MaxContact Wins at the 2025 Megabuyte Emerging Stars Awards
We’re proud to announce that MaxContact has been named the Best Performing Company in Customer Relationship Management at the 2025 Megabuyte Emerging Stars Awards!
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A Significant Achievement
This recognition places us among an elite group of 50 Emerging Stars, selected from an initial pool of over 6,000 companies. With only 825 meeting the strict eligibility criteria in a challenging economic climate, this award reflects our team’s commitment to innovation and excellence.
“Despite experiencing some softness in sectors like energy and longer sales cycles in recent years, MaxContact has maintained c. 30% revenue growth, ahead of most other vendors in the contact centre software market. A key proponent of this is its conversational AI product strategy, with AI-enabled products featuring in 80%+ of deals.”
Moving Forward
This award validates our strategic direction and focus on delivering innovative solutions that address real customer needs. Our investment in conversational AI technology, Spokn AI, continues to drive our success and differentiate us in the market.
We remain committed to supporting our 100+ UK customers across BPO, communications, financial services, utilities, and retail sectors with solutions that enhance their customer engagement capabilities.
We’d like to thank our dedicated team, partners and valued customers for their ongoing support and confidence in MaxContact.
About Megabuyte
Megabuyte supports UK scale-up and mid-market software & ICT Services companies to develop robust growth strategies, understand their competitive landscape and customer sentiment, benchmark their financial performance and valuation, and identify and track M&A targets. They provide proprietary insights and data through their subscription research service, offer packaged consulting services, and give access to their network of some 500 tech sector CEOs through events and their expert network.
About the Emerging Stars Awards
The Emerging Stars awards are part of the Megabuyte100 award series which collectively celebrate the 100 best-performing technology companies in the UK. The awards identify the UK’s best-performing technology scale-ups as defined by Megabuyte’s proprietary Scorecard methodology, complemented by expert qualitative insights from their analysts. Evaluation criteria encompass factors such as size, growth, and margins, highlighting the top 50 best-performing scale-up companies in the UK.
Learn More
For further information about the 2025 Megabuyte Emerging Stars Awards and to see the complete list of winners, click here to access the full Megabuyte report.
Here’s to continued success and innovation throughout 2025!
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Are we at the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning? As far as Covid-19 is concerned, nobody seems entirely sure. The vaccination rollout promises an eventual release from lockdown, but scientists remain cagey about when everyday life might properly resume.
In the meantime, many of your sales and customer service staff are getting used to working from home. They may be there for a while yet, at least until a combination of the vaccine rollout and better summer weather allows for a cautious return to the office.
Even then, not every business will be forcing staff back into work full time. Social distancing rules are likely to remain in place for the foreseeable future, limiting the number of employees in the same space at the same time.
There’s also growing speculation that many companies will never return to pre-Covid work practices, and that some form of flexible working will become standard practice. A recent Call Centre Helper poll showed that just 7% of contact centres planned to return to the office as normal2, and ONS reported a 47% increase in demand for home working amongst call centre staff1. The data’s there to see, hybrid working, where employees spend some of the week in the office and some working from home, will become far more widespread once the pandemic ends.
The hybrid model of work
There are certainly benefits to it. According to research from Slack, most knowledge workers want a hybrid remote-office model in future. Hardly any want to return to the office full time. Those results are mirrored across sectors and industries, inferring that companies who want to attract the best talent may have to offer hybrid working as a benefit.
Even among businesses with large sales and customer service teams, the benefits of hybrid working may outweigh inevitable misgivings. Many businesses believe they can cut post-pandemic costs by reducing office estates and moving to smaller premises that only have to accommodate a proportion of a firm’s total workforce at any one time.
Put it all together, and it means remote working probably isn’t going anywhere, even after Covid. And even businesses that remain determined to return en masse to the office eventually have no real idea of when that time might be.
So, we’re trying to balance all of this, with changing consumer contact habits – increased adoption of new channels and differing contact patterns – as well as a globally reported increase in contact centre demand, with support firm ZenDesk seeing a steady 16 per cent increase in support contact requests above pre-pandemic levels3.
Productivity challenges
So instead of holding on to pre-pandemic processes, businesses might be better asking how they can adapt more effectively to the ‘normal’ of today while also preparing for whatever tomorrow might throw at them.
