
Supporting this finding, survey respondents report that on average, around 22% of web chats require another channel – usually telephony – to resolve satisfactorily. (SEE FIGURE 3)
The stalling of the move away from live telephony to digital channels can also be seen as a factor of customer preference.
Live Voice Is Still the Gold Standard of Service
One of the main factors driving a customer’s choice of communication channel is the amount of effort they have to put in to get what they want.
Customer effort is more than simply picking the quickest and easiest channel to hand: few people could argue that choosing a face-to-face meeting over a web chat is a logical choice if customers are simply driven by doing what is easiest – ostensibly, the least effort – for them.
Customers do not just choose to use the channel of least effort: they choose the channel which is the least effort to them personally (both in terms of time and stress), but only where they are also confident that their issue will be resolved fully. Businesses should be aware that customer effort and first-contact resolution are inextricably linked.
[The survey] shows an industry in flux, where...customers have a growing preference to talk with human agents...
Effort is also not a constant between customers. For some, driving to an office or branch and speaking face-to-face is a major effort. For others, worrying about navigating around a self-service application and making sense of jargon, is a bigger effort.
Many younger customers actually get stressed about the idea of calling a contact center, and will try to avoid this wherever possible. In fact, our research shows that the youngest customer demographics place greater importance than older customers on having “polite and friendly agents”, as they lack the confidence that comes with the experience of using this channel.
The urgency, complexity, and emotional content of their interaction also plays a large part in their channel choice. Our survey (SEE FIGURE 4) shows U.S. customers’ primary channel preference for high emotion, high urgency, and high complexity interactions, from end-2018 to end-2024, based on annual surveys of 1,000 U.S. customers.
Considering that the prevalence of digital channels and self-service has increased so much in recent years, it is a surprise to see that the preference for the phone channel as the first port-of-call has risen so much, particularly for complex and urgent matters.
The timing suggests that the initial change may well be pandemic-driven (although the 2020 figure does not reflect this, as the surveys are carried out in early Q2 each year before the full impact hit).
Regardless of the reasons – a greater need for reassurance or a perceived danger in wasting time with digital channels – it should be noted that customers’ preference for the phone channel remains higher than ever, even after the lockdowns are now only a memory.
These data show that businesses can’t assume customers will use digital channels just because they’re there.
These channels need to become better – not only quicker, easier to use, and more effective – but also widely perceived as such across the whole industry.
Digital channels must improve, and by using AI to do this, businesses will reduce their cost per service interaction, as well as make these channels more effective and rewarding for customers to use.
Summary
“The 2025 US Contact Center Decision-Makers’ Guide” shows an industry in flux, where despite the growing opportunities to move from live voice to digital and automated channels, customers have a growing preference to talk with human agents in complex, emotional, and urgent situations.
This reluctance to give up the voice channel is putting increasing pressure on operational performance, raising costs, and damaging customer experience.
Despite the rise in the use of automation – especially chatbots – the contact center industry needs to invest not just in the technology to deliver more sophisticated and personalized self-service experiences, but also in making more of their internal systems processes and data available for this technology to access.
The final word should be left to the contact centers themselves. Contact center survey respondents were asked to assess which channel they would recommend customers to use if they had a complaint, a sales query, or a service query.
Telephony is the most frequently recommended specific channel in all cases, being particularly strong in complaint handling.
While a substantial minority of businesses recommend customers solve their own service issues online, and email is seen by 15% of respondents as the best way to make a complaint, this chart recognizes the ongoing dominance of the live voice channel. (SEE FIGURE 5)
“The 2025 US Contact Center Decision-Makers’ Guide” is available for free download from https://www.contactbabel.com/the-us-contact-center-decision-makers-guide/