How AI will influence customer experience in 2026
AI dominated 2025-and contact centres felt it first. Calabrio's research reported that 98% of contact centres used AI last year, which means the experimentation phase is over. 2026 is about stronger outcomes: faster resolutions, clearer oversight, and experiences that feel personal across every channel.
Make every interaction feel known
Customers want to be recognised without repeating themselves. That requires one integrated view: CRM and CCaaS working as a single system, with context carrying over from chat to phone to email.
- Unify profiles and IDs so history, preferences, and intents load instantly for agents.
- Surface real-time context panels: last touch, sentiment, open tickets, and next best action.
- Proactively detect friction-delivery delays, billing flags, outage areas-and reach out before customers ask.
Without this foundation, customers hit dead ends. With it, they feel understood-and your team works faster with fewer handoffs.
Personalised, always-on support (without the wait)
AI can give instant, tailored guidance that helps customers get value fast. Think precise troubleshooting steps, smart recommendations based on account setup, and clear escalation paths when self-serve isn't enough.
- Use AI to draft answers, but train it on your policies, tone, and product data.
- Let bots handle routine resets and FAQs, then pass the full context to an agent when human judgment is needed.
- Continuously learn from resolved cases to tighten intents and remove dead responses.
Governance is now a CX feature
Trust and transparency will decide who customers stick with in 2026. People want to know how decisions are made, what data is used, and how you stay accountable.
- Map data flows and set access rules that align with GDPR and similar privacy requirements.
- Adopt a risk framework like the NIST AI Risk Management Framework to guide reviews, testing, and documentation.
- Publish plain-English AI policies customers can read-and your agents can explain.
Measure humans and bots the same way
Quality shouldn't stop with agents. Treat every interaction-human, chat, or voice bot-under one quality lens: clarity, fairness, emotion, and business impact.
- Use conversation intelligence across channels to score intent coverage, sentiment shifts, and outcome rates.
- Hold bots to the same bar as agents: accuracy, empathy signals, compliance, and resolution speed.
- Feed insights back into both: update bot prompts and agent playbooks from the same report.
Do this well and your contact centre moves from pure support to a growth engine-identifying upsell moments, reducing churn, and lifting lifetime value.
Keep humans first
AI won't replace great agents. It removes repetitive work so people can focus on nuance, empathy, and complex problem-solving.
- Deploy assist tools that summarise context, suggest next steps, and auto-draft follow-ups.
- Route sensitive or high-stakes cases to specialists with richer context and authority to act.
- Coach on soft skills with real calls, then use AI to reinforce behaviors with targeted prompts.
A practical 90-day plan
- Days 0-30: Pick two high-volume intents and one high-value escalation path. Clean knowledge articles and map data permissions.
- Days 31-60: Launch bot + agent-assist for the selected intents. Add post-interaction surveys and conversation scoring for both bots and humans.
- Days 61-90: Tune prompts, fix gaps, and publish an AI use policy. Expand to two more intents and add proactive alerts for known pain points.
What "good" looks like in 2026
- Consistent context across channels with minimal repeat information.
- Containment that doesn't tank CSAT: bot-handled tasks stay solved.
- Faster time-to-resolution and higher first-contact resolution.
- Agent assist adoption above 70% on eligible cases.
- Unified QA coverage: at least 30% of bot chats and 30% of human calls reviewed each month (automated + manual).
- Clear audit trails, data minimisation, and bias checks documented.
Level up skills, not just tools
The tech is ready. The edge comes from teams who can operate it with care, clarity, and speed.
If you're upleveling your frontline and QA leaders, here's a useful place to start: AI courses for support teams.
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