Or to put it simply, how do you equip your remote staff with the tools they need to work as productively away from the office as they can in it? How do you train and mentor your teams remotely? How do you continue to delight customers and drive sales when most of your team is working from home? When your workforce returns to a socially distanced office, or splits its time between the office and home, how do you maintain a consistent customer experience?
Businesses have been asking similar questions since last March, of course. But many now realise that the sticking-plaster solutions hastily implemented then are no longer enough, especially when it comes to customer contact. Communications platforms need to give employees the tools they need today, while future-proofing businesses for whatever next month, next year or even the next decade might bring.
Is cloud-first the answer?
It’s for that reason that businesses of all kinds are turning to cloud-based solutions. When your contact centre solution lives in the cloud, your agents can access it from anywhere, on any device, onboarding new starters and completing system training remotely is easier. And, with solutions like MaxContact, new features and functionality are consistently introduced as market trends and business needs change.
But there’s more to a future-proof solution than simply the convenience of cloud. It has to be highly reliable, flexible and secure, while giving you the data you need to measure performance and implement change.
MaxContact is cloud-native for that reason. You get the assurances with the combination of a fully equipped contact centre solution that fulfils all these requirements combined with a resilient uptime guarantee of 99.999% so dropouts and downtime won’t affect sales and customer service. Whilst real-time dashboards and custom reporting give managers full transparency over their teams’ efficiency, wherever they happen to be located.
reduction in training, the issue of training a workforce in the contact centre fast and easily remotely has been of major benefit
This valuable data can eventually be used to inform decision making around post-pandemic working models, giving a real insight into the benefits and challenges of remote working models based on your specific circumstances for every campaign and every call centre agent. This data becomes invaluable in a world were presenteeism in some form has been part of most of our everyday lives for the past 12 months.
Security concerns
Working from home has meant that the companies networks – that were once a secure perimeter – have expanded to every employee home and the plethora of devices they use. There’s now an increasing need to deploy communications solutions with network and data centre security baked in. But we go further. Granular permissions mean you can limit the data your home working teams have access to and remove restrictions at the click of a mouse on those days when they are working from the office.
In fact, MaxContact gives you that kind of agility throughout your contact centre operation. You can add and remove users in minutes, and equip new sites in just a couple of days. MaxContact lets you calculate your staffing requirements using statistical analysis so that, wherever your workforce is based, you always have the right staff with the right skills in place.
In other words, powerful contact centre solutions like MaxContact don’t just solve the temporary challenges of remote working. They equip your business for an uncertain future.
Use our powerful cloud platform to create an agile, secure and streamlined contact centre that not only adapts to the unpredictable challenges of the post-pandemic world.
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Staying ahead of the competition is no longer just about having a talented team and a great product. Outbound sales teams can’t rely on instinct alone. Today’s successful sales operations are built on a foundation of data-driven decisions, cutting-edge technology, and continuous improvement.
But what does it really mean to be “data-driven” in outbound sales?
MaxContact’s 2024 KPI Benchmarking Report provides valuable context for the state of outbound sales. With an average of 65.55 daily calls per agent and a mean success rate of 6.74%, it’s clear that volume alone doesn’t guarantee success. The question is: how can you use this type of data to drive meaningful improvements in your team’s performance?
Embrace Advanced Dialling Technology
One of the most impactful ways to make your outbound sales team more data-driven is by implementing advanced dialling technology. Predictive dialling solutions use real-time data to optimise call pacing, ensuring agents spend more time talking to prospects and less time waiting between calls.
Our benchmarking report reveals that top-performing teams handle between 31 and 60 calls per agent per day. By leveraging predictive dialling, you can help your team reach or exceed this benchmark efficiently. MaxContact’s ‘undroppable’ feature and ‘degrade to progressive’ setting use data to balance aggressive outreach with compliance requirements, addressing the industry-wide challenge of maintaining high contact rates while avoiding regulatory penalties.
Implement Intelligent Lead Prioritisation
Not all leads are created equal, and a truly data-driven team recognises this fact. The benchmark report shows that the average first-call close rate is 27.81%, with nearly 30% of teams achieving 20 to 29%. To improve these figures, move beyond simple “first in, first out” approaches to lead management.
Consider implementing custom data fetching and prioritisation tools that allow you to rank leads based on criteria such as potential deal size, recent interactions, or historical conversion rates. This approach ensures your team is always focusing on the most promising opportunities, significantly increasing the chances of success.
