Year after year, contact centre leaders say the same thing: telephony volumes will fall. In the latest data, 54% of UK contact centre respondents expect live call volumes to drop, against just 21% who think they’ll rise.
That’s an expectation gap that has been widening for several years, and yet the phones keep ringing.
10 years ago, live telephony accounted for 67.8% of inbound interactions. At the end of 2025, it was 63.4%.
So much for the “Death of Voice”.
The data suggest that channels don’t get replaced: they accumulate.
Voice doesn’t disappear just because web chat grows. Email doesn’t die because messaging takes off.
What actually happens is that customers spread themselves across more channels, and businesses find themselves having to serve all of them simultaneously.
The implication for leaders is that it isn’t which channel will “win”, it’s whether your organisation can unify its view of the customer across all of them, and that challenge isn’t going away, no matter what this year’s forecast says.
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ContactBabel is the contact centre industry expert, helping US and UK contact centres compare themselves to their closest competitors so they can understand what they are doing well, what needs to improve and how they can do this.
Our ongoing primary research helps businesses understand how technology, people and process best fit together, and how they will work collectively in the future.
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