Contact Center Optimization: Strategies & Examples

Today’s contact centers face many challenges: rising software costs, elevated employee turnover rates, and sky-high customer expectations. Even with the growing popularity of customer self-service, 61% of companies now report an increase in overall call volume.[*]

Effective contact center optimization helps businesses meet increasing customer and agent demands while lowering operating costs.

Here, we discuss what exactly contact center optimization is, its benefits, and how an optimized call center improves the customer experience.

• Overview
• Benefits
• Challenges
• Strategies
• Examples
• KPIs
• Platforms
• FAQs

What is Contact Center Optimization?

Contact center optimization is a set of strategies designed to improve overall call center operations, the customer experience, and agent engagement rates. An optimized contact center provides efficient and consistent customer service across voice and digital channels–throughout the entire customer journey.

Call center optimization takes a customer-centric, holistic approach to CX by evaluating and improving agent performance, self-service options, call routing flows, employee training, reporting and analytics, and more.

The Benefits of Contact Center Optimization

Contact center optimization offers a wide range of benefits for customers, agents, and the business as a whole. Operations are streamlines, agents experience less tedious work which leads to less turnover, and customers enjoy faster and more personalized service. The initial investment of time and resources is well worth the payoff.

Here is a closer look at the business benefits of optimizing contact center operations:

Improved Agent Experience

Contact center optimization means your contact center is appropriately staffed, with more agents working during peak call times so that employees don’t get overwhelmed or burnt out.

Another part of contact center optimization is appropriate software, ensuring that agents can handle all of their tasks on one dashboard without having to switch between applications or devices.

Additionally, optimized contact centers allow agents to work from home, which most workers prefer.[*]

Reduced Operating Costs

Optimizing your contact center reduces operating costs by:

• Optimizing employee schedules based on call volume to eliminate overstaffing/understaffing and shorten call queues
• Leveraging customer self-service solutions to free up live agents and entirely automate basic or routine support requests
• Using cloud-based CCaaS solutions makes it easier to transition agents to remote work, lowering equipment/hardware costs, eliminating the need for a physical office, and giving agents more autonomy
• Providing agents with AI-powered support features, like Agent Assist and automated workflows, results in less employee turnover and shortens average handle time (AHT)

Higher Customer Satisfaction

Modern customers expect the brands they do business with to provide efficient, friendly, and personalized support. 70% of consumers now expect the agents they interact with to have access to the full context of the interaction.[*]

Contact center optimization increases customer satisfaction by:

• Leveraging tools like CTI screen pops and Agent Assist to give agents in-conversation access to essential CRM data, internal knowledge base documentation, notes from additional agents, account history, and more Providing omnichannel support so that customers can interact on the channels they are most comfortable using
• Reducing wait times and call queues
• Offering customer self-service
• Offering automated customer callbacks so customers don’t have to wait on hold
• Implementing automated CSAT and Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys and making improvements accordingly

Better Insights Into Business Performance

Reporting and analytics are a large part of contact center optimization. With advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and NLP, companies can easily track business performance and ensure goals are being met.

AI-powered CCaaS platforms not only provide constant real-time monitoring of key performance indicators, but they can also track keywords, customer sentiment, recurring customer issues, and even offer suggested next steps. This enables supervisors to obtain actionable business insights at a glance.

Boosted Agent Productivity

Contact center optimization generally includes several automation tools, such as automated call summaries, follow-up scheduling, and task assignments. These tools allow agents to focus less on tedious manual busy work and more on making genuine, meaningful customer connections.

Gamification tools like leaderboards and reward systems boost agent motivation, productivity, and overall job satisfaction rates.

Contact Center Optimization Challenges

When coming up with a contact center optimization strategy, it's important to first think through what specific challenges you want to address. For example, are customers complaining about long wait times or ineffective service? Are employees unhappy and leaving frequently, leaving the company scrambling to hire and train new team members? Or is it difficult to even ascertain the biggest issues because there is a lack of visibility into the data or metrics?