Match the Right Agent to the Right Lead
Data can play a crucial role in ensuring each lead is handled by the most suitable agent. MaxContact’s benchmark report indicates that the mean average revenue per call is £197.60, but nearly a quarter of teams generate much less, averaging £30 to £59 per call. This disparity suggests that proper lead-agent matching could significantly impact revenue.
Implementing a dialler with outbound skill-based routing that automatically matches leads with agents based on factors such as product knowledge, industry experience, or past performance with similar leads. This data-driven approach to call routing can dramatically improve conversion rates and average revenue per call.
Leverage Real-Time Analytics for Agile Decision Making
The world of sales is volatile, and simply waiting for end-of-day or weekly reports in this market just isn’t going to cut it. Empower your team leaders with real-time analytics dashboards that allow them to monitor performance as it happens and make immediate adjustments.
Real-time dashboards enable managers to spot trends or issues as they emerge, allowing for rapid response. This could mean reallocating resources, adjusting scripts, or providing on-the-spot coaching to underperforming agents. According to a study by McKinsey, companies that use customer analytics comprehensively report exceed their competition in terms of profit almost twice as often as companies that do not.
Utilise AI-Powered Speech Analytics for Deeper Insights
To truly understand what’s happening in your sales conversations, consider implementing AI-powered speech analytics. Tools like Spokn AI can analyse 100% of your customer interactions, providing insights that would be impossible to gather manually.
Speech analytics has emerged as a game-changing tool for outbound sales teams, transforming customer conversations into a goldmine of actionable insights. This technology analyses audio from customer calls, identifying key topics and detecting customer sentiment.
Key benefits for outbound sales teams include:
Enhanced Agent Training: Identify successful techniques and areas for improvement, allowing for targeted training programmes.
Customer Sentiment Analysis: Detect changes in tone and emotion, helping agents adapt their approach in real-time.
Quality Assurance at Scale: Analyse every call, ensuring comprehensive QA and quick identification of compliance issues.
Identifying Sales Opportunities: Recognise patterns in successful calls to refine sales scripts and strategies.
Competitor Intelligence: Flag mentions of competitors, providing valuable market insights.
Trend Identification: Quickly spot emerging trends in customer behaviour or common objections.
By implementing speech analytics, outbound sales teams can gain data-driven insights that lead to more effective strategies, improved customer experiences, and better business outcomes. Use these insights to identify common objections, spot successful sales techniques, and provide targeted coaching to your team. A recent study by Forrester found that companies using AI-driven speech analytics saw a 10% increase in customer satisfaction scores and a 15% improvement in first-call resolution rates.
With speech analytics, you’re not just collecting more data – you’re gaining the ability to understand and act on the nuances of every customer interaction, transforming your outbound sales operation into a truly data-driven powerhouse.
Foster a Culture of Continuous, Data-Driven Improvement
Creating a data-driven outbound sales team goes beyond implementing new technologies—it’s about fostering a culture where data informs every decision. This shift requires a multi-faceted approach that engages every level of your organisation.
Set clear, data-backed goals using industry benchmarks and your historical data. Aim to exceed average performance metrics, such as the 6.74% success per call rate revealed in our benchmark report. Make these goals visible and track progress regularly, ensuring everyone understands how their efforts contribute to team objectives.
Invest in data literacy across your team. Provide training programmes that help staff understand and interpret key metrics. This empowers them to make data-driven decisions in their daily work, whether it’s analysing call data or interpreting conversion rates.
Implement regular data review meetings. Use this time to discuss trends, celebrate successes, and collaboratively identify areas for improvement. Encourage team members to share insights they’ve gained from their own data analysis, fostering a culture of shared learning.
Use data to personalise coaching and development plans for each agent. This tailored approach not only leads to more effective improvements but also demonstrates the practical value of data in personal growth and career progression.
The Path to Data-Driven Success
Transforming your outbound sales team into a data-driven powerhouse is a journey, not a destination. It requires a commitment to continuous improvement, investment in the right tools, and a willingness to let data challenge assumptions and drive decision-making.
Implementing these strategies and leveraging advanced solutions can unlock the full potential of your outbound sales team. You’ll be able to optimise processes in real-time, provide more personalised experiences to prospects, and continuously refine your strategies based on concrete insights.
Remember, the goal isn’t just to collect data – it’s to use that data to drive meaningful improvements in performance, efficiency, and ultimately, sales success. With the right approach and tools, you can not only meet but exceed the benchmarks set by top-performing teams in the industry.
