Collect, dissect and act on customer interaction data. Integrate it with different company departments, especially the C-suite. And watch out for privacy issues.

First, organizations should gather raw and unstructured customer interaction data, such as text and audio. This includes transcripts of customer service calls, text messages from chatbot interactions, email, social media direct messages, video and screen-sharing sessions and call recordings. Next, make that data available for analysis, with the goal of understanding what was said, how it was said and why it was said.

This is where conversation analytics, the use of software and machine learning, including natural language processing, comes in. Applying conversation analytics enables companies to derive business value from their conversation data; they analyze it to extract meaning, insights and quantitative metrics.

Gather, analyze and act on customer data

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Proactive customer outreach provides several benefits for businesses. It generates revenue, improves customer satisfaction and takes advantage of AI workflows.

The days of waiting for the customer to call you are over — or should be. That is, if your customer experience strategy relies on inbound interactions, you’re already behind. Today, leading companies see proactive customer service outreach as a strategic imperative. As a result, they are shifting their focus from reactive problem solving to proactive customer support.

Why the urgency? Because consumers expect it, and your bottom line demands it.

Metrigy checked in with CX professionals on their plans for proactive outreach. In its “Customer Experience Optimization (CXO): 2025-26” study, Metrigy found all but 4% of companies weren’t reaching out to customers proactively, planning to start doing so by the end of the year, or evaluating how to get started.

Earlier Metrigy research showed that nearly 70% of companies expect customer service to shift from being mostly inbound to mostly proactive by 2027. Based on this research, it’s clear to see why companies are forging ahead on proactive outreach.

What is proactive outreach?

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Beth Schultz, VP of Research and Principal Analyst at Metrigy, explores how healthcare organizations can use virtual agents to strike a balance between automation and a personal touch.

The healthcare industry has traditionally been characterized by a cautious approach to new technology, largely driven by critical concerns around patient privacy, strict regulatory compliance, and the complexity of integrating new systems. Yet, the industry is simultaneously under immense pressure to deliver patient experiences that are seamless and personalized—on par with the best customer service available anywhere.

For healthcare CX leaders today, the prescription for success centers on artificial intelligence (AI), as revealed in Metrigy’s AI for Business Success: 2025-26 research study. Participating healthcare organizations are moving ahead with AI at a fast clip, ranking among the top five industries using AI extensively across their business. AI, specifically virtual agents, is proving to be a critical enabler, creating harmony between the need for scalable automation and the necessity of human empathy in care.

High adoption and strong performance metrics

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Ensuring autonomous workflows perform with consistent reliability and accuracy is core to customer experience; CX assurance tools can help.

The rapid rise of generative AI and the push toward fully autonomous agents is fundamentally reshaping customer experience (CX). But as it does, it is introducing a new set of complexities that legacy monitoring tools, such as those used for simulating interactions in a traditional, non-digital contact center, simply cannot handle.

This situation leaves organizations planning to use advanced AI agents—generative and agentic—facing a critical question: How do we ensure these agents and autonomous workflows perform with consistent reliability and accuracy over time so that they don’t alienate customers, cause reputational harm, or create other business-impacting problems? The answer lies in CX assurance tools that provide pre-deployment testing rigor and post-deployment performance monitoring and observability.

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Customer interaction analytics, autonomous agents and AI-driven upsells are some of the CX trends that could boost revenue, cut costs and improve customer service.

The pace of change in customer experience has never been faster, as technological innovation and customer expectations create competitive pressure on every business technology leader.

For business leaders who pivot correctly, however, the transformations ahead of them hold significant promise. In Metrigy’s “Customer Experience Optimization 2025-26” global study of 656 companies, several key points emerged to help IT and CX leaders navigate this rapidly changing era.

The report highlighted seven key trends that CX leaders should watch out for in 2026. CX tech buyers should evaluate these data-backed shifts for their strategic planning in the new year.

1. Interaction analytics improve business decisions.

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Beth Schultz, VP of research and principal analyst at Metrigy, explores how high-impact, low-effort, and perfectly personalized interactions can become the norm with virtual associates on the job.

In the fast-paced world of retail, the customer experience (CX) is everything. Savvy consumers today expect the same personalized experience online as they would receive from a human sales associate in person. This means retailers must deliver hyper-personalized experiences across digital channels, all without overwhelming their human customer service teams.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the perfect fit for retail CX.

The retail industry has aggressively embraced the use of AI for CX. In Metrigy’s AI for Business Success: 2025-26 global research study, 78.6% of participating retailers are already using AI for customer interactions. This isn’t just a handful of pilot programs, either; 51.8% of respondents characterize their use of AI as extensive. AI’s power to deliver the fast, low-effort experience customers demand, driving brand loyalty and a competitive edge, is fueling this adoption.

Virtual AI agents deliver low-effort service

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A growing number of attacks, along with the impact of AI, are creating urgency for security teams.

Metrigy’s annual study on workplace collaboration and contact center security and compliance paints a disturbing picture of growing attacks and increasing threats, often driven by AI. But, companies are slowly improving their security posture.

Attacks on the Rise

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By integrating contact center software with back-office apps, companies can improve employee productivity, customer satisfaction and ultimately their bottom line.

By now, many enterprise C-suite executives have abandoned the notion that contact centers are cost centers. Instead, the C-suite has embraced the contact center as a value center that drives revenue growth and operational efficiency.

However, for too many organizations, the contact center remains a silo disconnected from customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), service management, unified communications (UC) or other business-critical enterprise applications. This, clearly, is a mistake.

Seamless integration between the contact center and enterprise applications is a key characteristic of success for customer experience operations. Metrigy discovered this correlation in its global “Customer Experience Optimization (CXO): 2025-26” research study of 656 companies.

In this study, the majority of the most successful companies — based on achieving double-digit revenue growth, efficiency boosts and other improvements — have bridged the gap between the contact center and back-end enterprise systems. Unequivocally, this shows that seamless integration isn’t merely a nice-to-have, but it’s a foundational requirement for success.

Executives need access to contact center data

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A real-world story of customer service gone wrong illustrates how and why good data maintenance is foundational to any CX journey.

As we’re wont to do when we have a bad experience with a company, we share our stories. Serendipitously, I suppose, a customer service snafu I feel inclined to write about fits right into my planned topic for this post: single source of truth (SSoT).

First, the story. Earlier this month, I ordered some cosmetics. I won’t name the brand, but it’s a fairly young company whose founder is well respected in the business. After placing the order, I quickly received a notification of order receipt and a heads-up that the package would ship within three to five business days. That same day, the shipment tracker showed my delivery already in progress. “That was speedy,” I thought. But then I waited, and waited, and waited… five, then 10, then 15 days and no change in status.

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Vinod Muthukrishnan, Cisco VP & COO, joins us to advise companies on how to get started, progress, and demonstrate compelling business improvements with AI in customer experience strategies.