Insights from the show floor @ Call & Contact Center Expo 2025 London
This year’s Call and Contact Center Expo in London in November brought together hundreds of CX and call and contact center professionals and technology providers – and for the fourth-year running, the IBA team!
In-person events are a great way to gain first-hand insights from the people who use technology to run their business, and CCCE was no different. Talks on the exhibition floor and keynote theatre sessions topics followed a common theme: the world of customer service is no longer just about call volume or cost-cutting. It’s fast becoming a battlefield (yes, one keynote session featured speakers dressed as knights ready for battle!), for better quality assurance, human-AI collaboration, and intelligent automation.
So, for our latest industry spotlight, we’re reprising Call & Contact Center Expo to bring you what’s hot and what’s not in the contact center industry right now!
Move over Gen AI – here comes Agentic CX
We’ve already seen how AI in the contact center can take away laborious activities to improve quality management. It’s a no- brainer with some 98% of contact center leaders now using the technology in operations! In my maths, that’s everyone!
But new on the agenda this year is the advent of Agentic AI and how this can take contact center operations one step further. According to CX Network, “Agentic AI allows for souped-up chatbots that can initiate interactions and handle sophisticated and complex customer issues autonomously.”
Agentic AI is capable of making decisions and taking actions on behalf of the human and already, the industry is looking at how integrating agentic workflow can help customers solve problems in real time. The introduction of agentic AI and machine agents was hailed by some main stage talks as “Agentic CX!”
Agentic AI vs. human empathy: Spoiler – CX needs both
The next phase is about AI agents and humans working together. Welcome to the human-AI contact center!
The chatter from the show floor is that it’s about striking a balance: Agentic AI needs to share the spotlight with humans! A recurring theme at the Expo was the importance of human empathy, judgement and context. The industry must remember the importance of human-AI collaboration. AI can’t solve everything, and many humans still want to talk to a human!
As McKinsey states “The flipside of this gen-AI-driven transformation is that human-powered contact centers remain crucial, both as a form of risk control to validate AI, and to bring humans and AI together to create powerful forms of collaborative or collective intelligence.”
AI excels at routine tasks, simple queries and metadata-driven routing. Advancements in agentic AI have been huge towards personalization and better CX processes. But, as IBA CEO Judith Ingleton-Beer pointed out back in 2023, AI falls short in areas that humans still shine – it lacks creativity, critical thinking, empathy, and emotion.
Industries clearly recognize the importance of AI-human collaboration. Our last expo blog “Insights straight from the smart factory floor” hits the nail on the head: AI needs the contextual knowledge and hands-on expertise to enhance productivity and preserve valuable institutional knowledge that only humans can supply!
The metrics that matter most acknowledge customers to redefine contact center experiences
Metrics that matter was a theme that echoed throughout the expo. Data plays a critical role to ensure gold-standard experiences and today’s contact center customers expect every interaction to show clear understanding of their needs, their history and their context – something only data can provide!
What customers want above all is to feel acknowledged and one thing we’ve already seen, is that personalisation is no longer optional. This is where integration between contact center and CRM systems prove their worth. By giving agents full visibility into customer history – including previous calls, recent questions, outcomes, and profile data – they empower more relevant, empathetic, and efficient conversations.
With the right data at their fingertips, contact center agents can deliver faster resolutions, more informed guidance and a significantly higher chance of achieving a first-time fix. More importantly, they can deliver what today’s customers demand: an experience that feels personal, empathetic, and genuinely human.
Humans and tech have a role to play in the contact center of the future
As this year’s expo showed, CX is undergoing major change. AI is becoming smarter and more integrated. CX is more important than ever. But among all this tech, human agents are taking on more meaningful roles.
The technology is there and, from the solutions on show at CCCE, it’s primed to help!
Georgia Harris is PR Lead Themes at IBA International
