The contact centre is often maligned. But at a time of digital everything and omnichannel everywhere, its value to organisations as diverse as retailers and utilities remains undiminished. The challenge for these companies is getting customer service right. While executives understand how important building a customer-centric strategy is for their business, they’re not always clear on what the journey should look like.

In fact, it must focus on three areas: ensuring customers feel heard, agents feel valued, and the brand remains trusted. There are no easy fixes. But the prize for those who succeed is too important to ignore.

The world is changing

Customer experience (CX) is the foundation on which successful businesses are usually built. But too often, board priorities are dangerously misaligned with those of their customers. While the former may focus on cost, revenue, sales and agent metrics, customers want different things. They value elements like first contact resolution, choice of channels, short queues and polite customer agents.

Indeed, according to a recent survey conducted by ContactBabel, over half of customers said that short queuing times were most important to them when contacting an organisation. Additionally, over a quarter of customers added that a choice of channels was the most important thing for them, with 40 percent identifying polite agents as a priority for them.

But no business operates in a vacuum, and market trends continue to evolve at pace. Today’s post-pandemic consumers are more digitally savvy, and demand the streamlined, personalised experiences they’ve grown accustomed to through use of commercial technology. Yet at the same time, a cost-of-living crisis has made them more cautious about spending.

Those same economic headwinds have made life difficult for businesses. Conscious of their budgets, many Contact Centres are still saddled with legacy infrastructure and IT point solutions which are difficult to integrate. The resulting data silos make it challenging to gain a 360-degree view of each customer across channels—leading to a disjointed, impersonal experience. The employee experience (EX) also suffers from sub-par technology and processes, driving up attrition rates and dissatisfaction.

Start with EX

In fact, good EX is where customer service excellence begins. Staff need to have the right tools, information and processes to hand to do their jobs properly. Fail in this, and the Contact Centre will be left with frustrated agents and annoyed customers. Yet the trend towards mass remote working has brought with it a new set of challenges. It’s no coincidence that three major Contact Centre challenges are employee related: hiring, increased workload and attrition.

Businesses should aspire to create a new cohort of Super Agents, armed with integrated, cloud-based tools that enhance productivity, customer insight and collaboration wherever they work. These should feature AI and automation to eliminate mundane manual tasks, drive customer self-service and enable agents to provide more empathetic service. Technology can also help in non-customer facing use cases—by improving learning and development opportunities, enhancing flexibility through better workforce management, and even increasing performance through gamification techniques.

A happy, motivated Contact Centre team that feels valued by their employer is more likely to mean a happier set of customers.

A five-point plan

We can highlight five key areas of focus in the Contact Centre for organisations to improve CX.

Flexibility: A cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) model will seamlessly support hybrid working for employees, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) by reducing up-front CapEx and ongoing IT maintenance costs. The right SaaS platform, with open API integrations to other systems like CRM, can also enhance CX and EX by giving agents more insight into customers for faster issue resolution.

Omnichannel: Today’s customer journeys rarely start and end in the same channel. At the same time, costs are mounting. According to Contact Babel, the average cost of an inbound call is 70% more than email and 96% more than a web chat. An omnichannel Contact Centre strategy offers more choice to customers while delivering a more joined-up and personalised experience, at potentially lower cost.

AI-driven efficiency: Rising customer demand, tight budgets and staff shortages are taking their toll. But AI and automation technologies can help by taking on repetitive manual tasks to free-up in-demand staff, enabling customers to self-serve, and surfacing insight from huge volumes of data which can be used to enhance CX.

Super Agents: As mentioned, customers are increasingly demanding excellence in CX. But staff attrition rates remain stubbornly high and disjointed tools only worsen EX and customer frustration. The right SaaS tools across Workforce and Knowledge Management, Unified Communications, Analytics and more will empower Contact Centre employees to become Super Agents, capable of providing empathetic and personalised CX.

Data and insight: Contact Centres are generating more data than ever from customer interactions. But that’s only part of the battle. By applying intelligent analytics to that data, they can better understand customer and employee sentiment, improve first contact resolution, better manage agent performance and optimise the customer journey.

What’s up for grabs

For those businesses able to transform their Contact Centres, there are rich rewards in store. Research tells us that CX “leaders” are able to achieve more than double the revenue growth of “laggards”. But it’s not just about the bottom line. Increased loyalty and repeat business, market differentiation and enhanced employee engagement are also up for grabs.

No two Contact Centres are alike. But by sticking to some emerging best practices, businesses can increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and revenue, while reducing staff churn. That marks a clear path to sustainable growth.