AI and Agencies: 3 Customer Service Trends for 2025
Posted: Sun Apr 06, 2025 8:50 am
How you can use trends like AI and outsourcing to improve your customer service.
In this article
Trend 1: Humans continue to outperform AI in most customer service tasks
Trend 2: The use of AI-supported customer service tools increases customer satisfaction
Trend 3: More and more companies are using external agencies for customer service
Next Steps
There is one area where small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have a huge advantage over larger competitors due to their size: customer service.
While they struggle to compete in terms of price, range, and reach, they offer a completely different kind of value through more personalized experiences. There are aspects of customer service that change little over time, but there are also new trends and technologies that could mean major changes for the entire profession.
In this article, we explore three key customer service trends for SMBs in 2025 that all business leaders, country email list customer service providers, and customer support agents should consider in their plans for the year if they want to improve their strategies. By understanding how companies can use AI and external providers to improve customer service, SMBs can adapt their strategies and know exactly where they can have the greatest impact.
Trend 1: Humans continue to outperform AI in most customer service tasks
There's now no sector of the economy untouched by artificial intelligence, and companies are seizing the opportunity to use AI to improve their customer service. Capterra's 2024 Customer Service Technology Survey* found that more than half of German companies (55%) already use AI-powered customer service software. Most of these companies report that AI has increased productivity (61%), customer satisfaction (49%), and call volume (45%).
But so far, AI hasn't been able to surpass humans. The same survey found that humans are one step ahead of AI in many skills.
The majority of respondents worldwide believe that humans perform better in personalized interactions (65%), sales enablement (58%), problem solving (58%), performance evaluation (44%), and routine tasks (43%). AI, on the other hand, wins in multilingual conversations (56%), data analysis (53%), and bias prevention (43%).
In this article
Trend 1: Humans continue to outperform AI in most customer service tasks
Trend 2: The use of AI-supported customer service tools increases customer satisfaction
Trend 3: More and more companies are using external agencies for customer service
Next Steps
There is one area where small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have a huge advantage over larger competitors due to their size: customer service.
While they struggle to compete in terms of price, range, and reach, they offer a completely different kind of value through more personalized experiences. There are aspects of customer service that change little over time, but there are also new trends and technologies that could mean major changes for the entire profession.
In this article, we explore three key customer service trends for SMBs in 2025 that all business leaders, country email list customer service providers, and customer support agents should consider in their plans for the year if they want to improve their strategies. By understanding how companies can use AI and external providers to improve customer service, SMBs can adapt their strategies and know exactly where they can have the greatest impact.
Trend 1: Humans continue to outperform AI in most customer service tasks
There's now no sector of the economy untouched by artificial intelligence, and companies are seizing the opportunity to use AI to improve their customer service. Capterra's 2024 Customer Service Technology Survey* found that more than half of German companies (55%) already use AI-powered customer service software. Most of these companies report that AI has increased productivity (61%), customer satisfaction (49%), and call volume (45%).
But so far, AI hasn't been able to surpass humans. The same survey found that humans are one step ahead of AI in many skills.
The majority of respondents worldwide believe that humans perform better in personalized interactions (65%), sales enablement (58%), problem solving (58%), performance evaluation (44%), and routine tasks (43%). AI, on the other hand, wins in multilingual conversations (56%), data analysis (53%), and bias prevention (43%).