One conversation, answers for the whole business: new ContactBabel research shows how AI-enabled analytics reaches beyond the contact centre
93% of UK organisations rate analytics of customer interactions as important or critically important, while 86% of complaints start elsewhere in the business
AI-enabled analytics offers contact centres the greatest potential of any AI application to change the wider business, according to “The Inner Circle Guide to AI-Enabled Interaction Analytics”, published by contact centre and CX analyst firm ContactBabel.
The report examines AI in the contact centre as three pillars: automation, which does the work; agent assistance, which helps the human; and analytics, which explains what is happening and why.
Analytics is the only pillar that can see every conversation at once and carry what it finds into the rest of the business. Generative AI now allows the questions asked of a conversation to be written in plain language by the people who need the answer, so the same conversation can be read for sales behaviours, complaint drivers, broken processes or coaching needs.
Key findings include:
√ 93% of UK organisations rate analytics of customer interactions as “important” or “critically important” over the next two years.
√ 40% of UK contact centres already use AI-enabled interaction analytics, and around one in ten of those users are looking to replace their solution, against a third of voicebot users and 28% of chatbot users: AI-enabled analytics is working for its users.
√ 86% of complaints concern products, services and processes elsewhere in the business, and 61% of consumers say they often call only because they could not solve their issue online.
√ Among organisations that use it, speech analytics of recorded calls is rated very effective for gathering customer insight by 43% and ineffective by only 6%.
√ Between 36% and 47% of organisations that have deployed AI cannot yet say whether it performs better or worse than a human agent, a measurement gap that analytics is designed to close.
√ The largest opportunity lies in acting on insight: Only 13% of organisations using AI-driven analytics already act on it regularly across multiple areas, and the report sets out the practices that help others do the same.
Steve Morrell, Principal Analyst of ContactBabel, said:
“Every customer conversation contains answers for most of the business, from why a customer is leaving to which process caused the call. Until recently, getting at them meant a specialist building keyword lists. AI-enabled interaction analytics lets each department ask its own questions in plain language, which is why analytics now has more to offer the wider business than any other CX AI solution. The organisations that get the most from it will be the ones that give someone the job of acting on what it finds.”
Jonathan Sharp, CEO of Britannic, the report’s sponsor, said: “Call recording and analytical solutions are often constrained by predefined criteria, yielding limited insights meaning businesses are sitting on a wealth of unused data from their customers’ conversations. AI-enabled analytics extracts the intelligence from the questions different departments want to ask, effectively viewing a single conversation through multiple lenses and allowing teams to act on the findings to make a real difference. This new independent research shows organisations how to go about moving their analytics to the next level.”
“The Inner Circle Guide to AI-Enabled Interaction Analytics” is free to download by Clicking Here
About the research: the report draws on ContactBabel’s surveys of over 400 UK contact centre and CX decision-makers carried out in 2026 and a survey of 1,000 UK consumers. A US edition is also being published.
