Today’s consumers are more socially aware of products and services and, with customer retention being critical, businesses now face a challenge: How can providers proactively serve customers while empowering them to use self-service tools and programs?
State of Contact Center Testing
2025
How do CX leaders keep ahead of customer demands?
around the world to see what they’re prioritizing, concerned about, and excited about as they work with Hammer to build a better contact center experience.
With the rise of AI, the continued shift to the cloud, and the constantly evolving demands of customers, it’s a challenging time for contact center leaders and agents. The complexity of running an omnichannel contact center that meets the needs and preferences of customers – particularly on a budget – continues to be one of the most common pain points we hear from our community. To understand how CX leaders are facing this challenge – and offer insights into how they can overcome it – we surveyed contact center professionals from industries and organizations
The CX world moves fast. This report helps you keep pace and keep ahead.
Rick Hamilton CEO Infovista / Hammer
Executive summary • Hybrid infrastructures and hybrid staffing are on the rise. The post-COVID world is holding on to some of the benefits of the cloud and remote work environments while also maintaining on-premises datacenters and staffing. This increased investment in hybrid environments and workforces adds a new layer of complexity to communications and systems. • Customer demands are up, agents are struggling to keep up. Call and chat volumes continue to grow, as do customer expectations regarding the speed and support they receive from contact center agents. Nearly half of contact center agents feel that businesses have unrealistic expectations of them and agent attrition is up, as a result. • Confidence in tech capabilities and ROI are down. As CX environment complexity increases, it’s critical for organizations to make tech investments that make contact centers more productive, profitable, and streamlined. Yet a significant portion of CX leaders can’t identify when they have performance issues, aren’t sure they can handle contact volume surges, and aren’t sure they’re seeing the expected performance and ROI they made their investments to see. • AI-support and automation are more needed than ever. Given the lack of visibility CX leaders have into the performance gaps that may be appearing in their contact center, contact center testing and monitoring should be increasing in importance and frequency. But they aren’t. For most organizations, load tests are performed yearly – if at all – with a lack of resources and the slowness of manual testing highlighted as key reasons why.
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The future contact center is hybrid (and complex)
For the past several years, cloud migrations have been the move for IT professionals. In our own 2023 State of Contact Center Testing report, 37% of CX leaders had already moved at least some of their contact center infrastructure to the cloud – with another 22% planning a cloud migration. As we’ve shared recently , however, a contact center cloud migration isn’t always a cheap, easy, or successful process. So, what do you do if a full cloud migration isn’t for you and a permanently on- premises environment doesn’t meet your needs? Our latest survey found 66% of contact centers operating a hybrid infrastructure, up 43% from our 2023 report. Contact center staffing has taken a similar shift: 72% of contact centers are staffed from a mix of on-site and remote working environments, up 34% from 2023. This industry shift to hybrid work and infrastructure arrangements adds another layer of complexity to ensuring reliable, consistent performance across the entire CX environment. Maintaining visibility and accessibility across an increasingly diverse and wide-spread environment is inevitably going to be harder due to the number of potential fault points, applications, and levels of connectivity that comprise the network from datacenter to network edge. Tech stack complexity isn’t always a bad thing, of course! But it does mean that organizations need to increase their focus on monitoring performance from end-to-end so that the risks associated with hybrid infrastructures and work environments are kept under control.
Which of the following best describes your contact center infrastructure?
Cloud
Hybrid
On-Premises
0
20 40 60 80
2025 2023
What is your contact center agents' working arrangement?
All on-site
All remote
Mix of both
0
20
40
60
80
2025 2023
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Contact requests continue to grow. Can agents keep up?
Between calls and chats, contact center agents are busier than ever before. In our 2023 State of Contact Center Testing report, 67% of respondents said that call volumes had increased over the past 12 months. Over the same period, 68% of respondents said their chat volumes had increased, as well. Our newest research shows that this trend is continuing today. 66% of 2025 respondents report their call volume has continued to grow. 73% of CX leaders in our 2025 survey report their chat volume increasing, up 5% from the already-high 2023 response. This increased contact volume is having a clear toll, on agent experience . Agent attrition is up 9% year- over-year in contact centers, meaning that agents are burning out faster and a shrinking staff of contact center agents are expected to handle a steadily growing number of customer service requests. As a result, 41% of contact center professionals feel that their organizations have unrealistic expectations of their team – a sentiment that risks increased agent attrition and decreased customer satisfaction and revenue ahead. Customers have begun to notice and adjust their behavior, as well. Our research shows that, while overall customer churn is down from 2023, one- third of CX leaders agree that customer churn is up over the past 12 months, while 45% aren’t sure whether their customer churn increased or decreased – a separate knowledge gap that speaks to a broader lack of visibility across the CX and customer service environment.
