The Contact Rate Crisis: How Manual Debt Collection Is Costing More Than You Think
The challenge is clear: Debt collection operations face a growing dilemma. Customer debt levels are at record highs, yet traditional collection methods are becoming less effective and more expensive.
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The debt collection landscape has shifted dramatically. UK household debt reached approximately £2 trillion in the first half of 2024, creating unprecedented demand for collection services. Yet traditional recovery approaches are struggling to keep pace with this growing challenge.
For operational leaders, this presents a fundamental challenge: how do you scale debt recovery operations without proportionally scaling costs, especially when traditional methods are hitting efficiency limits?
The Reality of Manual Collection Operations
Walk into any traditional debt collection contact centre and you’ll see the same pattern. Agents spend their days making call after call, often with little to show for it. Industry benchmarking data from UK debt collection professionals shows that the average Right Person Connect (RPC) rate is just 26%, meaning nearly three-quarters of calls don’t reach the intended person.
This creates a cascade of inefficiencies. Agents make dozens of calls to reach a handful of people, many of whom aren’t the right person or available to have a meaningful conversation. Industry research reveals that call centre agents spend 30% of their working day on unsuccessful call attempts. The result? Teams burning through time and resources on activities that don’t drive results.
The human cost is significant too. Debt collection has some of the highest turnover rates in the contact centre industry, with many agencies reporting rates between 75% and 100%. It’s not hard to see why – repetitive dialling, difficult conversations, and constant pressure to hit targets in an inefficient system take their toll.
Why Traditional Approaches Are Struggling
Several factors are making manual collection methods increasingly challenging:
Customer expectations have evolved. People want to engage on their terms, through their preferred channels, at times that work for them. Traditional collection approaches – primarily phone calls during business hours – don’t align with how people want to communicate today.
The nature of debt has changed. UK households are under increasing financial pressure, with 44% of adults living in financially vulnerable circumstances – a 16% increase since 2022. Recent research shows that 13% of UK adults (equivalent to 6.8 million people) are struggling to meet day-to-day costs, making debt recovery conversations more sensitive and complex.
Regulatory complexity is increasing. The Financial Conduct Authority’s Consumer Duty has heightened focus on customer outcomes, requiring collection practices to demonstrate genuine customer benefit rather than just compliance. When two-thirds of UK adults who have interacted with a debt collector describe the experience as “stressful,” it’s clear the industry needs to evolve its approach.
The Hidden Costs Add Up Quickly
When collection operations rely heavily on manual processes, costs accumulate in ways that aren’t always immediately visible:
Training becomes a constant expense. High turnover means continuous hiring and training cycles. New agents need weeks to become productive, during which they’re generating costs rather than recoveries.
Productivity plateaus. There’s a natural limit to how many meaningful conversations an agent can have in a day when they’re spending most of their time on unproductive activities like leaving voicemails or speaking to wrong numbers.
Opportunity costs mount. When teams focus on high-volume, low-value tasks, there’s no capacity for the strategic work that drives better outcomes, like developing payment plans, understanding customer circumstances, or building relationships that lead to long-term resolutions.
Customer relationships suffer. Poor experiences during collection attempts can damage relationships, making future recovery efforts even more difficult and reducing the likelihood of successful resolution.
What Leading Operations Are Doing Differently
Forward-thinking collection operations are recognising that the traditional model needs to evolve. They’re finding ways to be more efficient while maintaining the human touch that effective debt collection requires.
The most successful approaches share common characteristics: they meet customers where they are, use technology to handle routine tasks, and free up human agents to focus on complex situations that require personal attention and problem-solving skills.
Leading operations are proving that dramatic efficiency improvements are achievable through smarter technology adoption. The UK debt collection market, valued at £2.0 billion in 2024 with 13.26% growth from 2023, demonstrates there’s significant opportunity for those willing to innovate.
Technology as an Enabler, Not a Replacement
The solution isn’t about replacing human agents with robots. It’s about creating a smarter division of labour where technology handles what it does well – routine tasks, initial contact, basic information gathering – while humans focus on what they do best: building relationships, solving complex problems, and providing empathy in difficult situations.
