January 9, 2026 • 13 min read
15 Contact Center Trends to Watch Out for in 2026
Director of Content & Market Research
January 9, 2026
Contact centers are entering a period of rapid change, shaped by AI advancements, evolving customer expectations, and a frontline workforce under increasing pressure.
In this landscape, experimentation is accelerating, traditional metrics are being called into question, and old best practices are being re-evaluated.
To stay ahead, here are 15 key contact center trends for 2026 that every customer service leader should be aware of.
1. Human and AI Performance Metrics Evolve
Conventional contact center metrics for AI and human performance need to change.
Starting with AI, contact centers should measure success by whether customer needs are truly met, not just by containment, which tracks how many contacts AI deflects from the frontline.
Real-time resolution and sentiment measures can provide a more comprehensive view of AI performance and its impact on the customer experience.
Similarly, as AI escalates cases, reporting on trends in when it does so will help isolate opportunities to improve the knowledge content and data that support both AI and human agents.
When it comes to human agents, Wayne Butterfield, a prominent AI & Automation Analyst, stresses the need to monitor how they interact with new AI support tools.
“Many organizations are rolling out AI but have no idea who’s using it, how it’s being used, or whether it’s delivering value. Tools like KYP.ai aim to address this by tracking tasks, AI usage, and productivity differences across users. That opens the door to better training, better adoption, and clearer ROI.”
Rebecca Wetteman, CEO of Valoir, also highlights this in an analysis of emerging customer experience metrics, while stressing the need to closely track frontline training time and compensation as the job evolves.
2. Tracking Case Complexity Arises as a Way to Combat Burnout
As customer-facing AI use expands, human service reps are handling more complex interactions. Couple that with rising job-security concerns, and the risk of burnout increases.
Historically, the management playbook for burnout focused primarily on managing occupancy rates, monitoring contact volumes, and balancing workloads. All that remains important.
Yet, complexity-induced burnout takes a different toll than volume-based burnout. As such, new employee well-being tactics are necessary.
One approach is to tag the contacts service teams handle as high-, medium-, and low-complexity and actively managing that mix.
Ultimately, this might mean enabling more frequent, unscheduled breaks when agents handle a run of tricky conversations and rethinking broader workforce planning strategies.
3. Contact Centers Get More Value from Automated Quality Assurance (QA)
Automated quality assurance (QA) promised to analyze every contact center interaction, auto-fill agent scorecards, and unlock trends in agent and team performance.
However, as Chris Crosby, Founder of VenturesCX, posted on LinkedIn, many implementations have failed to deliver on that promise…
Why? In many cases, it’s because the contact center hadn’t optimized the process they tried to automate in the first instance. As such, auto-generated insights didn’t drive positive change.
While QA teams could assess more contacts, they still searched for the same things.
In 2026, this will start to change. More QA teams will engage in continuous root cause analysis and uncover new actions across common service scenarios, which they add to an evolving scorecard.
From there, they can modify coaching programs, track those actions via auto-QA, and assess the impact of coaching on key metrics. That’s the future of QA.
4. Knowledge Management Initiatives Ramp Up
In 2025, knowledge base clutter prevented contact centers from accelerating their contact automation and agent-assist strategies.
Metric Sherpa research approximates that only one in five organizations describe their knowledge practices as ‘structured and mature’.
As AI deployment becomes an enterprise prerogative, that has to change, and contact centers will recognize the urgency to do that.
AI itself can help solve the issue by analyzing successful customer interactions and auto-generating knowledge articles. Yet, the Metric Sherpa warns against an over-reliance on this.
Instead, it recommends appointing an executive sponsor across service, IT, and operations, to define and track success. It also suggests starting with the biggest friction points, as relayed by AI escalations, repeat contacts, and human feedback.
5. Contact Centers Get Real on Empathy
As AI and automation strategies advance, contact centers risk sacrificing the value of empathy and human connection.
After all, when a customer is emotionally charged, an AI-generated empathy statement won’t suffice. In fact, it may only foster a sense of resentment.
To avoid this ‘empathy debt’ risk, service leaders will prioritize giving customers easy access to human support whenever it’s needed.
Even when they don’t request it, passing a customer who is experiencing an especially difficult issue through to a real person, who can deliver the necessary empathy, is the smart play.
