Forget 2025 — Here Are My Top Predictions for CX in 2030
December 20, 2024
December is a time of relaxation, holidays, and family. It is a time of snow (for some) and some good food and drink. And of course — it is time for predictions! December is when pundits, analysts, influencers, executives and marketeers all come out with their views on what the future holds in 2025.
I’m going to buck this trend — sort of — instead of predictions for 2025, I’m going to fast forward to 2030 and predict what the future of customer experience (CX) will look like. So, without further ado, here are my three predictions for CX in 2030:
Prediction 1:
Over the next few years, the role of the contact center agent as we know it will end. In its place — rising from its ashes so to speak — will be an entirely new role: the brand ambassador.
The contact center industry has long had the ambition to deliver automation solutions that allow for a reduction in the number of human agents. Brands want this because contact center agent labor has been a pure cost center. Over the past two decades, we’ve seen three prior waves of technology that have been deployed in pursuit of this — all with limited success.
Wave 1 was “press 1 for sales, 2 for support” IVR systems that made use of telephony touch tones. At the time, this was viewed as disruptive, but it did little to reduce the dependency on live agents.
Wave 2 was a slight upgrade. Users could now speak their menu options. “Press 1 or say sales.” Again, not much impact.
Wave 3 was more interesting, relying on natural language using deep neural networks. This allowed for: “In a few words, how can I help you?” This had a greater impact than the first two waves but still not enough to make a significant difference in the need for live agents across the industry as a whole.
But now we’re entering Wave 4 based on GenAI. The difference is obvious if you’ve used tools like ChatGPT that can handle complex conversations using information and intent spread over many turns. But will this technology finally give brands what they want — fewer live agents? Yes and no. Yes, to fewer live contact center agents, but instead of just taking jobs away from people, GenAI will also create new jobs for what I am calling “brand ambassadors.”
Brand ambassadors will allow brands to increase online sales and reduce customer churn through highly selective and proactive engagements with customers. It sounds like a sales position, and it is. But it's a new type of sales job enabled by using GenAI to filter through enormous numbers of online transactions happening in real-time — all through those GenAI powered bots — and find just the right ones where the human touch can make a difference between an abandoned shopping cart and a completed sale. GenAI will funnel these real-time leads to a brand ambassador to step in and use a human touch to get that sale over the finish line. It’ll prevent churn too, again using GenAI to sift through vast numbers of virtual conversations with GenAI bots to find the ones where a human touch will make the difference between a lost customer and a repeat customer.
Simply put, GenAI will enable new, proactive lead-generation — and this innovation will bring with it a new set of jobs for people to process those leads. The key is that this is a revenue-generating role for the business, not a cost center. Ask any executive and they’ll tell you they wish they had more salespeople to cover the leads they have. Brands will want more of these people, not less!
The brand ambassador will use storytelling, conversation, empathy, and sympathy to achieve these outcomes. While this is similar to today’s requirements for contact center agents, the new role is much more outcome-driven. Brand ambassadors will be rated by productivity and lead closure rates, not how much of their day they are on the phone. So while some people who are agents today may graduate into this role, others will not. At the same time, a lot of people who would have no interest in a contact center job, will be interested in this kind of role, and it will be a great entry-level opportunity for a career in sales.
Prediction 2:
A battle is looming to be the platform of choice for delivering AI-enabled CX use cases — a battle between startups, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, marketing and sales tools, and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) vendors. Over the next few years, CCaaS vendors like Five9 will capture the largest market share because what matters the most is conversation, and CCaaS today owns the conversational platform.
Everyone seems to be gunning for the lead position as the tech vendor delivering this next generation of GenAI self-service solutions for CX. A horde of startups and almost all the established vendors in the CX value chain are building these solutions. While market share will be spread among all the players, CCaaS is best poised to take the leading share for three big reasons.
Reason 1: Voice Is Reborn, and It’s Multichannel — Pundits have long predicted the death of voice. “My kids don’t want to pick up the phone - they only want to text!” has been the doom cry of panicked GenX overseers of contact centers all over the world. Voice never actually died — we still have huge numbers of voice interactions globally — but something more is coming. GenAI is going to drive a resurgence of interest in voice, because we will see the rise of a new modality which I’ll call “multichannel”. In this modality, people engage with GenAI bots using a combination of real-time voice, video, images and text — all of which are sent and received by people during a single interaction. To get a glimpse of what this looks like, just look at the visions for consumer AI agents being promoted by Google and OpenAI. These advanced assistants require expertise in voice and video, and require combining it with text, chat, and imagery. Vendors which are best equipped to handle all of these channels concurrently are in the best position to capture this market. CCaaS vendors — and Five9 in particular — have historically been extremely strong in voice and will have a leg up in delivering these experiences.