Digital voice agents can operate around the clock, meeting customers when they’re available rather than when your contact centre is open. They can handle payment reminders, frequently asked questions, and initial contact attempts, identifying which situations need human intervention and which can be resolved automatically.
This approach addresses both sides of the challenge: it improves efficiency and reduces costs while creating better experiences for customers. Industry data shows that one in five UK customers prefer to set up a payment plan, and most choose monthly repayments when given the option through digital channels.
The Path Forward
The debt collection industry is at a crossroads. Operations that cling to outdated methods will find themselves struggling with rising costs and declining effectiveness. Those that embrace smarter approaches, using technology to enhance rather than replace human capabilities, will thrive.
The goal isn’t to eliminate the human element from debt collection. It’s to ensure that human interaction happens where it adds the most value: in complex negotiations, empathetic conversations with people facing genuine hardship, and situations that require creative problem-solving.
By automating routine tasks and improving initial contact rates, operations can focus their human resources on the conversations that truly matter. This leads to better outcomes for everyone: more recovered debt for creditors, more manageable payment solutions for customers, and more meaningful work for collection agents.
The question isn’t whether debt collection will evolve, it’s whether your operation will be leading that evolution or struggling to catch up.
Ready to see how AI agents can transform your collections operation? Let’s talk about your specific challenges and explore how MaxContact’s digital voice agents can help you recover more debt while keeping overheads controlled.
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How does your contact centre support potentially vulnerable customers?
As agents speak with countless people daily, while trying to meet targets and other responsibilities, sometimes it can be tough to give each customer the time and sensitivity they deserve.
However, there has been an increasing number of vulnerable adults, in part due to the cost-of-living crisis and the pandemic. MaxContact commissioned research on 1,000 customers who identified as vulnerable across the country to find out more about their needs and how contact centre staff could better support them.
In this webinar session, MaxContact’s Sean McIver speaks with Sandra Thompson, Goleman Emotional Intelligence coach in the UK and Founder of Ei Evolution, and Helen Lord, CEO and Founder of the Vulnerability Registration Service (VRS), to explore how contact centres can support vulnerable customers.
Keep reading for the top takeaways from our discussion or tune in to the full video.
Identifying vulnerable customers
How do we define a vulnerable person?
Unfortunately, there is no one single answer to this. Vulnerability comes in all different shapes and sizes. It could relate to financial vulnerability, recent job loss, age or disability-related issues, mental illness, or bereavement. Any of these things can affect how people make decisions and how much support they need.
When handling sensitive topics in calls, it’s so important that first line staff have some training in how to best respond to and support customers going through tough times.
As Helen explains, there’s greater recognition of the different aspects of vulnerability these days – especially following the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis we currently face. People are generally more open about things like financial hardship and mental health, which is a positive step.
However, there’s still a long way to go in Helen’s opinion. There is currently a lot of talk and not enough action.
How businesses have responded to an increase in vulnerable customers
Sandra says that when leaders and staff have a better understanding of compassion and empathy, they can help to keep customers calm and resolve their problems more effectively. Part of that includes being proactive in giving out information so that customers feel like they have more control over their own situation.
Many organisations are realising this and are doing what they can to train their staff in this way. However, there are still plenty of organisations that don’t do this. As a result, contact centre staff often suffer from burnout, and customers are left feeling like the agents don’t understand them.
This leads to greater tension between the organisation and the customer, which means that issues take longer to resolve.
There are two stages of handling customer vulnerability. The first is to identify it, and the second is to think about how we can accommodate it in customer interactions.
As Helen says, dealing with vulnerability comes down to good customer service first and foremost.
Beyond that, organisations need to rethink how they map customer journeys because not all customers will experience things the same way.
For example, those experiencing mental health issues or people who are victims of economic abuse will have an entirely different experience. That’s why it’s important to consider all the different types of customer journeys.
While you may not be able to map out each individual one, understanding that everyone experiences things differently and taking things on a case-by-case basis will help agents support each customer individually.
The key to this is emotional intelligence. When agents have greater emotional intelligence, it makes them more empathetic and understanding of each customer’s journey. It also helps to keep agents themselves calm when dealing with emotionally difficult calls with customers.