6. IT Teams Take on a More Prominent Contact Center Role
Ten years ago, contact centers had their own IT offshoots, completely detached from the broader enterprise IT strategy.
That began to change with the cloud. Now, AI has completely flipped the script, and IT is taking a starring role in contact center procurement decisions, with marketing and sales teams also getting in on the act.
Why? To connect the broader customer experience function, open up access to more customer journey intelligence, and – of course – deploy new AI solutions.
Interestingly, as this is happening, CCaaS and ITSM (IT Service Management) solutions are coming together. For instance, Zoom partnered with ServiceNow in 2025 to build “a turnkey, AI-first solution for customer service and IT support.”
Such solutions recognize the shared need for case management and will help to unify support data from across the enterprise.
7. AI Customers Interact with AI Agents
In early 2025, Google released an experimental ‘Ask for Me’ tool for its search engine.
‘Ask for Me’ essentially gives search engine users an AI agent that calls businesses on their behalf, as shown in the video below.
The catch? It can currently only call nail salons and mechanics.
Nevertheless, expect this technology to surge as Google and other AI giants expand the use cases and start making such AI agents available through the voice assistant on smartphones.
“We’re starting to imagine a world where your personal agent can interoperate across multiple brands. The easy example is travel: flights, ride-sharing, and hotels. Instead of you interacting with each brand separately, your agent interacts with all of them - and they interact with each other - to serve you as a shared customer.”
While this vision of inter-brand, multi-agent ecosystems is perhaps something to watch out for further down the line, the future of a customer’s AI agent interacting with a contact center AI agent is accelerating fast.
In the meantime, customer support teams should consider policies around what machine customers are allowed to do, how they authenticate, and how failures are communicated back to humans.
8. The Contact Center Starts to Merge with Sales (& Other Functions!)
Brands have long entrenched service and sales in separate silos with disconnected data. Without this combined intelligence, cross-sell and upsell opportunities have gone untapped. Thankfully, advances in AI can help bridge the gap.
“Even back in the speech analytics days, the same underlying technology could serve both domains with different vocabularies. Now, you don’t even need that. You can just analyze all conversations and apply the same tools across both.”
The CX leaders who pool and mine such data will start to think about customer experience as originally intended, not as a synonym for the contact center but something much bigger.
9. Conversational Experience Orchestration Becomes the New ‘It’ Term
Carrying on from the previous trend, Opus Reseach recently coined the term ‘Conversational Experience Orchestration’.
A Conversational Experience Orchestration layer takes insights from all customer conversations to dynamically guide and improve future interactions, whether they’re human-to-human, human-to-AI, or AI-to-AI.
“Even in a world where AI agents talk to AI agents, the interaction is still structurally a conversation. It has turns, intent, context, and outcomes. That means orchestration and intelligence layers still matter, arguably more than ever.”
While this may seem a distant prospect, many vendors are preparing for this future. Take NiCE and its September 2025 acquisition of Cognigy.
Indeed, the acquisition seems likely to combine deep conversation intelligence with conversational AI to form such a Conversational Experience Orchestration layer that drives ongoing end-to-end customer experience improvement.
10. Pre-Emptive Customer Service Gets a New Lease of Life
When analyzing their contact volumes, contact center leaders will isolate issues they can resolve before the customer is aware that something has gone wrong.
When they identify such an issue – be it a billing, delivery, or service disruption problem – service teams should orchestrate an experience to tell customers proactively, explain what’s happening, and how it will be resolved. That’s not just proactive customer service; it’s pre-emptive.
However, many don’t, even when they’ve identified the issue, worrying that proactive outreach will increase inbound contacts.
In 2026, Butterfield predicts this could change. Why? “Because the fear factor was rooted in cost,” he told CX Foundation.
“If proactive outreach and any resulting inbound contacts are handled through AI or self-service, the cost argument largely disappears.”
Further in the future, contact centers may track issues in other enterprise systems using AI agents and trigger an outbound notification, bringing new opportunities for pre-emptive service to life.
11. Talk of Personalization Fizzles. Chatter of Individualization Grows.
Customer service leaders design journeys around their most common customer personas. In some contact centers, that’s as far as personalizing the service experience goes.
In 2026, that will start to change.
