NEW YORK — Deloitte Digital’s “2026 Global Contact Center Survey” provides a comprehensive and timely look at the evolving landscape of digital customer service, and the persistent challenges customer-facing organizations should address. This year’s survey, conducted in late 2025 and early 2026, gathered insights from contact center leaders across multiple industries and geographies, offering a clear perspective on priorities, opportunities, and the obstacles holding teams back. 

Agentic in action
Thirty-five percent of contact centers already use agentic AI as part of operations, and the results speak for themselves. With AI-centric organizations reporting 85% greater contact center profitability, compared to organizations with low AI maturity, it’s clear that adopting the latest technological advancements makes a difference on the bottom line. 

Organizations are purposefully utilizing agentic capabilities to create new value across the service ecosystem, from agent assist and virtual assistants, to predictive support and omnichannel integration. These capabilities multiply the value created by human service representatives. This has resulted in lower attrition and cost per contact, compared to contact centers with low AI maturity.

Traditional contact center operations are often labor-intensive and difficult to scale. Legacy contact center technologies, incomplete or siloed data, and integration issues have too often left service representatives not focusing on the interactions that truly matter.

According to Deloitte’s latest survey of contact center leaders, today’s most AI-centric organizations are today’s most effective and efficient organizations. They’re outperforming service organizations with low AI maturity across a range of key metrics that contribute to bottom-line business performance.

Good customer service rewarded
Contact center leaders are at a crossroads as growing business pressure, “do more with less” and enhanced customer expectations have converged to create unprecedented challenges. More than half of surveyed consumers say service quality stayed the same or got worse in 2025. 

On the other hand, when consumers experience great customer service, they go out of their way to advocate, engage and spend more with the brand. Consumers not only estimated they spend 36% more with companies that provide great service; 84% of respondents recommended the company, engaged more with the company, and/or bought more. 

Organizations may risk leaving significant revenue on the table without an advanced contact center deployment.