Three things organisations can do to provide a better service
1 . Create content to support customers
Sandra says that if you have a good understanding of your customers and their needs, you should create content such as videos that help to build that emotional connection.
Videos with useful advice can help customers feel empowered to tackle their own challenges. This can also reduce the number of customer calls.
2 . Ensure you have the right statistics
This means, for example, having a way to see if a customer has called multiple times and keeps getting cut off. If people are discussing emotional issues on a call and they get cut off, it can increase mental stress.
Having that data keeps agents informed and ready to help customers right away.
3 . Try something counterintuitive
While many call centres have targets on call handling times, Sandra has a method that might seem a little counterintuitive.
Instead of trying to speed up the call, simply say “take your time.” When customers are stressed and are scrambling to remember a password, for example, saying “take your time” helps to keep them calm.
Once they’re calm, they’re more likely to remember a password, and you can resolve the issues much faster. While it might seem like this phrase would increase call time, you might find it does the opposite.
Protect contact centre staff
Dealing with difficult situations and emotions can take its toll on your agents as well. That’s why it’s so important to think about their wellbeing and mental health as well.
Helen suggests doing what you can to avoid a blame culture. By focusing so much on call times and targets, you just add more stress to the situation. Agents might feel rushed when dealing with sensitive issues, and this can affect customer service.
Another way you can protect contact centre staff is to ensure they have adequate training to deal with difficult calls. If agents don’t feel prepared, this can increase stress, and that affects the customer’s experience as well. Good training is a win-win for all.
Sandra shares some more ideas about how you can improve the training side of things.
1 . Don’t forget to check in on your remote staff
It’s important in today’s world to make sure you’re checking in on your remote staff. You can try out tools such as TeamMood, which staff can use to share feedback and let you know if they’re feeling low or stressed.
Remember, people won’t usually come to tell you this themselves, but a tool can prompt them.
2 . Check-in on team meetings
Before diving into your meeting agenda, have a quick check-in with everyone. Ask how they are and if they give vague answers, dig in further and ask more specific questions.
Sandra suggests, “what’s the top thing you feel amazing about?” Specific questions can help you understand your staff more easily and spot when something is wrong.
3 . Invite people to develop their understanding of emotional intelligence
Emotional intelligence is essential when handling difficult calls and emotional situations. Sandra suggests encouraging your agents to learn more about what it is and how you can improve it via online articles and videos.
Improve outgoing communication
Incoming communication from customer calls is one thing to think about, but we can also improve any outbound communications as well.
Sandra has three ideas you can try out:
1 . Prepare your customer for calls they’re due to receive
A quick email to let them know to expect a call over the next few days or a check-in can help to prepare customers. That way, they’re not suddenly dealing with a call and trying to figure out their account details. This can just increase stress, so a simple heads-up can go a long way.
2 . Make sure you’re tuned in to responses
Hearing and listening are two different things. When you make those outbound calls, are you really hearing the response the customer is giving? What words are they using? What behaviours are they showing when they receive calls?
3 . Empower agents
What degree of risk is there for agents who go above and beyond to help individual customers? Are agents empowered to resolve customer issues without passing them on to another member of staff?
By empowering agents to really help customers, they can feel good about their work and your customers will also get the care they need quickly.
By increasing openness and understanding – while improving staff training, contact centres can better support their customers.
To learn more about customer vulnerability and what call centres can do to improve their approach to it, tune in to the full webinar.
5 min read
Improving Wellbeing & Engagement in Your Contact Centre
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In the era of The Great Resignation, staff wellbeing and engagement is certainly a hot topic right now.
Many employees are leaving due to feeling burnt out, unsupported, or undervalued in their roles. In fact, our research shows that 72% of workers said they were burnt out, and 52% said there had been an increase in workload since the beginning of the pandemic.
In the contact centre world, 64% of people reported that they were losing between three to four hours of work each month due to poor work-related mental wellbeing.
And this could have a huge effect on the wider business!
