What’s on YOUR CX “To-do” List in 2025?

Well folks, it’s that time of year again—time to look into our collective crystal balls and see what trends in the world of CX might be top-of-mind as we head into 2025.

I was very lucky to have the chance to check in with a number of our customers during this year’s Verint Engage. While it doesn’t take a soothsayer to predict that we’re likely to see a lot of upheaval and uncertainty in the coming months, there are several specific trends to watch as we get ready to bid adieu to 2024.

AI and Automation

In uncertain times, one thing you can rely on is that businesses will look for ways to cut costs and improve efficiency.

That was definitely something I heard a lot of from Verint customers. One trend that stood out was the recognition of the significant cost savings that can/are being realized by companies focusing on using AI and automation to improve and expand their self-service and containment efforts.

In fact, one customer told me that, by using Verint IVA for their chat interactions, they were able to achieve 30% containment of their chat conversations on Day 1! Another Engage presenter shared how, with Verint bots, they have now achieved a whopping 83% containment rate.

It’s important to remember that, with Verint, containment rates continue to improve over time as our containment bots train on your unique engagement data to continuously improve and provide relevant, correct responses—regardless of complexity or specificity to your business.

With results like these, it’s clear that AI and Automation will continue to be major focuses in the coming year.

Improving CX

The competition for customers remains fierce in many sectors. There was a definite consensus about the need to do everything possible to retain current customers and attract new ones.

While there are numerous ways organizations are going about this, again AI and CX automation rise to the top in terms of customer retention initiatives in place or being planned.

Throughout Engage, customers were excited to share their many CX wins during mainstage presentations, breakout sessions, and just in casual conversations during social hours. Here, again, people were eager to share some really impressive results, this time focusing on how their NPS and CSAT scores increased dramatically with improved CX.

Here are two examples:

• By using Verint Coaching Bot to provide in-the-moment guidance to agents who may be struggling with a call, a mortgage bank was able to dramatically increase their NPS from 3 to 39.
• Another customer saw a 35% increase in CSAT thanks to their company-wide digitalization effort and laser-focus on improving customer experience.

The Importance of a Platform Approach

Verint’s open platform approach has long been one of our key differentiators in the marketplace. Customers had much to say about the value of the CX automation it delivers and how it is key in driving AI business outcomes while helping to “future-proof” their organizations.

Not only does Verint Platform deliver fast and dramatic results, but many of the customers I spoke with point to​ the value of the flexibility of our approach that allows our solutions to be easily integrated in existing ecosystems with little or no disruption.

They valued the ability to start small and grow over time without having to rip and replace their existing ecosystem—to quickly start seeing results.

When valuable behavioral data is stuck in silos and inaccessible to your contact center, that information can become unusable, and its value lost. Verint Platform brings unified data to users so they can gain a deeper understanding of the behaviors of customers, employees, and bots.

Perhaps one customer summed it up best:

“The value it brings is pretty amazing. It helps confirm hunches. It helps us find stuff we did not know. With the analytics and AI, we can better react to outside market forces.”

Hooray for Bots!

One of the favorite topics of discussion at Engage was our ever-growing family of AI-powered bots and the specialized skills they bring to automate a given task and improve productivity and overall CX. As we’ve said, companies are working hard to find ways to improve efficiency without necessarily adding headcount.

The excitement over our bots and the capabilities they bring was palpable. Many had a particular favorite (or favorites) they’re looking forward to implementing—or have already implemented and are seeing successes. Here are just a few things I heard:

“We are hoping that these bots (Coaching Bot, Interaction Wrap-Up Bot, Quality Bot) will not only drive down talk time, but also bring more value in terms of more concise notes, better summaries, and better quality management.”

“It’s the future right now. We always have to focus on the bottom line and be more productive. The Quality Bot is going to be amazing to help us get there.”

“I’m super thrilled about what bots are going to bring and how we’re going to leverage AI to really cut down long wait times, provide flexibility in scheduling for our agents, and to capture end-to-end insights.”

The Value of Data and Improved Accuracy

Ultimately, it’s still all about the data. Without accurate data, you’re simply not making fact-based decisions—you’re just guessing.

Harnessing your behavioral data is critical to achieving the business outcomes you’re looking for with increased insights to help optimize processes, elevate CX, drive sales, and more.

Engage attendees were excited to share some of the outcomes they’ve achieved along with their hopes for the future. This is one of my favorite comments from an Engage attendee about how the insights they are able to unearth have a wide impact across their organization:

“Without Verint, we wouldn’t be able to identify where there’s need for additional training. We wouldn’t be able to get a clear view of where we can make changes/enhancements to procedures to improve the experiences of both our customers and our employees. We are also better prepared to respond to changes in the marketplace and our long-term strategic decisions are based on what the analytics tell us—not just hunches.”

The newly unveiled Genie Bot certainly had a lot of people talking and excited about how it can provide deep-dive analysis and insights to improve agent capacity and CX, while accelerating time to insight across the enterprise.

And on to 2025!

The truth is nobody really knows what 2025 holds in store for us. But, whatever comes, it’s always good to follow the old Boy Scout motto: “Be Prepared.”

If those with whom I spoke are good prognosticators of next year’s trends, more ways to incorporate AI and automation into CX operations will undoubtedly be on everyone’s 2025 “to do” list to make sure that their organizations are maximizing their resources and nimble enough to meet whatever the year has in store.

And of course, having the most accurate and actionable data for clear insights will continue to be essential to drive business outcomes. What else? Only time will tell.

If you want to be on top of the latest trends, make sure to keep your eyes open for news about Engage 2025, September 8-11. Plan to join us to see just how our predictions have played out.