Are you ready to take your outbound sales to the next level? Get in touch with the team today and explore how MaxContact can help your sales become truly data-driven.
Blog
5 min read
2025 Contact Centre Trends: A Year In Review
Let's look back at what we predicted for 2025 and how it measured up against reality.
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As we close out 2025, it's time to reflect on the predictions we made at the start of the year and examine how the contact centre industry actually evolved. While some trends played out largely as anticipated, others took different paths, and the year brought valuable lessons about the pace of technological adoption and the realities of AI implementation.
Let's look back at what we predicted for 2025 and how it measured up against reality.
AI Enters the Value Creation Phase: Prediction Validated
We predicted that 2025 would be the year AI moved from deployment to proving its worth, with organisations becoming more pragmatic about ROI and accepting realistic efficiency gains of around 25% rather than the marketed 70-80%. This proved to be one of our most accurate predictions.
The shift happened – and not just among buyers. AI vendors themselves fundamentally changed their positioning throughout the year, moving away from revolutionary promises toward demonstrable value delivery. The industry experienced a collective reality check, with both clients and vendors acknowledging that AI's current capabilities, while valuable, require focused implementation and realistic expectations.
The buyer sophistication we anticipated materialised as predicted. Organisations approached AI investments with the same caution they learned from the early SaaS era, demanding proof of value before committing resources. This pragmatic approach has actually accelerated successful implementations, as companies focused on achievable wins rather than transformational moonshots.
The adoption patterns we're seeing reflect this pragmatic approach. Our recent benchmark data shows that chatbots (57%), virtual or AI agents (56%), and fraud detection (46%) lead AI adoption – a mix of customer-facing and operational applications that demonstrates organisations are deploying AI across diverse use cases rather than betting everything on a single transformational solution.
This diversified approach demonstrates that organisations have learned a crucial lesson: AI value comes from multiple focused applications working together, not from a single revolutionary solution. Rather than seeking the one AI tool to transform everything, successful contact centres are building an ecosystem of AI capabilities, each solving specific problems and delivering measurable returns.
Looking to 2026, this value-focused approach will intensify. The stakes have never been higher for demonstrating real return on AI investment.
Agent Role Evolution: Still a Work in Progress
Our prediction about enhanced focus on emotional intelligence and complex problem-solving, driven by agents juggling 5-10 applications, proved partially accurate – but the evolution happened more slowly than anticipated.
The fundamental problem we identified, cognitive load from application switching, still exists. When agents need to hunt for information across multiple systems, that friction hasn't been solved at scale. However, there's a crucial development: vendors are now actively prioritising this challenge for the next 12-18 months in a way they weren't before.
The reality is that other AI use cases – digital deflection and efficiency improvements – showed faster, more measurable results and therefore attracted more immediate attention. Agent-focused solutions, which require more complex integrations and change management, naturally took longer to implement.
What's changed is the industry's recognition that solving the agent experience is the next frontier. The easy wins have been captured; now the focus is shifting to the harder problem of reducing cognitive load and empowering agents to focus on high-value interactions. The agent role evolution we predicted is happening – it's just unfolding across a longer timeline than a single year.
Personalisation Meets Privacy: Not Yet
This was one of our predictions that didn't materialise as expected. We highlighted that while 76% of consumers say personalised communications are a key factor in considering a brand, 80% are concerned about how their data is being used – a tension we believed would define how contact centres approached personalisation in 2025. In reality, this particular dynamic didn't become the defining issue we thought it would.
Personalisation absolutely grew, but not in the data-driven, privacy-challenging ways we envisioned. Instead, we saw incremental improvements that enhanced customer experience without crossing privacy boundaries. Conversational IVR systems that recognise customers and speak naturally. Auto-summarisation that gives agents context about previous interactions. Proactive outreach based on known customer journeys.
These are all forms of "respectful personalisation" – but the anticipated tension with privacy regulations didn't materialise because those regulations themselves haven't fully arrived yet. The comprehensive AI-specific data protection frameworks we expected are still pending, creating a situation that's both liberating and potentially dangerous.
The privacy conversation is coming – regulation always lags behind technology. But 2025 taught us that personalisation can advance through improvements in how we interact with customers, not just through deeper data mining. The human touch in personalisation is key, making interactions feel more conversational and contextual.