To talk about how leaders can improve wellbeing and company culture, we invited Natalie Calvert, CX+EX Coach & Expert, and Sean McIver, Product Owner at MaxContact, to a recent webinar.
You can watch the webinar in full below or keep reading for the key takeaways.
Why leaders should prioritise employee wellness
On a human level, prioritising wellness and checking in with employees is always a sign of good leadership. But the benefits go beyond that.
Research shows that good company culture increases customer experience by upwards of 75%. So it’s no wonder that 70% of executives say it’s their number one priority.
There’s a clear key link between company culture and employee wellbeing, customer satisfaction, and business performance.
The customer contact industry has always had a high staff turnover, but this has increased significantly during the pandemic and The Great Resignation.
Studies show that employees are feeling burnt out and stressed which is causing them to leave en-mass.
Increased employee turnover can hurt businesses in many ways, including the bottom line. On average, it costs between £3,000 to £5,000 to recruit new staff and around 20,000 hours of training to get them up to speed.
It’s no surprise that leaders want to avoid a revolving door of staff, so they can spend that time and money on growing the business. But for this to happen, the company needs to prioritise employee wellbeing and culture.
How to reduce stress for contact centre workers
Any job surrounding customer care, queries, or complaints can come with some stress attached.
Angry customers are feeling the strain of a cost-of-living crisis, life post-pandemic, and the challenges of an increasingly remote world thrown into the mix.
But what can leaders do to protect their contact centre workers? As Natalie explained, we’re creating some of our own stress in a way.
A few years back, workers needed an entirely different skill set than they need today. The world has changed so much, so fast, and contact centre workers have to deal with increasingly complex issues, more demanding customers, and a whole range of other issues that many workplaces aren’t prepared for.
She believes that we really need to reskill our people, leaders especially, to match the needs and expectations of the modern world. If we don’t ensure our frontline staff have the right skills, we can expect high burnout and low staff retention rates.
Another thing that Sean suggested was having a system where customer complaints are recognised and analysed for trends. If frontline staff know there’s a common issue that’s being addressed at a higher level, this provides a bit more backup and support for team members dealing with angry customers.
Ultimately, leaders need to really understand the value of their people and do whatever they can to manage, coach, and support them through stressful times.
Balancing business growth with staff needs
Of course, all businesses want to grow, and growth can sometimes be uncomfortable.
But rather than focusing entirely on hitting quotas, business objectives, and handling increased pressure from customers, leaders should try to address company culture across the board.
This is not just something that affects frontline staff either. There needs to be a culture across all areas and roles, such as QA managers, finance, suppliers, and leadership.
Every subsection of the business should feel valued and supported. And sometimes, all it takes is a quick check-in with staff and some open and honest conversations.
As a business prepares to grow, so with it must the plan to support staff. Increasing or decreasing team sizes, revamping company structure, and training must all be done with employee wellbeing in mind.
How to manage staff wellbeing in a remote setting
Natalie has two tips for this:
> Keep cameras on
> Run team huddles
Keeping cameras on during meetings is critical because you can actually check in with people and see how they’re doing. If your team has cameras off, there’s little engagement, and it’s harder to pick up on things that could affect staff wellbeing.
Natalie is also a fan of team huddles, which are short and sweet meetings where everyone can gather for a chat. While they take time to run, Natalie says they are well worth the investment because of the impact on employee engagement and wellbeing.
Why businesses should care about employee engagement
One of the top reasons is that it affects recruitment and retention. Engaged employees are simply less likely to quit.
When you have a group of engaged employees, you’re ensuring that they feel valued and listened to. You are also demonstrating that you are prepared to adapt and adjust as necessary.
On a wider scale, having engaged staff means better performance when it comes to business aims and objectives. Highly engaged employees are much more likely to deliver great customer experience, which impacts customer satisfaction and, ultimately, revenue. So, it’s a win-win.
But Natalie has a word of advice. Good employee engagement won’t happen spontaneously. You have to design it and to do that, you need great leaders who are committed.
Maximising employee engagement in a remote world
Just like with wellbeing, managing engagement can be extra tough when everyone’s working remotely.
But Natalie suggests focusing on a few key areas that impact employee engagement:
Customers – Be customer-focused in all areas of the business – not just in customer interactions, but also in internal communications in the team.
