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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AI in workplace collaboration is rapidly moving beyond summarization and content generation.

AI in the workplace continues to evolve. Early capabilities, enabled by generative AI, were mostly focused on saving employees time by summarizing meeting transcripts, documents and messages, improving search and access to knowledge, and enabling basic content creation.

These capabilities have become table stakes with just about every collaboration vendor now either including generative AI in its products or enabling add-ons at additional cost. Generative AI has certainly been helpful, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed the nature of our work; in most cases it has just saved time.

As we move into 2026, we are entering a much more disruptive phase: The shift from Generative AI to Agentic AI.

From Summarization to Automation

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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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Kick off the year with Metrigy analysts, who share what’s top of mind for them in customer experience and workplace collaboration as 2026 gets underway.

Many industries will reap major benefits from integrating augmented and virtual reality technology with 5G. But beware of limitations in 5G coverage and mobile device capabilities.

5G has become the default technology for cellular wireless networks. Thanks to its ability to offer WAN-like speeds, 5G can support the bandwidth needs of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), serving as the basis of new applications that provide immersive experiences for businesses and their customers.

The impact of 5G-enabled AR/VR

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The UC trends driving strategic priorities in 2026 include agentic AI, connected workspaces and security advancements to boost productivity and innovation.

If 2024 was the year generative AI arrived, then 2025 was the year of the AI agent. Almost every vendor in the unified communications and collaboration (UCC) space released an AI-powered agent, beginning the march toward agentic AI to give agents the ability to maintain context and take action on their own (within guardrails).

Here are the five trends that will shape the communications and collaboration landscape in 2026.

1. Agentic AI goes mainstream

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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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