Economic Pressures Drive Innovation: Absolutely Accurate
This prediction proved devastatingly accurate. The economic pressures we highlighted – minimum wage increases to £12.21 per hour and National Insurance changes – drove exactly the responses we anticipated, and then some.
The most significant development was the dramatic acceleration of offshoring. Organisations didn't just explore offshore and nearshore options; many made wholesale moves, relocating entire operations because even with 20-30% AI-driven productivity improvements, the cost savings of offshore operations (often halving expenses) proved more immediately impactful.
This created an interesting dynamic: AI and offshoring aren't competing strategies, they're complementary ones. Organisations are doing both. The combination delivers the cost reductions that economic pressures demand, while AI provides the efficiency gains needed to maintain service quality in distributed operations.
For UK-based contact centres, this created an urgent imperative: AI implementation is no longer optional for competing at scale. The economics are stark – without AI-driven efficiency improvements, domestic operations struggle to justify their cost premium against offshore alternatives.
The year also validated our prediction about investment focusing on technology with clear cost benefits. Organisations moved past experimentation to demand concrete ROI demonstrations before committing to new platforms. First-contact resolution gained renewed focusas a direct cost-reduction strategy, and workforce management sophistication increased as organisations sought to maximise resource efficiency.
Economic pressure didn't just drive innovation – it fundamentally reshaped operational strategies across the industry.
Hybrid Working 2.0: Matured and Settled
Our prediction about hybrid working evolving beyond basic remote capabilities proved largely accurate. With over 60% of contact centres incorporating home working [Source: MaxContact 2024 KPI Benchmarking Report], 2025 was the year hybrid models matured from experimentation to established practice.
The persistent challenges we identified – training, culture, team cohesion, and the 10% higher attrition in remote teams – didn't disappear, but organisations developed more sophisticated approaches to managing them. The industry moved from asking "does hybrid work?" to "how do we make hybrid work better?"
That said, the journey isn't complete. Hybrid working remains an ongoing optimisation challenge rather than a solved problem. Organisations continue refining their approaches to onboarding, knowledge management, and cultural cohesion in distributed environments. The difference is that these are now recognised as manageable challenges within an accepted working model, rather than existential questions about hybrid working's viability.
What 2025 demonstrated is that hybrid working in contact centres has settled into a mature, sustainable model. It's not perfect, and it requires ongoing attention, but it's no longer experimental. Organisations know what works, what doesn't, and what trade-offs they're making.
We predicted 2025 would see contact centres move beyond scratching the surface toward sophisticated analytics and better cross-channel insights. What actually happened was more nuanced: awareness arrived, but implementation is still catching up.
The year's defining lesson about data came from AI implementations: data quality and integration determine success or failure. Organisations attempting AI projects quickly discovered that siloed, fragmented data blocks effective AI deployment. This painful lesson elevated data strategy from a nice-to-have to a fundamental requirement.
As a result, conversations about new technology implementations now start with data. Where is it? How timely is it? How well integrated across systems? This represents genuine progress – the industry now understands that data foundations must come before AI applications.
However, understanding the problem and solving it are different challenges. Data consolidation and integration remain complex, expensive projects that don't happen overnight. Many organisations spent 2025 realising the depth of their data challenges rather than solving them.
Interestingly, we also learned that AI tools themselves are creating more data. Speech analytics transcribing 100% of calls, conversation analytics tracking interaction quality, AI agents generating workflow data – the volume of available information is exploding. The new challenge isn't just integrating existing data sources, but making the tsunami of new data accessible and actionable for frontline decision-makers.
The data-driven future we predicted is coming, but 2025 was the year of recognition rather than transformation. The real work lies ahead in 2026.
Regulatory Compliance and Security: The Waiting Game
Our prediction about new AI-specific regulations joining existing frameworks like Consumer Duty didn't materialise in 2025 – though the reality is more nuanced than a simple absence of regulation.
While dedicated AI legislation hasn't arrived, existing regulatory frameworks continue to apply robustly to AI implementations. The FCA'stechnology-agnostic, outcomes-focused approach means that contact centres using AI remain fully accountable under Consumer Duty requirements – including obligations to act in good faith, avoid foreseeable harm, and deliver good outcomes for customers. This principles-based approach has proven flexible enough to address AI-related risks without requiring entirely new regulatory structures.