Here are some examples of challenges that can be addressed with contact center optimization:

Siloed Systems and Data Fragmentation

Contact center optimization is largely focused on improving customer service by collecting data to create more personalized experiences.  Large amounts of data that are not organized properly can become difficult to access when they are needed by agents.

Additionally, call notes and other data collected by agents will not necessarily be accessible to agents in different departments or who are communicating with the same customers on different channels. This results in data silos and fragmentation.

In order to address this challenge, companies can:

• Build in deep CRM integrations to their CCaaS systems
• Automate updating customer profiles
• Utilize an omnichannel system that allows agents to view all channels on one dashboard
• Leverage AI-powered Agent Assist to pull relevant customer data in real time.

High Agent Turnover and Burnout

As you are implementing a call center optimization strategy, it may put more pressure on agents, especially in the beginning phases. Agents may need to learn how to navigate new tools and systems. They may receive more correction from supervisors than usual, or their may be an increase in work due to opening up new channels for customer contact.

For agents that are used to only communicating with customers via voice, transitioning to using text and messaging channels may be particularly stressful, ultimately leading to burnout and costly agent turnover.

Call centers can be proactive about agent turnover by:

• Signing up for personalized onboarding with their CCaaS provider
• Creating a training program for supervisors with clearly defined goals
• Creating a training program for agents that lets them practice using any new tools before interacting with customers
• Utilizing call monitoring tools such as Whisper, Listen, and Barge

Inconsistent Customer Experiences Across Channels

For call centers that are introducing new channels of communication for the first time, such as text, social media messaging, chatbots and voicebots, and email, it may be a challenge to ensure that customer experiences are consistent across channels.

Many consumers will contact a company using several different channels even for one transaction. For example, a customer may call to schedule an appointment, but then send a text message asking to change the date.

Companies can improve cross-channel consistency by:

• Utilizing an omnichannel provider that combines multiple channels on one agent dashboard
• Create automations that will update customer profiles with agent notes
• Automated follow-up reminders

Lack of Real-Time Visibility Into Performance Metrics

An important consideration when choosing a CCaaS provider is whether the solution includes real-time or historical analytics, and whether those analytics include performance metrics such as average speed of answer, abandoned call rate, escalation rate, and cost per contact. Historical data may be sufficient for smaller contact centers, and is almost always more cost effective, but a lack of real-time analytics may be a challenge for companies that are experiencing growth.

For example, real-time performance metrics may be used by supervisors to offer more effective on-the-job training, as well as to intervene before a customer is lost. Real-time metrics can also be used in gamification leaderboards to motivate team members, increase engagement, and decrease turnover.

Manual Processes That Limit Scalability and Efficiency

Another challenge for many contact centers is inefficiencies in operations. For example, it may seem like a small thing for an agent to spend 3 minutes after a call to create a tag, make notes, schedule a follow-up, and update a customer profile, but those three minutes add up when the number of calls increases and the number of agents increases. Additionally, there is a chance for errors to be made after every single interaction.

Contact centers can save time and money, reduce stress on agents, and decrease human error by automating as much as possible. Some CCaaS platforms enable companies to build workflow automations with triggers, conditions and actions in a graphical, no-code interface.

Common Optimization Pitfalls to Avoid

Now that you've thought through the benefits you wish to obtain and the challenges you'd like to overcome with contact center optimization, let's take a look at some of the pitfalls you will want to avoid. Most CCaaS providers offer assistance for implementation and onboarding so that it goes as smoothly as possible, but there are still some issues to be aware of.

