A recent CX Network report found that there are 5 key factors driving contact centre growth in the next few years: omnichannel customer engagement, personalization and CX, AI, cloud-based solutions and heightened awareness of business continuity.

In 2025, CX Network research has identified that agentic AI, increased automation, data analytics, cloud migration, compliance and trust, employee experience and empathy will be at the top of the priorities list for most contact center leaders.

With this knowledge in hand, this session will bring together experts from contact centers dealing with a variety of customers, to discuss these growth factors and key investment trends, unpacking them and discussing how our audience can integrate them into their own contact center strategies.

Attendees will learn:

• What’s shaping the contact centre of tomorrow: Hear from industry leaders about the top trends influencing contact centre strategy in 2025—from agentic AI and automation to cloud migration and omnichannel engagement.
• Balancing innovation with continuity: Explore how organisations are integrating new technologies while maintaining compliance, trust, and business resilience across rapidly evolving service environments.
• Where to invest next: Gain insight into the tools and capabilities contact centre leaders are prioritising—from employee experience platforms to predictive analytics and personalised customer journeys.

Contact center leaders face a dilemma: maintaining high quality customer service while keeping costs down. Challenges around agent retention and engagement add to the strain.

AI agents, driven by agentic AI, can be a cost-effective solution to this problem, allowing contact centers to scale customer service while keeping costs low. Unlike traditional AI solutions, AI agents can act autonomously, taking initiative, identifying customer issues before they arise and actioning them – all without human intervention. In this, seamless, standardized, high-quality experiences become a reality.

Join this session to learn about how AI agents can help you scale contact center operations and improve customer service. We will delve into the new AI agents on the market and how to choose the best one for your contact center.

Attendees will learn:

• What makes AI Agents different: Understand how agentic AI enables proactive, autonomous service, reducing the need for human oversight while maintaining consistency and quality.
• Evaluating the tech landscape: Explore the latest AI agents on the market, their capabilities, and key considerations when selecting the right solution for your contact center.
• Scaling with efficiency: Learn how AI agents can help you manage volume, lower costs, and ease pressure on human agents without compromising on CX.

With agent retention a continuing challenge for contact centers, workforce engagement has never been more critical.

In this context, it is no surprise that CX Network research found employee experience emerging as the eighth most important trend impacting the role of the practitioner in 2025, the same ranking as in 2024. Investing in teams is still a huge priority for CX and contact center leaders seeking to keep employees engaged, and only 4 percent of our audience said they did not train their team in any new skills in 2024.

Luckily, there is a wealth of workforce engagement on the market to help with this often time-consuming endeavour. In this session, we will explore the options on the market and delve into strategies to keep agents engaged and reduce agent turnover.

Attendees will learn:

• How to build a high-retention contact center culture: Explore practical approaches to improving agent satisfaction, motivation, and loyalty in fast-paced customer service environments.
• Tech-powered workforce engagement: Understand how tools like real-time feedback platforms, AI-enabled coaching, and intelligent scheduling can support team wellbeing and performance.
• Training for tomorrow: Learn how leading organizations are embedding upskilling and career development into day-to-day operations to future-proof their workforce and reduce churn.

As contact centers deal with increasingly complex customer needs across channels, generative AI-powered Copilot, a real -time assistant that advises agents on responses and next-best actions based on a knowledge pool, comes to the fore as a solution.

In addition to real-time help for agents, copilots also reduce post-contact work, providing instant call summaries with analysis.

In this, copilots not only lighten the load for agents but help them to work more efficiently and more consistently, reducing the chance of human error during service. The reduced workload frees up agent time for more meaningful (and profitable) tasks.

Join this session to learn why copilot is an essential tool for a modern contact center and how to successfully implement it and integrate it with existing tools and platforms.

Attendees will learn:

• How to boost engagement and retention: Discover proven strategies for improving agent satisfaction, reducing burnout, and keeping top talent in an increasingly competitive labor market.
• Leveraging technology for workforce management: Explore the latest tools in workforce engagement, like AI-driven scheduling, real-time coaching, and performance analytics, and how they’re making life easier for teams and leaders alike.
• Building a culture of growth: Understand how to upskill agents for evolving roles, embed continuous learning into daily workflows, and align employee experience with wider CX goals.

Virgin Money has restructured its contact center operations to include the conversational banking function, placing digital and human touchpoints on a level playing field. In this fireside chat, Laura MacLeod, Digital Product Strategy Senior Manager at Virgin Money, is joining to explain how this shift is enabling a smarter, more joined-up service experience, and why AI isn’t replacing agents, but enhancing their value.

With hundreds of thousands of monthly interactions now handled by a 24/7 virtual assistant, including complex queries like fraud, Virgin Money is seeing a surprising trend: contact volumes are rising. Easier, faster service is driving repeat use of the virtual assistants, especially in the small hours when support used to be out of reach.

Discover how the team is using Microsoft Copilot to summarise conversations and support agents through a unified desktop, and why transparent, ethical AI is central to both colleague buy-in and customer trust.

Attendees will learn:

• Why contact volumes can rise after AI is implemented and why that’s a good thing
• How Virgin Money is embedding AI to support, not replace, its contact center teams
• The role of ethical design in building trust across digital and human channels

Laura MacLeod

Digital Product Strategy Senior Manager
Virgin Money

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Customer self service once meant FAQs, but it has come a long way since then. Businesses are increasingly seeking to empower customer to self serve for more complex issues, and customers increasingly prefer self-service over getting in touch with the contact center. As customer expectations rise, self-service solutions can help brands to keep up without increasing contact center headcount. There are challenges around self-service technologies, however, such as hallucinations and security concerns.

In this session, we will explore the future of customer self-service, tackle the challenges associated with it and workshop solutions. We will examine the technologies that enable self-service, such as AI-powered chatbots, knowledge bases, data centralization and automated workflows and explain how to implement these seamlessly into your contact center and CX.

Attendees will learn:

• Identifying and overcoming the challenges of self-service: Learn about common pitfalls such as inaccurate automation, lack of personalization, and user frustration, and discover strategies to address these challenges effectively.
• Enhancing CX through self-service solutions: Explore the key benefits of customer self-service, including increased convenience, reduced wait times, and the ability to handle routine inquiries efficiently, while maintaining high-quality service.
• Integrating self-service with human support: Understand how to ensure a smooth transition between self-service and live support when needed, and how to design a system where self-service complements rather than replaces customer service agents.

The proliferation of AI in contact centers and customer serivce has changed agent experience forever. AI has enabled automation of simpler tasks for years now, but the recent developments in generative and agentic AI have led to increased use cases in the contact center, including improved, empathetic generative-AI-powered chatbots and autonomous AI agents that can carry out complex tasks from start to finish without human intervention.

With these newer tools, the skills required of contact center agents are shifting and new challenges in agent retention are cropping up. In this All Access virtual roundtable discussion, we will discuss the skills that agents in the contact center of 2025 need, and how to nurture and grow these and retain agents.

CX Network invites all attendees and network members to join this inclusive virtual roundtable discussion, where all participants will be encouraged to enable cameras and microphones.

We will discuss:

• What skills are becoming more critical for agents in an AI-augmented contact center—empathy, complex problem-solving, tech literacy, and beyond
• How training and upskilling programs can evolve to support agents in working alongside generative and autonomous AI
• Strategies to keep agents motivated, engaged, and retained in a landscape where their roles are rapidly changing