The future of AI in customer service [A 2025 guide]

1. AI-powered chatbots are shaping customer service

A Deloitte survey shows that 76% of service agents in contact centers are overwhelmed by systems and information. However, the bulk of this problem is due to the increase in contact volume. 

For example, your complaint backlog scales synonymously with your business growth, overloading human agents with tons of data to analyze when providing services.

However, AI-powered chatbots are changing the scenario. These NLP and ML-trained bots can efficiently handle bulk customer data and leverage them to address customer queries and provide personalized resolutions.

In return, businesses see results such as:

• 37% faster first response time
• 46% agent occupancy rate and a 35% reduction in the likelihood of agents getting overwhelmed
• 27% decrease in ticket-to-order ratio and 1% increase in customer satisfaction score
• $11 billion in annual cost savings for ecommerce brands and other industries in 2023. Chatbots also saved 2.5 billion hours in customer service hours

Returns and refunds

Thanks to digitalization, customers rarely need to queue up in front of your office to return a product. Just a click on the ecommerce store app’s refund button will do. However, some businesses still struggle to streamline this process and pacify their turned-off customers.

When that happens, customers escalate the issue to social media, which can quickly sour your brand reputation. AI chatbots will help avoid such issues in 2025 by simplifying returns and refunds in seconds.

As a comprehensive, AI-driven customer service platform, Plivo CX offers an OpenAI-powered chatbot trained to handle returns and product exchanges, escalate complex issues to human agents, and enhance service delivery.

Implementation: Adopt chatbots to reduce the time to first response and time to resolution, eliminate customer complaint backlogs, free up agents for more complex tasks, and provide the much anticipated hyper-personalized experience to customers in 2025.

2. Omnichannel AI will take a leading role

Invoca’s 2022 survey shows customers prefer to communicate mostly via phone calls, followed by email, in-person communications, live agent chat, and chatbots. In 2024, chatbots and direct messaging via social media have also picked up more pace than before.

That means utilizing multiple channels to meet individual customers where they are comfortable. This leads to a chaotic multichannel communication process, as you have to switch between email tabs, social media, calls, and so on.

As a result, customers feel like they’re talking to different units within the same organization. This poor communication is a major reason 46% of businesses say they’ve lost a customer before.

Omnichannel, AI-powered customer service bridges this gap and unifies customer preferences on a single screen. Your agents can seamlessly move between voice, chat, text/SMS, and WhatsApp or use multiple channels simultaneously to address customers’ complaints.

While omnichannel communication is not a new approach, it will see greater adoption in 2025 as businesses seek to centralize issues and customer communication for increased efficiency.

According to a Gartner report from 2024, over 30% of Fortune 500 companies will offer service through only a single AI-enabled channel by 2028.

Most importantly, advanced AI solutions will provide far more benefits than channel unification, such as live AI suggestions when your agents resolve customer queries. 

Plus, AI’s ability to leverage customer data can also help predict customer preferences, including their top communication channel, language, cultural nuances, and sentiment score when the query was logged.

Eliminating silos

Siloed communication data can worsen a customer’s image of your brand. Because no customer wants to narrate their issue in case of a query again after they’ve initially done so with the first service representative.

Also, not all queries end at L1 or L2; some are escalated to agents for resolution. However, each stage of interaction contains useful information the next correspondent will find useful.

With the appropriate AI-powered omnichannel platform, your agents can simply scroll up to access previous communication summaries or review full notes and utilize them to provide a unified experience for the customer.

An example of such a platform is Plivo CX’s unified agent desktop, which helps you break the barriers between your communication channels, centralize customer interactions on a single window pane, and eliminate communication silos.

Implementation: Adopt an AI-driven omnichannel communication tool to prevent disconnect in your customer-brand interactions.

3. AI and humans will collaborate seamlessly

The surge of AI in customer service has stoked job insecurity and unemployment fears in recent years. At the recently concluded World Economic Forum (WEF), AI was predicted to eliminate 14 million jobs in the next five years.

Gartner’s report also shows that AI will become the primary customer channel over phone calls for a quarter of organizations by 2027.

While there’s no doubt AI will handle some roles in customer operations better, it’s far-fetched to think these models are here to replace humans. On the contrary, AI will become service agents’ ideal assistants in 2025.

For instance, AI-powered self-service is expected to reduce ticket load via automated allocation, prioritization, and workload reduction. This will enhance agents' ability to focus on more complex tasks. Omnichannel AI tools will also provide helpful, live suggestions to agents based on customer data and improve overall delivery. 

AI makes sticky rerouting possible, ensuring the same callers stay routed to the same agent for a consistent experience. Plivo CX’s drag-and-drop workflow builder tool helps create escalation and communication pathways that both your agents and chatbots can use.

Besides, AI is still in its developmental phase and cannot totally replicate empathy. So, 2025 will see a seamless collaboration between humans and AI to provide both accuracy, which humans can’t offer all the time, and emotions, which AI lacks.

Gartner also predicts AI will reduce the number of customer service agents by 20-30% in 2026, but this does not mean humans will cease to exist. Instead, these changes will create new roles for agents instead of handling the same repetitive tasks as before.

Another report shows that AI will take the guardian seat and provide service reps with detailed contexts, insights, and suggestions instead of replacing agents.

Implementation: Embrace AI and equip your customer service team with result-oriented platforms like Plivo CX. Don’t leave AI to do the heavy lifting; instead, build a collaborative flow between your AI and human agents. 

4. Use of AI for quality management

Traditional quality management has long been a go-to for most customer service teams. However, it is inconvenient, time-consuming, requires extensive resource use, and provides slow feedback to agents on the frontline of your business operations.

Besides, traditional QM only allows analysis of a fraction of customer interactions—just the most concerning ones. This makes it impossible to paint a full picture of your service delivery and can result in subpar operations over time.

Given how customer service plays a major differentiating role between businesses, it’s no longer ideal to rely on traditional approaches for QM. In 2025, this trend will take a different turn.

As AI’s adoption for global customer service operations grows, companies are also expected to embrace it for quality management. Primarily, AI can handle vast amounts of customer data and provide a bird’s-eye view of the state of your customer service.

For instance, Plivo CX’s AI-powered Metrics can analyze customers’ past interactions, agents’ activities, and other data to provide useful insights for improving delivery.

AI in QM will also facilitate sentiment analysis, allowing you to determine whether your customers are happy and what’s driving their sentiment so you can promptly address it.

With predictive analysis, businesses will find it easy to identify trends and patterns and make healthy decisions that enhance customer satisfaction.