What we're seeing is that leading organisations aren't waiting for AI-specific regulations to establish best practices. Forward-thinking contact centres and vendors are proactively embedding responsible AI principles into their implementations – focusing on data protection, algorithmic transparency, fairness, and customer consent. These organisations recognise that existing regulatory requirements around consumer protection, operational resilience, and data governance already provide a comprehensive framework for responsible AI deployment.
This proactive approach positions organisations well regardless of future regulatory developments. By building AI systems that align with existing regulatory principles and industry best practices, they're creating implementations that are inherently compliance-ready. When AI-specific guidance does arrive – and regulators continue to monitor the space closely – organisations that have already embedded responsible practices will adapt seamlessly rather than facing disruptive retrofitting.
Security incidents throughout the year kept data protection at board-level attention, reinforcing the importance of robust governance around AI implementations. The industry's focus on operational resilience, secure outsourcing arrangements, and clear accountability structures demonstrates mature risk management even in the absence of AI-specific mandates.
The regulatory landscape for 2026 remains one to watch closely. While comprehensive AI-specific frameworks may still be developing, the application of existing regulations to AI use cases continues to evolve through regulatory guidance and industry practice. Organisations taking a principles-based, outcomes-focused approach to AI implementation – prioritising customer outcomes, transparency, and accountability – are positioning themselves as industry leaders in responsible innovation.
Looking Back: What We Learned
Perhaps the most important insight from 2025 is that AI is delivering real value, but in focused applications rather than wholesale revolution. Hybrid working has matured into standard practice, but the human challenges persist. Economic pressures accelerated strategic shifts that might have taken years in different circumstances.
The year validated our core message from the start of 2025: success comes from realistic expectations, focused implementations, and keeping sight of what matters – delivering excellent customer service in sustainable ways for both businesses and employees.
What surprised us least was how little surprised us. As an industry voice advocating for realistic AI expectations while others promised transformation, we saw our predictions largely validated. The technology evolution we anticipated happened; it just happened at the measured pace we expected rather than the revolutionary speed others marketed.
2025 Trends in Brief: What Actually Happened
AI Value Creation: Vendors and clients shifted focus to ROI and measurable value delivery. Chatbots (57%), virtual/AI agents (56%), and fraud detection (46%) lead AI adoption, with organisations taking a diversified approach rather than betting on single transformational solutions.
Agent Role Evolution: The cognitive load problem persists, but vendors are now prioritising agent experience as the next frontier after capturing easier AI wins in digital deflection.
Personalisation vs Privacy: Personalisation grew through conversational IVR, auto-summarisation, and proactive outreach, but the anticipated privacy tensions didn't materialise as AI-specific regulations remain pending.
Economic Pressures: Offshoring accelerateddramatically as the combination of minimum wage increases and National Insurance changes made offshore operations (often halving costs) more impactful than AI's 20-30% efficiency gains alone.
Hybrid Working: Matured from experimentation to established practice, with over 60% of contact centres incorporating home working and developing sophisticated approaches to managing persistent challenges.
Data-Driven Operations: Awareness arrived as AI implementations proved that data quality determines success or failure, but many organisations spent the year realising the depth of their data challenges rather than solving them.
Regulatory Landscape: AI-specific regulations didn't materialise, but existing frameworks like Consumer Duty continue to apply robustly. Leading organisations are proactively embedding responsible AI principles aligned with existing regulatory requirements.
As we move into 2026, these lessons will guide the next phase of contact centre evolution. The industry has learned to balance innovation with pragmatism, efficiency with experience, and automation with human expertise. The challenges ahead are significant, but 2025 proved the sector's ability to adapt thoughtfully rather than reactively – and that may be the most important trend of all.
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5 min read
How to Remove Guesswork from Contact Strategies with Conversation Analytics
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Contact centres are under pressure. Rising costs, increased competition, and shifting customer expectations mean teams are being asked to do more with less. The challenge? Making decisions based on incomplete data or small samples that don't represent the full picture.
In our recent webinar, we explored how conversation analytics helps contact centres move beyond guesswork and make data-driven decisions that improve performance, reduce costs, and deliver better customer experiences.
Four Forces Reshaping Contact Strategies
Contact centres face a perfect storm of challenges:
Rising costs and increasing competition The barrier to entry has lowered across most sectors, meaning competition can move with agility and quickly challenge established players. Every interaction is getting more expensive, whilst high attrition rates mean teams are working harder just to stand still.
