3 Fastest Growing Customer Service Channels in 2026
Customer expectations are changing faster than most contact centres can adapt.
Just a few years ago, most service interactions happened through phone calls and email. While those channels remain important, they're no longer where the biggest growth is happening.
Today's customers expect businesses to be available in the same places they communicate with friends and family. They want answers immediately, they want to switch between channels without repeating themselves, and increasingly, they expect service experiences that make use of rich media such as images and video.
For contact centre leaders, understanding which customer service channels are growing fastest is critical. Investing in the wrong channels can increase costs and complexity. Investing in the right ones can improve customer satisfaction, increase efficiency, and reduce avoidable contact volumes.
Here are the three customer service channels seeing the strongest growth and momentum heading into 2026.
1. Business Messaging Is Becoming a Mainstream Customer Service Channel
The strongest growth story in customer service continues to come from business messaging.
Customers have become used to messaging in their personal lives. Instead of waiting on hold or searching through an email inbox, they can send a message, carry on with their day, and return to the conversation when it suits them. That behaviour is now reshaping how people expect to interact with businesses.
According to The State of Business Messaging from WhatsApp for Business, based on Kantar research commissioned by Meta across 22 global markets, 73.3% of consumers now prefer asynchronous messaging when communicating with a business. The same research found that 66.8% of consumers feel frustrated when messaging is not offered as a contact option.
That matters for UK contact centres because messaging is no longer just a convenient extra. It is becoming part of the expected service experience.
The UK picture is equally clear. The 2026 Meta BCG Business Messaging Report states that 9 in 10 UK adults are frequent users of rich messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Messenger. It also found that 77% of surveyed enterprises already use AI in one-to-one customer messaging, with 88% planning to expand usage in the next year.
For contact centre leaders, this points to a clear shift. Customers already live in messaging channels, while enterprises are investing in richer, AI-enabled messaging experiences to support service, sales, updates and ongoing customer engagement.
WhatsApp is a particularly important part of that shift. It gives customers a familiar, mobile-first way to contact a business, while giving contact centres the ability to combine live agents, automation, AI, rich media and persistent conversation history in one place.
For many organisations, the question is no longer whether customers want messaging.
It is whether the contact centre is ready to support it properly.
2. AI-Powered Self-Service Is Growing Faster Than Traditional Support Channels
Customers increasingly want answers, not interactions.
That is why AI-powered self-service is becoming one of the fastest-growing customer experience channels in the industry.
Unlike traditional FAQ pages or static knowledge bases, modern self-service uses conversational AI, natural language search and automated workflows to help customers find answers without agent involvement.
Multiple 2026 customer support trend reports identify AI-powered support as one of the biggest shifts happening within the contact centre industry today.
The growth is being fueled by rising customer expectations. Zendesk's 2026 CX Trends report found that 74% of consumers now expect customer service to be available 24/7.
Providing round-the-clock service through traditional staffing models is expensive. AI-powered self-service gives organisations a scalable way to meet those expectations while reducing pressure on agents.
The biggest misconception is that AI self-service is replacing human support.
In reality, the most successful contact centres use AI to resolve routine enquiries while ensuring customers can move smoothly to a human when they need assistance. Research also shows that customers become frustrated when organisations fail to provide effective transitions between automated and human support.
The main goal is fewer unnecessary conversations.
3. Video-Enabled Customer Support Is Transforming Service Experiences
While video is not a customer service channel in its own right, it is becoming an increasingly important part of how support is delivered.
Historically, customer service has been dominated by text and voice. However, many problems are simply easier to explain visually.
Customers can show damage to a product. Agents can demonstrate a process. Businesses can answer common questions using short video content instead of lengthy written instructions.
This is reflected in evolving customer expectations. Zendesk's 2026 CX Trends report found that 76% of consumers would choose a company if they could share text, images and video within the same conversation. The same report also found that 82% of CX leaders believe organisations that ignore multimodal experiences will fall behind.
Customer experience research also ranks video-based support among the highest-performing interaction methods for customer satisfaction.
The growth of video support is showing up in several ways:
- Video FAQs replacing text-heavy help articles
- Video-guided self-service journeys
- Screen-sharing support sessions
- Rich media within messaging conversations
- AI-generated video knowledge content
For contact centres, the value extends beyond customer preference.
Many organisations are discovering that a 30-second video can often achieve what would otherwise require several pages of written instructions or a lengthy phone call.
What Should Contact Centre Leaders Prioritise?
The fastest-growing customer service channels all have something in common.
They reduce effort.
Messaging removes waiting. AI removes unnecessary interactions. Video removes confusion.
But success doesn't come from adding channels indiscriminately.
Research shows that customers care just as much about consistency between channels as they do about channel availability. Customer experience research found that 97% of consumers consider it important to move between channels without losing context.
That means the goal shouldn't be to launch as many channels as possible.
The goal should be to build a connected omnichannel support strategy where messaging, self-service, voice, and video all work together to create a seamless customer journey.