Purpose – The purpose of the contact centre has to align with the purpose of the overall organisation.
Culture and community – Build a great culture focused on your community.
Improvement – Make constant improvement a primary goal across each area of the business.
Structured development – Focus on staff development and skills.
Rewards and recognition – Celebrate successes and reward staff so they know they’re valued.
Five ways to improve employee engagement and wellbeing
Ready to rethink employee engagement and wellbeing but don’t know where to start? Natalie and Sean have you covered. Here are their top five methods for improving wellbeing and engagement:
Have a strategy and a plan
If you don’t have a plan to improve things, you can’t expect them to improve by themselves. Go in with a plan of action.
Talk openly and honestly
Sean’s tip is to be proactive, not passive, when it comes to open communication. It’s hard to know if there are any issues with staff wellbeing if no one’s talking about them. Encourage leaders to be proactive about communicating with their teams.
Make sure leaders have the right skills
It all starts with leadership, as Natalie says. They need the right skills to coach and support the rest of the business. When good leadership is in place, this trickles down to employees and customers as well.
Culture
Customer service and customer experience teams shouldn’t work in silos. Everyone needs to be on the same page when it comes to company culture, feeling valued, and knowing the core purpose of their roles.
Employee engagement goes hand in hand with customer experience
These are not two separate things. They are intrinsically linked. If employees feel valued and engaged, this will result in better customer service and happier customers. So, if you want to improve the customer experience, one step is to tackle any employee wellness issues you have in your team. For more insights and actionable advice on how to revamp the employee experience, catch the full webinar here.
Blog
5 min read
If You Want to Collect Honey, Don't Kick the Hive: Why Your Best Innovators Are Already on the Frontline
Guest article by Jamie Corbett, Operations Leader at Advantis Credit, as shared at Afterwork with MaxContact, a contact centre community event.
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What does a plumbing apprenticeship, ten years on a building site, and a career in debt collection have in common?
Absolutely nothing.
But what I learned in all those jobs is that the people closest to the work, the ones actually doing it, always have the best ideas.
When I first started in a contact centre, I was terrible. After a month of following the script and struggling, my manager asked if I wanted to sit next to someone else. In all my wisdom, I decided to sit next to the highest-collecting agent in the room.
His name was Vinny.
The Agent Who Changed Everything
We were working in debt collection. Everyone around us followed the script - voices raised, pushing for payments. Vinny sat there with a dusty Rubik's cube and a stained coffee mug, looking like an old hippy(which, by his own admission, he was).
Everyone else was loud and intense. Vinny was calm. He just talked to people.
And he was the top performer on the floor.
After a few days, I asked him what his secret was.
He smiled: "If you want to collect honey, you don't kick the hive."
That line stuck with me. Vinny showed me something important- sometimes the quietest people, the ones who do things differently, are the real innovators. He hadn't been told to change his approach. He just noticed what worked and trusted his instinct.
But here's the sad part - Vinny never told his manager.
"Because it's not in the script. I'd probably get marked down on QA."
He thought doing what worked meant breaking the rules. And as I sat in the chaos of the contact centre, I realised something:
If innovation feels like rebellion, we've built the wrong culture.
Your Agents Are Already Innovating
Frontline people are natural innovators. They live the process every day - they see what works, what doesn't, and they care about making it better.
But they don't do it because they're thinking about efficiency or the bottom line. They do it because they're human. They want to make their jobs simpler, smoother, less stressful.
Agents find smarter ways through clunky systems and shave seconds off repetitive tasks - not out of laziness, but instinct. It's the most natural form of innovation there is.
That's actually what Lean thinking is all about. It's not a corporate framework - it's common sense, done consistently. It's asking everyday: "What's getting in the way, and how can we make it easier?"
Our agents are already doing that. They just don't call it Lean.
The challenge for leaders is to recognise that behaviour, support it, and give it a name - to turn natural innovation into intentional improvement.
But too often, agents don't speak up. Rigid scripts, metrics obsession, or fear of "breaking process" make them feel like their ideas don't count.
