As we approach the halfway point of the 2020s, it is a good time to take stock of the technologies and trends that have shaped our decade so far and speculate on what we can expect as we head towards 2030. Predictions from late 2019 looking at the upcoming decade reflected high anticipation for increasing digitalization, with a focus on technologies including artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR) and connected devices (IoT); but where are we with those predictions, what else dominated the landscape and what will come next?
The Experience 2030: The Future of Customer Service is Now report by Futurum Research looked at the technologies that would define the 2020s and how customer experiences may look by 2030. Some of Futurum’s predictions have come to pass, while others are developing more slowly but could yet prevail before the decade is out. However, there were notable unforeseen innovations, for example, the rapid increase of hybrid and remote working.
Taking all this into account, then, let’s make some second-half-of-the-decade predictions:
Hybrid working hits peak before declining
Working outside the physical contact center was very rare pre-2020, but mass work-from-home orders triggered by the Covid pandemic dramatically changed the landscape. Research from Contact Babel found that 71% of UK businesses had more than half of their agents working from home at the end of 2021, while in the US 100% of operations surveyed had more than half of their agents working from home at least part of the time, signaling a huge shift in both the capabilities for working remotely and the flexibility this new approach provided to organizations.
However as we enter 2025, although flexibility is welcomed by workers and around a quarter of roles are still advertised as hybrid positions, we expect the contact center to align with a number of other industries where the scales are tipping back towards being in-office. Most recently Amazon has become the latest large organization to mandate a return to the office full-time, citing the ambition to strengthen its culture. Within CX, customers are less forgiving of any issues associated with agents working remotely and, coupled with increased training and support offered in-person, it is easy to see how the hybrid working trend was born but ultimately has begun to fade. Bad news for owners of pandemic pooches, perhaps.
Immersive CX: Not quite a virtual reality
One technology that was highly anticipated to impact CX was the inclusion of VR that would allow customers to interact with brands in spaces on the Metaverse. However, despite tech vendor enthusiasm and a large amount of funding, including $46 Billion spent by Meta on the Metaverse since 2021 (even going so far as to rebrand their whole business), this technology has so far failed to hit the mainstream, prompting memories of 3D TV.
VR technology is an expensive investment for both organizations and consumers, and neither has bought into the early use cases. However, as the cost of technology comes down and access to virtual worlds increases, it is likely that VR experiences within CX will begin to establish themselves.
The rapid rise of AI
Although some technologies have progressed slower than hoped, others have exploded in popularity, such as increased automation through AI. The contact center is a great fit for automation due to its concentration of communications and data, and the large percentage of workers’ time that is taken up by repetitive admin tasks. As a result, CX leaders have been keen to embrace AI and have been able to make tangible efficiency benefits with solutions supporting agents and customers alike before, during and after interactions.
AI development is moving at a great pace and the next challenge for it will be climbing out of the ‘trough of disillusionment’ on Gartner’s Hype Cycle. Sentiment surrounding emerging technologies typically ends up declining after the initial hype, and AI is no different. According to Gartner, 30% of generative AI projects will be scrapped following proof of concept by the end of next year, citing “poor data quality, inadequate risk controls, escalating costs or unclear business value.” In the short term, AI technologies will have to prove their worth, but by the time we reach 2030 implementation will be much further on and a number of processes will have been fully and automated, without undue controversy. By the end of the decade we will look back and see that the contact center was the first mass-working environment to have been transformed by AI.
Smart technology expanding its presence within CX
The rise of AI has touched every sector and many consumers have adopted it in their personal lives due to the easy accessibility of tools such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini. However, one technology that is growing fast but with considerably less fanfare is that of connected devices and its consequent creation of digital customers.
Internet-connected objects can now act on behalf of customers and the proliferation of these devices and their position as a new channel is growing in importance within the contact center. Cars with black box devices communicate with insurers, health trackers pass on information to chosen brands and healthcare providers, and smart meters relay data to utilities providers – making manually checking meter readings a thing of the past and ensuring providers can communicate proactively on any issues as they come up, or even before they do.
Versatility is key to overcoming both the predictable and unpredictable
A number of key advancements have been made in the first half of the decade and by the time we reach 2030, CX will no doubt have continued to digitalize and embrace AI. As we saw with the curveball thrown by the pandemic, not all events can be predicted and brands must remain flexible in their stance. Those with omnichannel cloud contact centers will find it easier to adapt to change, adopt new technologies and navigate emerging trends. For this reason cloud adoption will continue to gather pace, and those that have made the move will continue to out-perform their competitors.
Quite frankly, what strikes me most about the issue of how technology has/will affect CX is the way that companies claim that every technology they deploy is an investment in improving CX. This, however, is a mostly a masquerade in which firms invest in their own operational efficiencies (which is perfectly justifiable) and then call it an investment in CX (which it often is not) — economically efficient processes for a company is not the same as a better customer experience.
To date, the most important technologies for improving the customer experience are the ones that operate “behind the curtain,” making firms better at delivering what customers want, not the technologies with which customer directly interact. AI holds the promise (yet unfulfilled) of changing this by developing interfaces with which people (AKA customers) can truly interact naturally. Until then, we all will suffer through automated tools at which we scream, rage click, pound keys, and otherwise express our frustration that these systems may save a company money, but fail to address our needs as customers.
Martin, thanks for drawing sharp lines for these four predictions for 2030. While I agree with your points about immersive technologies, at least for CX and customer care; about AI soon proving its worth; and about the proliferation of cloud services, I disagree about hybrid working and what AI is already accomplishing.
While Amazon and others are requiring back to work, we’re seeing many contact centers remaining at home, or largely at home, including in my recent trip to Guatemala. While there will be a lot of failed AI experiments and tests, we’re seeing impressive results in agent assist, automated intent generation, and IVA, to name only three examples.
All in all, we should all take stock as you have, learning from missteps or misdirections and doubling down on what’s best for customers, and for our teams.
yes, we have seen a lot of technologies that, if combined, make much more sense. Prime example is the “Metaverse” – which is in good use by the way. Think of digital twins.
Just that some of them have their heyday not in customer facing applications.
Many of the smart technologies that you mention – are there for ages. And, they are not used to improve CX, but the vendor’s benefit. Or do you really think that the smart boxes in your car communicate with your insurance to make your case?
AI is another of these topics. AI is a running target. Virtually nobody talks about predictive analytics anymore, which – in contrast to gen AI – has already very valuable use cases, which is the type of use cases we still wait to see in the case of gen AI.
So, in summary, I am bullish on technology, especially when used smartly and in conjunction with each other. I am not so bullish about them being applied to improve CX as in using an outside-in strategy but in using an inside-out strategy that has the one that operates the technology at its core (i.e., the business).
Many challenges with CX come down to fundamentals. Process, data, tools, architecture, etc. Gen AI is failing due to poor content and knowledge curation and immaturity with the tools of RAG (retrieval augmented generation). RAG comes down to search. It is a retrieval mechanism. Search is broken because content is not correctly structured and curated, and the tools are not optimized. Upstream processes that impact the customer sometimes require acts of heroics – which do not scale. In my opinion, organizations have to look at the entire information ecosystem and have enough feedback loops to solve problems at the source rather than apply band aids to fix problems that have a broader root cause. AI will mature, CX will continue to improve. As for VR, that’s not my area so cannot comment – the article stated the issues. IoT is continuing to instrument the physical world and of course AI is needed to deal with the unprecedented volumes of data that connected devices throw off. The rate of change is increasing, making extrapolation about current trends dicey. As attributed to various people from Nostradamus to Yogi Berra and others “it’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future”.