“The next wave, in my view, is truly individual experiences, built around someone’s historical data, recent interactions, timing, context, and preferences.”
What could this look like? Consider a customer who spoke to a live rep – let’s call them Jack - last week and had, by all sentiment indicators, a positive interaction. The system could then say: “Do you want to speak to Jack again? The wait will be three minutes, or I can connect you to someone else.”
That’s not personalization in the traditional sense; it’s an entirely individual experience.
12. Neuro-Inclusive Customer Service Experiences Arise
Okay, this one may be beyond 2026. Nevertheless, neuro-inclusive customer service experiences are fascinating to consider.
After all, as AI advances, the tools that people use will adapt to how they think, not the other way around. In the future, that may change how customers self-serve.
For instance, a digital self-service application could help overcome the ‘blank page problem’, which is a mental block many people with ADD experience when confronted with an empty page or screen.
Essentially, if they can’t get the first sentence, they’re stuck. However, if the application could suggest ten possible opening lines, the customer can immediately jump in.
“That kind of adaptive support could apply across CX, especially for vulnerable customers or those with cognitive or sensory differences. Designing for inclusion isn’t an edge case; it’s core to good CX.”
Further into the future, adaptive AI could also help human reps struggling with a tricky query. Instead of having AI generate a reply that may or may not be satisfactory, reps could work with AI to draw ideas out through structured interaction.
13. Voice Becomes Sexy Again, But the Future Is Multimodal
Contact center folk make this prediction every year. Yet, many service leaders still obsess over reducing voice contacts, considering it the most expensive channel. In 2026, that should change.
“I spent most of my career trying to reduce voice because it was expensive, but voice is still the most natural interface for explaining complex problems,” said Butterfield. “Asking people to type out detailed issues into chatbots is cognitively harder than just speaking.”
“Voice AI, if designed properly, could significantly improve resolution.”
Yet, the future isn’t voice or digital, it’s multimodal. Voice may remain the primary channel, but digital elements will layer in where they make sense: seat maps, account selection, confirmations.
Such multimodal service experiences used to feel like an edge case, with UJET one of the few CCaaS vendors banging the drum. However, it will soon become the norm, largely because voice AI has improved so dramatically.
14. Value-Based Contact Center Pricing Models Will Emerge
Contact center vendors have traditionally aligned their pricing with agent seat counts. Yet, as AI begins to do more of the legwork, questions have arisen over whether these models are future-proof.
The obvious alternative is consumption-based pricing that incorporates AI usage. However, CFOs have legitimate concerns that if AI booms, they could end up with big bills.
There are alternative models, such as vendors that allow businesses to purchase AI tokens, layered over the traditional seat-based model. Rising CCaaS vendor Glia even offers a fixed price for unlimited seats, usage, and integrated AI features.
Yet, in 2026, vendors will reconsider their approach to emphasize the value their software is driving. Zendesk’s outcome-based pricing model is an excellent example here.
Nevertheless, vendors that build robust tools and telemetry to measure, monitor, and manage value and usage will be best positioned for success.
15. The Term ‘CCaaS’ Loses Its Shine
At first, CCaaS platforms largely replicated their on-premise predecessors, orienting around telephony and the core routing application.
In 2026, they do much more. Indeed, they help orchestrate workflows, design proactive experiences, and pull in data from across the enterprise. These capabilities are what differentiate a CCaaS platform, not the conventional ‘contact center’ elements.
Yet, with brands now able to ‘spin up’ a contact center without working with a conventional CCaaS provider - likely via CRM software - vendors in this space need to reiterate their platform differentiators, resources, and expertise.
To do so, many may start to move away from the term ‘CCaaS’. Talkdesk is one vendor that has already made this pivot. Now, it refers to itself as a ‘customer experience automation platform’.
A Common Thread That Runs Through These Trends
For contact centers moving further along their transformation journeys, all these AI-related trends may feel both exciting and scary.
Some will feel like they’re already falling behind. Yet, every brand has to choose its own path.
For all those still ramping up their strategy, here’s a key takeaway: AI only works when the purpose is sharp. Success isn’t about how much AI a service team deploys, it’s about knowing exactly why they’re doing it.
Indeed, if there’s anything contact centers learned in 2025 and should take into 2026, it’s that the use case has to be crystal clear.