Stagnating effectiveness Sales conversions and first call resolutions are trending downwards for many businesses. Conversations are becoming more complex and harder to resolve on the first attempt.
Growing commercial risk of poor CX Customers switch providers faster when service falls short. There's no loyalty in those first few minutes of an interaction. Many organisations struggle to route customers accurately, creating inconsistency and avoidable friction for both consumers and agents.
Shifting consumer behaviour AI call screening, digital buying journeys, and social search are making people harder to reach and changing where and how they want to engage with organisations.
t's not just one challenge – it's the combination of these forces that means traditional contact strategies need to evolve.
52% of contact centres report increased agent workloads this year – a 10-point rise since last year
Average agent churn rate sits at 31% – a costly cycle of recruitment and retraining
Agents are handling more conversations with more complexity and pressure than before
This level of attrition creates both financial costs and operational challenges, impacting team performance and customer experience.
The Sampling Problem
Many contact centres still rely on sampling to understand what's happening in their conversations. The traditional approach might involve listening to 2-3 calls per agent per month – a tiny fraction of overall activity.
When you're handling thousands or tens of thousands of conversations, sampling simply doesn't give you the full picture. You might miss critical trends, coaching opportunities, or compliance issues that only become visible when you analyse conversations at scale.
How Conversation Analytics Works
MaxContact's conversation analytics platform uses AI to analyse 100% of your conversations, not just a sample. Here's what that makes possible:
AI-powered call summaries Every conversation is automatically summarised, capturing key points, outcomes, and next steps. This saves hours of manual note-taking and makes it easy to understand what happened on any call at a glance.
Sentiment analysis Track customer and agent sentiment throughout conversations. Identify where interactions go well and where frustration builds, helping you understand the emotional journey of your customers.
Objection tracking Automatically identify common objections across all conversations. See which objections come up most frequently, how often they're successfully handled, and spot patterns that point to process improvements or product issues.
Custom saved views Create filtered views that surface the conversations that matter most to your team. Whether you're looking for calls with specific outcomes, objections, sentiment patterns, or compliance markers, saved views let you quickly find what you need without manually searching through thousands of recordings.
AI assistant prompts Ask questions of your conversation data in natural language. For example, "Show me calls where customers mentioned pricing concerns" or "Find conversations where agents successfully overcame objections." The AI assistant helps you explore your data and uncover insights without needing technical skills.
Real-World Use Cases
Coaching and development Identify specific coaching opportunities by finding conversations where agents struggle with particular objections or where sentiment deteriorates. Move from generic training to targeted coaching based on actual performance data.
Process improvements When you see patterns across hundreds of conversations – repeated objections, common confusion points, or friction in specific processes – you have clear evidence to drive process changes and improvements.
Compliance monitoring Analyse 100% of calls for compliance markers, not just a small sample. Identify potential issues quickly and address them before they become serious problems.
Understanding what drives success Compare conversations that result in positive outcomes with those that don't. What do successful agents do differently? What patterns emerge in conversations that lead to sales, resolved issues, or satisfied customers?
From Reactive to Proactive
The shift from sampling to comprehensive analysis changes how contact centres operate. Instead of reacting to issues after they've escalated or basing decisions on limited data, conversation analytics gives you:
Complete visibility into what's happening across all conversations
Early warning signals when trends start to emerge
Evidence-based decisions supported by comprehensive data
Measurable improvements that you can track over time
Getting Started with Conversation Analytics
Implementation includes working with MaxContact's product team to define success criteria and create custom views that align with your specific goals. Many organisations start with core use cases – coaching, compliance, objection handling – and then expand as they see the value and discover new applications for the platform.
The platform includes templates to get started quickly, but the real power comes from tailoring the analysis to your specific needs and challenges.
The Bottom Line
Contact centres can't afford to make decisions based on guesswork or small samples. When you're handling thousands of conversations, you need to understand what's happening at scale.
Conversation analytics removes the guesswork, giving you the insights you need to improve coaching, enhance processes, ensure compliance, and ultimately deliver better outcomes for both your team and your customers.
The 2025 UK Budget brings a series of labour-market, tax and business-rate shifts that directly affect contact centres - a sector powered by people and tight margins. Rising wage floors, frozen employer NIC thresholds, and new skills programmes will reshape workforce planning. Meanwhile, changes to business rates and investment incentives could reduce cost pressures for some operators.
