We’ve seen a number of consumer trends in 2024 shape how businesses connect with their customers. These range from how people shop to how they expect to be served. 

Adapting to these and ensuring that your business keeps pace with emerging trends in 2025, requires communications systems that are agile, scalable, but above all, create stronger connections with your customers.

Customers are being bombarded with information all the time and there are many studies that show our attention spans are getting shorter, to the point where being told that “you have the attention of a goldfish” might be a compliment. 

In this type of environment how do you make sure you communicate with your customers in a way that gets your messages across?

Improve flexibility - A key trend from 2024 that is set to accelerate in 2025 is quick commerce. Customers want instant gratification, and we’ve seen a number of businesses implementing same day delivery in response. This places increased pressure on communications throughout the value chain. Tied to this is an omni-channel approach to how people buy - they might browse on social media, evaluate the product in-store, and then order online with same day delivery.

Business communication needs to adapt to meet these demands. Omni-channel commerce requires an omni-channel communications approach, which includes telephone calls, email, social media messaging and, increasingly, chatbots.

Making communications systems more flexible will help your business manage multiple communications touchpoints more easily and adapt to changing market conditions.

 Cloud-based communications solutions such as phones and productivity suites are easily scalable and adaptable, integrate with multiple systems and allow communication from anywhere, allowing you to reach your customers more effectively.

Harness integrations and automation - AI and automation have refined their communications capabilities rapidly over the past year and are having a significant impact on how people and businesses communicate. Balancing the personalised, human touch with the efficiency of automation will not only make communication simpler, but will improve it.

As an example, using a chatbot to answer simple queries gives customers a quick response to their queries and saves your resources for communications tasks that require more empathy, finesse or engagement such as sales or dispute management. If tasks like raising customer service tickets are automated, there is less chance of an agent forgetting to do it, or doing it incorrectly.

Customers don’t see automation processes, but these can improve their communication experience overall. Automation reduces the number of manual, repetitive and time consuming tasks your teams deal with. Integration gives them a set of tools to deliver more personalised and efficient service. 

Integrating your phone system, your customer relationship management (CRM) platform and your productivity suite, for instance, will give your call centre agents a unified view of customer data from different channels. This allows them to easily access data like purchase history and previous interactions during a call, allowing them to deliver a much more personalised and efficient service.

Use your analytics and insights - We’ve been hearing “data is the new gold” for a few years now, but I’d wager that most businesses still aren’t using all the data available to them.

Your phone system alone can provide you with a wealth of information to make data-backed decisions. It can tell you how long a person was on hold, if they bounced around between departments, which problems are repeating themselves, and how customers felt after hanging up. This is all essential to identifying strengths and weaknesses in your customer service offering.

Comparing and contrasting different data types might also fill in information gaps that help your business understand specific issues customers may not be communicating. You might look at sales data on its own and wonder why a product isn’t performing, but augmenting this with website bounce rates might show a payment complication or pricing issue stopping people from completing a purchase.

By integrating flexible systems, using your data correctly and investigating where automation can add value, you’ll be well-prepared to communicate more effectively, deliver exceptional customer service and ensure long-term resilience in an increasingly digital, fast-moving economy.