In December 2024, DMG Consulting conducted our annual global survey of enterprise, customer experience (CX), contact center, and customer service leaders concerning their business goals and technology investment priorities for the upcoming year. This year, we also asked participants about their expectations regarding the potential and benefits of artificial intelligence (AI), as this is currently the hottest topic in the service industry.
The study shows a clear pattern of AI-enabled transformation that was set in motion in 2024 and is going strong in 2025. Following are insights into the business objectives contact center leaders plan to address during the year.
Top Contact Center Goals for 2025
Improving the CX is the top business goal for service organizations in 2025, selected by 57.6% of respondents (SEE CHART) and recapturing sole possession of first place after tying with enhancing self-service solutions in 2024. However, the percentage of survey participants who chose improving the CX as a priority decreased slightly from 59.3% during that period.
Having followed these survey trends for the past 10 years (with the exception of 2019), DMG believes executives are highly committed to enhancing the CX and view this goal as a core operating tenet in most contact centers. Enhancing self-service systems came in second place, chosen by 53.0% of survey respondents, and improving productivity was the third-ranked business goal (48.5%).
In general, deploying customer-facing self-service capabilities is the most effective way to deflect interactions from live agents and decrease service costs. Providing agents with automation, which came in fourth with 40.9% of survey responses, is another means to boost productivity. As is the case with Conversational AI (CAI) self-service systems for customers, the market is filled with an innovative set of applications to augment agent performance. These Generative AI (GenAI)-enabled capabilities enhance the CX as well as the employee experience (EX) and improve productivity.
Improving the CX is the top business goal for service organizations…
Reducing operating costs came in as the fifth-highest business goal for 2025, chosen by 40.2% of survey participants. As total inquiry volumes continue to rise, this is a practical and common goal for service organizations.
Improving employee engagement and updating contact center systems and technology were each selected by 36.4% of survey respondents and tied for sixth place. During the past two years, fueled by GenAI and large language models (LLMs), the market has experienced an influx of tools to assist agents in performing their jobs. This is part of the reason investing in AI to enhance the contact center was selected by 35.6% of survey participants, landing it in seventh place.
Two years ago, there was great concern that agents would feel threatened by the introduction of AI in contact centers; instead, it has ushered in a number of applications that make their jobs easier and improve their performance.
Enhancing security and compliance came in eighth place, chosen by 28.8% of the people responding to the survey. Protecting a company, its employees, customers, and data is a responsibility for every operating department, including the contact center.
As importantly, enterprises need to position their workforce to comply with all applicable internal and external regulatory requirements, which is becoming more complicated with each passing year. New AI-enabled agent-facing tools help reduce fraud losses and increase regulatory compliance while improving productivity and the EX.
The underlying theme of the results…is the growing use of AI to improve the CX, EX, and contact centers overall.
Adding new digital channels and integrating contact center and back-office departments both received 23.5% of votes, tying for ninth place in the study. Organizations continue to expand the number of channels they support, which is now relatively common throughout the industry. However, integrating contact center and back-office operations is an objective that only recently has slowly started increasing in importance and is expected to receive more attention during the next few years. Both goals are essential for enabling companies to deliver an outstanding customer experience cost-effectively.
Enhancing business continuity/disaster recovery and updating policies and procedures tied for tenth place, both of which were selected by 20.5% of survey respondents. Each are core activities that should be of importance to every contact center around the world.
Survey respondents also selected migrating systems to the cloud (16.7%), increasing agent compensation (12.1%), reducing fraud (10.6%), and Other (6.8%) as goals for 2025.
Final Thoughts
The underlying theme of the results of DMG’s 2025 contact center goals and technology survey is the growing use of AI to improve the CX, EX, and contact centers overall. AI technologies provide the means for these departments to be increasingly intelligent, interact more conversationally, respond faster and better to the needs of their customers and prospects, and become better places to work.
Although AI fuels this evolution, people, processes, and operations will enable organizations to fully realize its benefits.
