The Three Biggest CX Trends in the Contact Centre Industry Set To Redefine 2026 according to Content Guru
As 2025 draws to a close, it’s clear that the past twelve months have been pivotal for Customer Experience (CX). Increasing consumer expectations, rapid advances in AI, and mounting pressure on organisations to demonstrate real value from their AI investments have reshaped the landscape at an increasing pace. With 2026 on the horizon, CX leaders now have a crucial opportunity to reflect on the lessons of the past year and prepare for the trends that will define, and will continue to define, CX in the next twelve months.
Prediction 1: The Demand for AI ROI
2026 will be the year when AI needs to prove its value through measurable Return on Investment (ROI), rather than artfully scripted demos, unsubstantiated claims and exciting predictions about the worlds of 2028 or 2030. Valuations in 2025 soared from an already inflated start to wildly unsustainable heights, with global stock indices distorted by a handful of AI stars, some of them fuelled by revenues bulked up through cross-subsidising investment strategies that recalled the vendor financing of an earlier era.
Inevitably, all this has brought matters to a point where anything that happens in AI is magnified: both success and failure. In the latter part of 2025, the appearance of critical reports such as MIT’s State of AI in Business, with its assessment of a 95% failure rate for Gen AI pilots, began setting the market’s animal spirits on edge.
Across industries, leaders will be under pressure to show where AI and intelligent automation are genuinely transforming processes and improving outcomes. Unlike most other areas of business, the customer experience department has the foundations already laid to make AI work, with people, processes, and data already optimised and ready to receive AI. When the dust settles, CX will come to be recognised as one of the few places where AI’s early promise survived the ‘trough of disillusionment’ intact – a pathfinder for other sectors seeking to implement AI effectively.
Prediction 2: Agentic Agents and Augmented Human Agents
Agentic AI was one of the big themes of 2025, especially in CX. AI vendors made a superficially persuasive case, backed by demos to investors, that Agentic AI ‘agents’ would replace every single one of their human counterparts, with 2028 frequently cited as the year when this vision would become reality. At the same time, Gartner countered with a prediction that, also in 2028, precisely zero Fortune 500 companies would implement such a complete replacement of their customer service headcount. Separately, Gartner predicted that, by 2029, some 80% of service enquiries would be resolved completely in automation.
There is, in fact, no contradiction in these apparently oppositional analyses. For several years, intelligent automation has been quietly mopping up, first simple, now increasingly complex types of customer enquiry. At the same time, major businesses are understandably reluctant to entrust the care of their most precious resource – their customers – entirely to machines. In other words, people will retain an important place in servicing the needs of their fellow humans, especially when a matter is complex, urgent or emotive. Likewise when a customer is aged, vulnerable or wealthy. AI will increasingly endow workers with superpowers that will drive efficiency, customer delight and job satisfaction, in equal measure.
In 2026, AI will continue to augment and support human CX agents rather than replacing them entirely. As AI use cases expand, the public will grow wary of hallucinations and incorrect outputs from AI, which can be delivered with alarming confidence. People are far more forgiving of human error than they are of algorithmic failure, and ultimately the responsibility for any AI-generated response remains with the provider of the service, not the technology vendor they employ.
Prediction 3: Changing CX Channel Demand and Premium Channels
Asynchronous conversational channels like WhatsApp will go from strength to strength in 2026 as customers look to interact with brands in the same way they as do with friends and family. Customers are increasingly intolerant of waiting in digital queues for email replies that may arrive days later, and instant messaging is just one of the channels that is growing as a result. If queue times are long, customers are often invited to start a conversation on WhatsApp instead of waiting on hold, which has proved popular for those with non-urgent queries. Customers can also freely share multimedia files easily on this channel, which can be vital if the agent requires a photo to help understand and resolve a customer’s query.
We are also likely to see a rise in tiered CX, where speed and human access become premium features. Just as low-cost airlines now offer optional upgrades, from priority boarding to luxury hotel partnerships, so digital service providers will offer tiered experiences: frictionless automation for everyday queries, and paid, human-led service for those who value immediacy and empathy, in line with services already being offered by some neobanks and online-only insurance brokers.
Currently, most consumer-facing businesses are typically either budget or luxury, but the versatility of CX will allow them to offer something more nuanced to a wider range of people and benefit from the returns, enabled by AI and humans working together, to deliver great experiences with enviable efficiency.
Embracing the Next Year of CX
As we move into 2026, the pressure to demonstrate real ROI from AI investments will intensify, human-AI collaboration will continue to mature, and contact channels will continue to expand with platforms such as WhatsApp giving rise to increasingly personalised interactions between customers and organisations. Businesses that are able to adapt quickly and balance intelligent automation with meaningful human connection will be ready to set the standard for effortless customer experiences in the year ahead.
Martin Taylor is Co-Founder and Deputy CEO at Content Guru
Available in over 150 countries, storm® is the only cloud platform trusted to run national blue-light emergency services and its CX solutions have delivered the highest customer satisfaction scores in multiple industries for many of the globe’s largest organisations. Its brain® AI services provide leading automated and human-assist capabilities to bolster contact centre performance.
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