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Budget 2025 - What Contact Centres Need to Know
The 2025 UK Budget brings a series of labour-market, tax and business-rate shifts that directly affect contact centres - a sector powered by people and tight margins. Rising wage floors, frozen employer NIC thresholds, and new skills programmes will reshape workforce planning.
Meanwhile, changes to business rates and investment incentives could reduce cost pressures for some operators.
For contact centres, the challenge is clear: absorb higher employment costs while accelerating efficiency, automation and employee development.
MaxContact’s view? This Budget reinforces what we already know - the most resilient contact centres will be those that invest in workforce experience, smarter technology, and data-led decision-making.
What the Budget Means for Contact Centres
If contact centres feel like they’re being asked to do more with less, Budget 2025 cements that reality. While many measures aim to ‘make work pay’, several place direct cost pressure on people-intensive industries - including ours. But with the right technology and operating model, these shifts can be turned into opportunities.
1. Wage Costs Are Rising - Again
From 1 April 2026, the National Living Wage (NLW) increases 4.1% to £12.71/hour (Budget clause - 4.22).
Minimum wage bands for younger workers rise even faster.
For contact centres - where large portions of the frontline workforce sit on or near the NLW - this is the single biggest cost impact.
What this means
Expect a higher annual wage bill, particularly for large multi-site operations.
Increased wage competition could make talent attraction harder.
Inefficient processes will become more expensive every year.
What to do
Use workforce optimisation and automation to reduce low-value tasks.
Improve agent experience to protect retention (reducing recruitment cost spikes).
Reforecast now - 2026 isn’t far away in budgeting terms.
2. Employer NIC Freeze = Higher Costs Hidden in Plain Sight
One detail in this year’s Budget that doesn’t make headlines - but really matters - is the freeze on the Employer National Insurance threshold until 2031 (Budget clause - 4.112)
Here’s what that means in simple terms:
The point at which employers start paying NIC for their staff will not increase for six years.
But wages will increase - especially with the higher National Living Wage coming in 2026.
So even though the NIC rate isn’t changing, employers will still pay more NIC each year as more of each salary is pushed above the frozen threshold.
For people-intensive sectors like contact centres, that’s a direct and unavoidable cost increase built into the system.
When labour costs rise automatically every year, efficiency becomes mission-critical.
Small improvements in forecasting, scheduling, and automation can deliver real financial impact at scale.
This is exactly where modern WFM, AI-assisted routing, and intelligent automation help organisations stay ahead of cost pressure.
3. Youth Guarantee Could Ease Recruitment Challenges
Government funding includes £1.5bn for skills and employment support, including paid six-month placements for 18–21-year-olds (Budget clause - 4.23–4.24 ).
Why it matters:
Contact centres can tap into subsidised entry-level talent.
It may become a strong pipeline for customer-facing roles with the right development pathways.
Build apprenticeship and early-careers programmes aligned to these schemes.
4. Business Rates Reset in 2026
Business rates multipliers drop in 2026-27 due to evaluation (Budget clause - 4.26 ). Transitional Relief and new multipliers offer further support.
For operators in office estates, this may bring modest cost relief - though location-specific impacts vary.
Review your estate profile. Many centres could achieve meaningful savings with the right appeals or optimisation.
5. Salary Sacrifice Tightening (from 2029)
NIC relief on pension-related salary sacrifice will be capped at £2,000 per year (Budget clause - 4.120).
For contact centres offering enhanced pension schemes, this could erode part of their employee-value proposition or increase employer costs.
6. Compliance and Employment Rights Focus Will Intensify
The Budget funds a new Fair Work Agency team targeting illegal working and employment-rights breaches from April 2026 (Budget clause - 4.103).
This signals tougher scrutiny on employment practices and contractor models common in outsourced service environments.
Ensure scheduling accuracy, break compliance and HR documentation are watertight - technology can remove risk here.
Key Takeaways
1. Cost pressures will rise - but predictable pressures are manageable.
Wage floors and frozen NIC thresholds mean labour cost inflation is here to stay. Smart forecasting, WFM, and automation will be essential.
2. Talent pipelines are evolving - seize the opportunity.
Government-backed youth placements and skills funding offer a low-cost hiring route if built into recruitment strategies early.
3. Compliance is tightening - operational visibility matters.
Clear audit trails, documented processes and accurate time-tracking will pay dividends as enforcement grows.
4. Estate costs may fall - review your footprint.
Business rates changes could offer relief for some operators, but only with proactive assessment.