Here are some of the most common pitfalls companies fall into when implementing contact center optimization:

• Overloading agents with KPIs: Tracking too many metrics at once creates confusion and makes it difficult to discern what the most important issues are
• Relying too much on AI: It may be tempting to send most customers to effective and affordable AI-powered virtual agents, but too much reliance on AI can frustrate customers and result in inaccuracies that aren't caught right away
• Chasing AHT at the cost of quality: AHT is one of the most important KPIs to track and improve, but you will want to make sure that agents and customers feel they are getting enough time on call to resolve issues without being rushed
• Too many marketing messages and surveys: Automations make it easy to send out mass marketing messages but sending out too many will annoy customers. Surveys should be short and sweet
• Automating the wrong interactions: Many interactions can and should be automated such as appoinment scheduling and bill payment, but for more complex interactions like customer questions and concerns, using a real agent can prevent misunderstandings and save time
• Overly complicated IVR menus: IVR menus are great for relieving stress on agents and reducing wait times, but you will want to ensure that your IVR menu makes sense and is easy to follow with only as many options as necessary and no submenus if possible
• Ignoring employee feedback: Your employees are on the front line every day communicating with customers and they are your best source of data as far as what is and isn't working and what improvements are needed

Contact Center Optimization Strategies

Once you have solidified your contact center optimization goals, it's time to pick a strategy. There are as many contact center optimization strategies as there are companies. Each strategy will be customized to fit your companies goals, working style, and budget. You may want to focus on KPIs, customer service, or employee training. Whichever strategy you choose, remain flexible and open to tweaking the strategy or changing it completely. Your needs will likely change as new data comes in.

There are many ways to optimize contact center performance. Here are some of the best strategies.

Monitor Contact Center Metrics

Whatever is monitored improves, and monitoring key metrics in your contact center is a great place to start as it will inform you where the greatest weaknesses in your contact center are. Most CCaaS platforms include automatic and around-the-clock call center monitoring with customizable reports and alerts.

Important call center metrics to track include:

• Average handle time: Average length of time that agents spend interacting with customers in order to resolve an issue
• Average time on hold: The average length of time callers spend waiting for an agent
• Customer satisfaction: Collects and analyzes customer feedback from surveys
• Queue and abandonment rates: Percentage of calls that are abandoned by the customer
• First call resolution rate (FCR): Percentage of calls that are resolved during the first interaction
• Call trends: Identifies peak call times, common issues, popular IVR choices, most used communication channel, etc.
• Customer loyalty: Divides the total of return customers by the total number of customers to get a percentage of repeat customers

Train and Coach Agents

For call center agents to be productive, they must be fully trained. But agent training programs can be expensive and time-consuming, especially during a period of rapid growth.

Supervisors can streamline the onboarding process by building a comprehensive knowledge base, using generative AI tools to create call scripts, and creating playlists of call recordings to demonstrate dos and don’ts. On-demand videos and screen recordings are also helpful.

Call monitoring tools such as Listen, Whisper, and Barge give new agents a chance to practice on live phone calls with supervision and intervention when necessary.

Use Call Center Gamification

Call center gamification tools have been shown to increase employee engagement, improve retention rates, and make work more satisfying and enjoyable. Gamification is becoming more popular in call centers and the global gamification market is projected to surpass 116.68 billion by 2032.[*]

Gamification platforms enable supervisors to select which agent metrics to track (such as conversion rates, first contact resolution rate, upsells, etc.) and then create a leaderboard and reward system to entice employees with friendly competition.

Improve the Quality of Service

Providing quality service is essential for businesses in every industry. Over 58% of customers have stated that they are willing to pay higher prices to receive better customer support.[*]

To improve the quality of service, start with a clear strategy and a list of best practices for agents. Next, interactions should be monitored across communication channels using recording software and speech analytics tools. After enough data has been collected, you will be able to see where improvements can be made, such as updating IVR systems, administering additional agent training, implementing self-service, etc.

Use Workforce Management and Optimization Tools

Adequately staffing call centers and managing employee schedules and time off requests is time-consuming and frustrating. Understaffing means a loss of productivity and a decline in the overall quality of customer service.

Workforce management and optimization tools automate this entire process by forecasting staffing needs based on call volume data, creating employee schedules, and enabling agents to submit time-off and trading requests virtually.

