November 21, 2025
Contact Centre Expo Roundup: Blending AI and People Skills
After a hectic couple of days, Contact Centre Expo from London’s ExCel Arena has come to a end. From running around the floor, a welcome feeling given the freezing weather outside, bagging key vendor interviews, and gathering insights and trends from the sessions (that would be AI), the CXM team has a busy few days reporting.
Taking an outside view, Charlie Adams, CX Director, summarised the event succinctly as “Expo isn’t the climax of the contact centre year – it’s the catalyst. It sets off a chain reaction across the industry. Vendors, service providers, BPOs, tech innovators, consultants, operators, and every flavour of CX and contact centre professional spend two days learning, connecting, challenging assumptions, sparking ideas, and taking all of that back to their organisations.” in his LinkedIn post, “What Happens at CC Expo Doesn’t Stay at CC Expo…”
The Big Contact Centre Ideas
With deeply-experienced panels discussing “‘The New Thinking for Customer Contact KPIs’” and “CX Priorities, Hurdles & The Road Ahead. There was plenty to learn, even for seasoned veterans, and vendors trying all sorts of tricks to attract those in need of a new CC solution to their stands.
Among the vendors CXM caught up with was Jenna Shanks from NiCE, talking about what is possible with AI, noting that people may have been using for it longer than they think, and reactions as it becomes part of the common currency of business.
At the Heart of the Contact Centre
Vonage was also on hand to discuss two key areas of business, integration (specifically with Salesforce) and the company’s “intelligent workspace” features. It delivers AI assistance with omnichannel capabilities and expert collaboration to boost CX and EX.
Having recently made a splash on Gartner’s CCaaS Magic Quadrant Zoom is on a sustained push into the CC market, driving AI-powered customer engagement. We spoke to Ben Neo about some of the success factors that surrounded this achievement and how Zoom are focusing on outcomes when implementing their AI solutions for customers.
To wrap things up, CCExpo 2025 confirmed that customer contact technology and the customer experience is evolving into a blend of AI-driven efficiency and much-needed human empathy. The winning formula combines automation with an omnichannel approach, and empowered human agents to provide expert insight and empathy, all underpinned by data-led strategies, in a secure environment.
And it is the people that make the event, we leave it to Sue Moore, CCO at Moore Engagement, on her CCExpo experience, “What a brilliant day at the Contact Centre Expo at London Excel. When you’re flying solo most of the day, it genuinely makes a difference bumping into familiar faces and meeting plenty of new ones. Loved the chats, the reconnections, and getting to know people properly rather than just waving across a conference hall.”