The more simplified vision of the future takes you to the same place. Users will want to engage with these AI agents across multiple channels. Sometimes they will want to text, sometimes they will want voice. Sometimes they may even want email. Brands will want a single agentic solution that works identically across these channels — they don’t want separate solutions for each. The vendors best positioned to offer solutions across all channels? CCaaS.
Reason 2: Conversation Data Is King — For these bots to be effective, they need the history of your conversations with a brand as context. The importance of this cannot be overstated. If you harken back to the days of in-person interactions, when you loved a brand the most, you had “your guy” at a company who you had been talking to and working with for years. He or she knew you, what your preferences were, what you did and didn't buy, and was able to suggest things that worked for you. To get consumers to use self-service automation, it needs to be like that again. And the only way to deliver that is by training GenAI models for each consumer individually, using their personal conversation history with the brand, which must include conversations with live agents, chatbots, voice bots, web chat, texting, WhatsApp, and whatever else. This historically has been the most difficult data to get access to. And the platforms that own it are CCaaS.
Reason 3: “Silo-Busting” with Cross-Silo Integration — For self-service GenAI bots to be effective, they need to be able to do everything: check your order status, book reservations, answer questions about every product and service, access your medical history and personal information, and so on. In each market segment, the best solutions will be those with the most integrations into the backend IT and other systems that hold this data and have APIs for these operations. This means that cross-functional platforms — like CCaaS — are extremely well positioned as they’ve been building the technology and personnel capable of putting this in place.
Prediction 3:
Over the next few years, consumers will do a complete 360, moving from hating chatbots to preferring them — as chatbots become capable enough to subsume not just tasks handled by live agents today but also those you could otherwise self-service via the website. Why will customers prefer this experience? The power of conversation.
Before the web was a thing, if you wanted to take a trip, you went to a travel agency and had a conversation with a person:
“Where do you want to go?”
“I was thinking about an island, somewhere with beautiful blue beaches.”
“Oh, the Maldives is perfect for that, and you know what, a new resort just opened there, and they have a great special on right now. Let me show you.”
Then the travel agent would open a brochure, show you pictures, and talk about what you could do. And you’d get excited, and they’d help you book the trip, interacting with you to collect data to ultimately book flights and hotels.
That was a GREAT customer experience! But it was expensive and ultimately killed by web2.0 and much cheaper online travel booking. But that experience is far less conversational and far less flexible. As a consumer, you must do all the work — you need to search and read and search some more and look at countless options. Today’s web tools can do the mechanics of booking a flight, but everything else is on the shoulders of the consumer.
With GenAI and agentic systems, we can get the best of both worlds — across any number of verticals. We can deliver a system that feels like the experience of yesterday — a conversation with an expert that can do the work for you, helping you make choices based on analysis of your needs and desires. And it can take action, booking the flights and making the hotel reservations. And it can, like a travel agent, show you pictures and images. It can also use the web to share reviews and feedback, and it can show you flight options — visually even — and let you pick. It can even show you seat pickers on flights and room selectors. But most important, it can understand your needs and desires to drive all those mechanics. And the only way it gets to know your needs and desires is through conversation.
This experience is something new. It's not just a chatbot. It's a conversation, where that conversation includes visual elements that show bits and pieces of the website, but within the structure of the conversation. The way to think about it is this: instead of the chatbot being inside the website, the website is inside the chatbot.
And when we do that, we end up with an experience that is better than the sum of its parts. You get the speed and visual effectiveness of a click-based web experience, with the personalization and improved efficiency of a conversational expert. When we have this, it will be like everyone in the world has their own personal travel agent, their own personal health coach, their own personal pharmacist, their own personal shopper. Customers will prefer this over talking to a human because it offers all the benefits and none of the drawbacks.
The Five-Year Horizon
I have used the multi-year time horizon throughout this because it’s not all going to happen next year. And maybe not the year after that. But both the opportunity and the technology are here now, and we’re already starting to create those experiences. When brands understand this, when they understand what CCaaS vendors like Five9 can enable, it will accelerate the transformation, replacing the contact center as we know it today with a new type of experience that will bring dramatic benefits to both brands and their customers.