Automate Processes Where Possible

Contact center software platforms leverage generative AI and other technologies to automate repetitive and tedious processes that would otherwise be time-consuming for agents. Automations improve operational efficiency and relieve stress on live agents.

Common call center automation includes:

• Call scheduling: Automatically schedule calls to customers when predetermined conditions are met such as a callback or website request
• Chatbots: Text-based website chatbots interact with customers 24/7/365 to answer common questions and handle basic processes such as making payments and scheduling appointments
• Automated emails and SMS messages: Sends out welcome messages, follow-ups, and promotional material automatically based on preset triggers
• Call summaries: Automatically creates a summary for each customer interaction
• Auto dialing tools: Automatically dials numbers on a call list and only connects an agent when a person answers
• Task assignment: NLP identifies when an action item is brought up during or call or meeting (ex.: let’s meet next Tuesday) and automatically creates a task

Choose the Right Contact Center Software

Contact center technology is essential for optimization, but choosing the right solution for your business is key. There is a wide variety of platforms, each with different strengths, weaknesses, and pricing options.

Some things to consider when selecting a CCaaS solution:

• Security and reliability: If your company needs a higher level of security and reliability, look for things like E2EE, HIPAA compliance, SSO, uptime service level agreements (SLAs), etc.
• Price and value: When researching providers, it’s important to note not only the price per seat, but also what features are included in each plan, agent training and installation costs, necessary add-on features, and hidden taxes/fees
• Scalability: If your company is planning to scale, make sure that you choose a provider that can accommodate the needs of larger call centers
• Features: Make sure the provider you choose offers the features you need and includes them in the pricing plan you can afford
• Hardware compatibility: If your contact center will use hardware such as desk phones and headsets, take a look at what brands your preferred provider is compatible with and if they include phones with contracts

A/B Test Contact Center Strategies

A/B testing, or split testing, allows contact centers to test out two different approaches to customer engagement and determine which one works best for their specific customer base.

Companies start by choosing two different strategies they want to test for effectiveness- for example, do customers prefer agents to use active listening or follow a structured script? A certain percentage of calls will be routed to agents following a script, while the rest will be routed to agents instructed to respond intuitively.

After collecting customer data through surveys and KPI reports, admins can measure the effectiveness of each strategy, gain insights, and determine the best course of action.

Use Performance Monitoring and Reporting

Monitoring call center performance is essential to consistent, high-quality support. Companies should first determine which metrics they are most concerned with, then set goals and benchmarks accordingly.

Scorecards can be used to enable supervisors to grade calls according to a list of relevant criteria, helping the company address problematic patterns quickly.

Some agent performance metrics to consider:

• Effectiveness at problem-solving
• Agent attitude and tone of voice
• Overall competency
• Employee engagement
• Agent productivity

Adopt Omnichannel Listening

Omnichannel listening, or social listening, is a strategy to monitor the public opinion of your company along with industry trends and competitor analysis. Social listening creates a holistic view of who your audience is, what they want, and why.

Omnichannel listening tools automatically track any mentions of your brand as well as industry hashtags to identify frequently asked questions, common issues, preferences, and more so that you can adequately address specific customer needs.

Examples of Successful Contact Center Optimization

The ways in which contact center optimization can solve problems and improve service are endless. If you are not sure how to begin, it might help to look at what other companies have done and how contact center optimization has helped them reach their goals. From improving the customer experience to lowering the bottom line, we've collected a few examples to show you specifically what conatct center optimization can do.