So if we want innovation to thrive, our job as leaders isn't to create it - it's to unblock it.
When Doing the Right Thing Looks Like Breaking the Rules
A few years later, when I became a manager, I inherited Katie. She cared deeply about customers but was struggling with collections. Every one-to-one she'd say, "I'm doing it the way they tell us to, but itdoesn't feel right to push people like that."
So I sat in on her calls.
She wasn't talking about taking payments. She was talking about helping people get out of debt. "Let's figure out a plan that works for you." "What's getting in the way right now?"
On paper, she was off-script. She wasn't hitting the "ask for payment" markers. But her customers trusted her. They opened up. And slowly, her results climbed.
One day she said, "I know it's not what they want, but I feel like I'm actually helping people this way."
Sometimes doing the right thing looks like breaking the rules. I backed her. She became my best collector.
The Power of Perception
If you owed £400 to British Gas and your mortgage advisor told you to pay it, you'd thank them for protecting your credit score.
But if I, a debt collector, called about that same £400, it would feel completely different - even though it's the same advice.
Katie understood that. She changed the conversation from "Can we take a payment?" to "Let's help you get out of debt."
That tiny shift - from transaction to transformation -changed everything. Quiet, human innovation.
And here's the thing: this was before Consumer Duty. Before Treating Customers Fairly. Before the FCA. Katie was ahead of the industry curve.
It's Not People That Stop Innovation. It's Process.
Most of the time, our systems make innovation difficult.
QA, KPIs, scripts, compliance - all built with good intentions. But somewhere along the line, the systems started running the people instead of the other way around.
QA should measure the quality of the outcome, not just the accuracy of the process. Too often it's about catching mistakes instead of coaching improvement.
KPIs - we measure speed, wrap time, promises to pay, then wonder why empathy gets rushed. If you measure speed, you'll get speed. If you measure empathy, you'll get empathy. If you measure both - you'll get balance.
Scripts protect consistency, but they shouldn't control humanity. The best conversations are guided, not governed.
Culture is the biggest killer. Not process - fear. Agents stay quiet because they've seen others shot down. Silence in a contact centre isn't peace - it's potential going unheard.
These systems aren't bad. They were just built for consistency, not creativity. Our challenge is to rebuild them for both.
The Ripple Effect of Small Ideas
When people feel safe to share and experiment, you see the ripple effect.
I've seen it first-hand:
An agent suggests a note template - saves 30 seconds per call, three hours a day across the team.
Another swaps "you need to" for "what we can do together is" - complaint rates drop.
A team starts a Friday "what worked this week?" huddle - positivity skyrockets.
Tiny things. Massive impact.
When one person's idea is implemented, everyone starts looking for their own. That's how culture changes - not with slogans, but with ripples.
Start With One Question
When I think back to those days sitting next to Vinny, I realise he probably had no idea how much he changed my outlook.
At the time, I thought it was about keeping calm on the phones. But now I see it was about leadership, culture, and trust. You don't get great performance by pushing harder - you get it by creating the conditions for people to do their best work.
My mission has always been to change the world - not the whole world, at least not at first - but the world of debt collection. Because for too long, our industry has carried a negative perception. But what we really do is help people move forward.
And for me, that started with Vinny. That one quote. He was the stone that started the ripple - the ripple I intend to turn into a wave.
So when you go back to your teams, try this: ask questions.
"What's one small thing we could fix this week?"
"What's that one hack that is an absolute must?"
"How would you improve this process?"
Listen to the answers. Act on them.
Because once people see their ideas become real, that's when the ripples start. And that's when cultures change.
If you want to collect honey, don't kick the hive.
Trust your people. Listen to your frontline. And give them permission to make things better - one small idea, one ripple, one wave at a time.
---
Jamie Corbett is an Operations Leader at Advantis Credit. He spoke at Afterwork with MaxContact, a contact centre community event, where he shared his journey from the frontline to leadership and his mission to change the perception of debt collection through agent-focused innovation.
Want to unlock innovation in your contact centre? Discover how MaxContact's AI-powered platform gives your agents the tools and insights to do their best work. Learn more
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.
Blog
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.
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