Call volumes have increased over the past 12 months
Total agree Agree Strongly agree
0
20 40 60 80
2025 2023
Chat volumes have increased over the past 12 months
Strongly agree
Agree
Total agree
0
20 40 60 80
2025 2023
Our business has unrealistic expectations of the contact center team
Agree Unsure Disagree
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CX tech confidence and visibility are down
That inevitably leads to customer frustration, delayed issue responses, and tech failures that are never internally recognized or resolved until angry customers flag the experience. In today’s market, where a single irritating customer service experience can be enough to drive customer churn, that’s a risk that CX leaders can’t afford to take. Unexpectedly, a lack of visibility also extends to the operational and business goals that CX solutions deliver. While contact center budgets remain tight, our research indicates that a significant percentage of CX leaders aren’t sure that their recent CX technology investments are paying off. 21% of respondents admit that they can’t evaluate potential technology investments. Another 35% aren’t sure. Similarly, 21% of contact center professionals report that their recent CX tech investments haven’t met their ROI and performance expectations. Another 31% aren’t sure.
For many contact centers and contact center as a service (CCaaS) teams, end-to-end observability is a hard goal to reach – let alone maintain. As CX environment complexity and customer demands continue to rise, being able to reliably assess CX environment performance, availability, and problem areas before they impact customer experience. Unfortunately, that’s not the experience for most contact center professionals. • 38% of CX leaders either can’t tell or aren’t sure they can tell when they have voice quality or performance issues. • 38% of CX leaders either don’t have or aren’t sure they have visibility into CX tech failures. • 40% of CX leaders aren’t confident that they can handle unexpected surges in contact volumes. Because of this lack of CX observability, contact center leaders can’t identify when or why performance issues like drops in voice quality, connection instability, and downtime arise .
Can you thoroughly evaluate potential technology investments?
Have your contact center investments met ROI and performance expectations?
Yes Unsure No
Yes Unsure No
Combined with the growing complexity of contact center infrastructures and growing demands of customers, this widespread lack of visibility poses a major threat to the efficacy of contact centers – regardless of industry or size – and the revenue and brand response tied directly to customer service experiences.
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Cut through the complexity: AI and automation
CX challenges like visibility gaps and constant increases in traffic volume paired with the growing complexity of modern contact centers have made it harder than ever for organizations to deliver the support and experiences their customers demand. To resolve these challenges, contact center leaders need modern, automated testing and monitoring solutions so they can regain visibility and control over their CX environment and its business-critical outcomes like customer satisfaction and customer
How frequently do you perform load / performance testing in your contact center?
20 25 30 35 40 45
10 15
0 5
Daily Weekly Monthly Yearly Less than Annually Never
retention. Unfortunately, this is also proving to be an obstacle for CX leaders. According to our latest research, essential testing plans aren’t conducted with anywhere near the frequency that they should be – best practice for modern contact centers is to conduct performance and load testing on at least a weekly basis. The majority (51%) of contact centers at best perform basic load/performance testing on a yearly basis. 7% of respondents admit to never load testing. As a result, contact centers aren’t prepared to meet customer demands at scale.
Why aren’t contact centers performing the load tests and performance tests they need? Unsurprisingly, a lack of time and resources came up again and again in our research. In both cases, CX testing automation and AI-powered solutions offer a clear path for contact center professionals to free up resources, reduce manual, error-
TOP 5 LIMITATIONS FACING CONTACT CENTERS 1 We don’t have enough resources in our developer team 2 Our DevOps environment isn’t agile enough 3 The manual testing process is too long 4 We can’t properly test projects before they go live 5 We rely on aging, legacy systems
prone agent testing and QA, and accelerate the testing and monitoring processes needed to ensure operations are up and running as intended – stopping performance issues before they impact customer experiences, customer satisfaction, and overall business revenue. The good news is, contact center professionals seem to be aware of this need for increased automation and AI in their tech stacks. When asked what solutions were at the top of their priority list for upgrades in the next 12-24 months, our survey respondents overwhelmingly reported plans to invest in CX automation and AI technologies.
