As 2024 draws to a close, I had the the opportunity to sit down with Aaron Fox, the CEO here at TelXL, to discuss the highlights of the year, the challenges the company has faced, and what’s on the horizon for 2025. Aaron reflects on his achievements and the progress of his company, offering valuable insights into the rapidly evolving world of customer experience (CX) and contact centre technology.
Q: Aaron, what would you say is your biggest achievement of 2024?
AARON FOX: Personally, being recognised on the LDC’s “Top 50 Most Ambitious Business Leaders – Ones to Watch” list has been a huge highlight for me. It was a big honour to receive that recognition, and it really underlined all the hard work we’ve been doing here at TelXL. It was a reminder of the amazing progress we've made so far.
For TelXL, the growth of our Cxp product and proposition has been a standout achievement this year. We’ve been able to address the specific needs of the UK’s small and medium-sized contact centres and ICT channel. Our team has been phenomenal, and it’s their hard work that’s driving everything forward. We’re seeing real momentum, and it’s exciting.
Q: What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in 2024, both personally and professionally?
AARON FOX: On a personal level, keeping everything balanced has been a challenge. Juggling roles as a father, husband, friend, and CEO isn’t easy, but it’s rewarding. I couldn’t do any of it without the support of my wife, Zoe.
As for TelXL, the biggest challenge has been finding ways to do more with less. We're a relatively small, privately-owned and funded business with extremely ambitious goals. We've made some incredible progress considering, but it has been tough.
Q: What was the biggest surprise of 2024 for TelXL?
AARON FOX: The biggest surprise has been how slowly the UK channel has been to address the opportunity to serve small and medium-sized businesses, particularly in the contact centre space. Although we’ve had fantastic success with a select number of partners, it’s only recently that we’re seeing wider adoption of these opportunities. The green shoots are there, but it’s taken longer than anticipated.
Q: If you had to sum up 2024 in just three words, what would they be?
AARON FOX: Progress, challenging, rewarding.
Q: Now looking ahead to next year, what are the biggest industry trends you foresee?
AARON FOX: At the macro level, many of the trends we’ve been seeing will continue into 2025. Cloud adoption will keep advancing, and faster connectivity will continue to roll out. Cybersecurity will remain a top priority, along with data security and compliance.
I think AI will continue to evolve at a rapid pace throughout 2025. For the vast majority of businesses, they will spend time figuring out how to meaningfully apply AI and automation in their environments to drive value, both through cost reduction and through providing better customer service. I read an interesting stat recently, which was that 85% of CX leaders are set to trial AI through 2025 to really get under the skin of and quantify the real-world use cases.
There will also be a continued replacement of the huge amount of technology that was implemented at pace as a knee-jerk response to COVID19. The key this time around is that business leaders have learned from previous experiences, where they’ve only been using 20% of what they paid for. So as this technology comes up for renewal through the coming year, businesses will take these learnings and shop around for the right solutions that meet their specific needs, which really pushes the channel and the technology vendors alike to get things right.
Q: What do you think will be the biggest challenges the industry faces in 2025?
AARON FOX: The challenge for many businesses is that most consumers are not having a good time of it. Call abandonment rates are still nearly twice what they were pre-covid, speed to answer is nearly three times longer and as the queries become more complicated average duration times increase.
There are competing forces at work driving this. From the consumers side, the data shows there is an ever-increasing desire to just want to interact with a real person who can handle their needs quickly and seamlessly. For many businesses, their primary customer service goal is to drive down cost through automation and efficiencies. These driving forces are not aligned and herein lies the challenge.
If the right technologies are applied into businesses in the right way they can act as a broker between these two opposing forces. This then highlights a further challenge, which is technology is only as good as the education it comes with.
For the ICT Channel, that’s getting the right support and education they need to meaningfully identify and address the opportunities that sat in the UK market for contact centre technology. For the wider business community, that’s getting the right support and education they need in order to implement and utilise the right technology in the right way at the right price whilst meeting the needs of their customers.
We have also seen many of the established technology vendors continue to downsize as they try to figure out how to do more with less. This puts pressure on the ICT Channel to get the support and investment they need from the right technology vendor partnerships so they can support their customer's needs.
Q: How do you see AI developing in 2025?
AARON FOX: Many of the vendors in our industry are at the forefront of AI adoption and it will continue to be pushed in a big way. However, from a UK business perspective, I believe the next 12 months will see a big push in trialling and figuring out how to use AI to solve real-world problems. I think we’ve gone passed the initial hype of “AI can solve all of my problems”. The potential for AI is absolutely there but many businesses haven’t yet figured out the real-world application and what the specific use cases are that they need to optimise with and benefit from AI, and crucially without compromising on the quality of service they give to their customers. This focus will shape and drive AI over 2025.
Q: What are TelXL’s goals for the next year?
AARON FOX: In a nutshell, to keep going and scale on the great progress we’ve already achieved this year. Our target is to continue to grow through a select number of new meaningful channel partnerships that we mutually invest in. To continue to drive innovation and progress with our Cxp product, proposition and the education we push out with it to meet the needs of small and medium contact centres. Also, contact centre technology - by its very nature - is complex and critical. So another big focus of ours is to “keep it simple” and to keep simplifying all aspects of the Cxp product & proposition. We also want to do it all by staying true to ourselves, by being honest and transparent with our partners, whilst having some fun along the way.
Would you like to know more about TelXL's contact centre software platform, Cxp, and how it could help your business? Book a call today with a member of the team.