Here are a few use cases:

• A healthcare provider began monitoring call center activity and found a high number of repeat calls occurring on a specific IVR path. Upon further investigation, the director of customer service learned that the majority of repeat callers were patients who requested a 90-day prescription but only received a 30-day prescription and had to call the company again. The healthcare provider added a step in the IVR flow to confirm the prescription length, thereby ensuring that patients received the correct prescription for the correct number of days on their first request.[*]
• A health insurer had set a goal to increase customer self-service usage to reduce call volume and cut costs. The plan administrator determined that the reason most callers were requesting a live agent was because they wanted to confirm whether a specific doctor was covered in their PPO plan. The plan administrator worked with the IVR design team to build voicebots that were able to look up a doctor’s name and determine whether they were covered under the plan.[*]
• An internet service provider (ISP) began monitoring IVR interactions and found that 30% of calls were related to router issues. All router-related calls were directed to the customer service department where an agent would walk the customer through a reboot, and if that didn’t work, the call was transferred to technical support. However, about half of these callers had already tried rebooting before calling, and therefore time was being wasted. With this insight, the call center manager worked with the IVR director to route customers who had initiated a device reboot in the past 24 hours directly to technical support. This initiative decreased AHT by 3% and agent transfers by 5%.[*]

How to Use AI & Automation in Contact Center Optimization

Artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) have experienced explosive growth in nearly every market, and have led to some extremely useful technological advancements in the contact center software industry. CCaaS providers use artificial intelligence and automation in a number of ways to help companies improve customer experience, increase productivity, reduce hold times, and improve the bottom line.

Here are some ways to use AI and automation in your contact center:

• Self-service: AI-powered self-service tools such as chat bots, voice bots, online ticketing and scheduling, etc., help reduce call volume and wait times and increase customer satisfaction
• Smart routing: AI-powered IVR systems can converse with callers in natural language and automatically route calls to the best agent based on skills, longest idle time, and more
• Real-time agent assistance: AI assistants retrieve relevant data on callers in real-time, or deliver answers to customer questions from internal knowledge bases that are displayed for agents right when they need them
• Quality and coaching automation: Virtual assistant are able to detect when agents are speaking too fast, not communicating clearly, or giving inaccurate information
• After call work: AI is used to automate after call work such as call tagging, summaries, after call notes, etc.
• Sentiment analysis: AI assistants detect customer sentiment and can alert a supervisor before a call gets to the point where the customer hangs up or escalates
• Marketing and promotions: Marketing texts and emails and sales notifications are sent automatically to custoemrs who have opted-in. AI is able to customize text messages
• Task creation and assignment: AI tools can create and assign tasks automatically whenever it detects an action item such as "I'll send you that report tomorrow"
• Appointment reminders and confirmation:AI can be used to automate appointment reminders and confirmation texts so that nothing falls through the cracks

Contact Center Optimization KPIs

There are hundreds of key performance metrics to track in a contact center. It is counterproductive to track everything at once, so you will want to start out by tracking those metrics that will give you the best data that's relevant for reaching your business goals.

Here are some of the most important for optimizing operations, service, and overall customer experience:

• First Contact Resolution (FCR): FCR rate is the percentage of interactions that are resolved during the initial customer contact. FCR rates can be increased by implementing better agent training programs
• Average Handle Time (AHT): AHT is the average amount of time that contact center agents spend interacting with customers. AHT can be reduced with tools like screen pops and CRM integrations
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Customer satisfaction is measured by administering surveys to customers and asking them to rate their experience. CSAT can be improved with automations and self-service options
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS measures customer loyalty by asking customers how likely they are to recommend a product or service
• Occupancy Rate: This is the percentage of available units that are in use by customers, for example, the percentage of hotel rooms that are being rented out at a given time. Occupancy rate can be increased with a good marketing strategy and improvements to customer service
• Most Popular IVR Selection: The most common IVR selection will tell you where you need to focus your efforts and how to most efficiently staff the contact center
• Keywords and Key Phrases: Words and phrases that are brought up over and over again by customers can inform decisions on self-service tools, agent training, etc.
• Customer Sentiment: AI-powered tools detect whether customers are happy or frustrated by picking up on key words, tone, etc. 

Contact Center Optimization Tools and Platforms

The CCaaS industry is huge and there are a number of providers out there, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The best option for you will depend on your budget, company size, feature requirements, and what tools and apps your company s already using. Selecting a CCaaS provider is an important decision and it's important to do some research.

Here is a quick comparison and overview of some of our favorite contact center optimization platforms.

FAQs