TOP 10 PLANNED CX TECHNOLOGY INVESTMENTS
1
6 7 8 9
AI-powered CRM solutions
Inbound telephony/email systems Omnichannel/Multichannel systems
2 3 4 5
Conversational IVR Analytics systems Conversational AI Chatbot solutions
Voice biometrics
Outbound telephony systems
10
Voice activated IVR
CX automation and AI technologies
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3 key steps to overcome CX challenges in 2025
As CX tech stacks expand in scale and complexity the number of hours in the day stays the same. To make sure your contact center team is able to meet the evolving demands of customers, you need to make sure that your agents are equipped with solutions that help them accomplish more of their support services, faster, and more reliably. To do that, our team of CX technology experts recommend all contact center leaders assess their capabilities and gaps in visibility with these key steps: 1. Know where you’re starting from The only way to make progress is to start with a clear understanding of where you’re starting from. Review customer feedback trends relating to your contact center experience and conduct agent experience surveys to assess the performance issues that impact their productivity, morale, and ability to support customers effectively. Combine those reviews with CX solution analytics for a preliminary picture of your contact center’s health. If you can’t test and monitor the performance of your contact center from end-to-end, explore continuous CX testing and monitoring solutions to audit your contact center’s health as it stands today. 2. Ensure your CX tech stack is meeting expectations Without the ability to see ROI from their contact center tech investments, CX leaders have left themselves with a significant blind spot in their operations. Once you’ve assessed the performance gaps, vulnerabilities, and unoptimized parts of your contact center tech stack, find automated solutions that streamline the detection of these issues so that your team can more quickly resolve them. With these monitoring and quality assurance solutions in place, contact center teams can benchmark key performance indicators for crucial metrics like voice quality, time on call, abandoned customer interactions, call drops, and more. These can quickly highlight the components and solutions that aren’t meeting your needs, making it easy to replace poorly performing components and improve your contact center’s overall success. 3. Determine your best opportunities for AI AI capabilities are still in their infancy. They can be incredibly valuable for contact center teams, particularly in applications like chatbots, conversational IVR, CRM tasks, and sentiment analysis. For now, however, there is still the need for knowledgeable, empathetic contact center agents to manage top priority customer needs and complicated or sensitive requests. Review your audited performance issues and gaps in visibility to find the tedious and time-intensive workflows in your contact center today. Many of these will be your best candidates for automation and AI-powered solutions – especially in your CX testing and monitoring processes.
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How Hammer helps contact centers succeed in 2025
Hammer, part of Infovista, has been the world leader in end-to-end contact center testing and monitoring for over 30 years. In that time, the organization has evolved from providing load, performance, and stress testing for CX environments to an AI-powered, automated CX assurance platform that extends from the datacenter to the network edge on all the channels and vendors your customers turn to. The Hammer Cloud Platform empowers CX leaders to get the most out of their contact centers and ensure comprehensive assurance throughout the software development lifecycle.
DEFINE
DEVELOP
DELIVER
DIAGNOSE
AUTOMATE DEVELOPMENT LIFECYCLES
PLAN & BASELINE DESIGNS
ACCELERATE & VALIDATE CHANGE
ENSURE REGULATORY COMPLIANCE
PROACTIVELY MONITOR & REDUCE MTTR
Automate early with functional and performance/risk analysis, and insights.
Validate performance and integrations to prevent migration delays and human error.
Assure systems against compliance issues, while improving risk management, and SLAs.
Automate third-party integrations and updates
Automated, data-driven insights, beyond traditional methods, for faster MTTR and enhanced performance.
for seamless CX and resource e ciency.
Ready to increase observability, customer satisfaction, and business outcomes from your contact center? Contact the Hammer team today to receive a free, custom demo of Hammer CX solutions and make 2025 the year you build a better contact center experience.
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For more information please visit www.hammer.com For sales inquiries please email info@hammer.com Contact us
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