How Can CX Improve the Contact Centre?

A Customer Experience (CX)-first strategy is so critical to contact centre success, but what does industry-leading CX look like right now?

Here, we look at some of the most significant trends and insights behind the best customer experience (CX) strategies in the contact centre, so you can better understand what good looks like when benchmarking your operation.

What Does Good CX Look Like in the Contact Centre?

Here are 6 CX trends and initiatives we’re seeing in industry-leading contact centres right now:

1. Understanding Customers’ Pain Points

The very best contact centres and CX strategies are proactive. They put processes in place to help spot and resolve customers’ pain points – all to help drive a culture of improving the overall customer experience and driving down call volumes.

The very best contact centres and CX strategies are proactive.

Some of the best ways to capture this insight are to take your agents out for lunch for an honest conversation, stop tagging issues as ‘other’, and to make the customer a central figure in your boardroom – as suggested in our consultants panel article on 25 Ways to Proactively Spot Your Customers’ Pain Points.

2. Sharing the Contact Centre With the Wider Company

Contact centres committed to delivering fantastic CX also make sure they play their part in pushing insights into the wider business, to proactively ensure that their frontline customer service teams don’t exist in a silo.

Many use initiatives such as inviting the CEO to spend time on the contact centre floor, asking the frontline “what can we do better?”, and using data and insights to help other departments understand how they impact CX.

You can find more ideas and inspiration in this article on 12 Inspiring Tactics for Sharing the Call Centre With the Wider Company

3. Creating a Clear ‘Customer Access Strategy’

Some forward-thinkers also implement a Customer Access Strategy to help maintain an effective contact centre operation and underpin their wider CX strategy, as Brad Cleveland, consultant and keynote speaker, explains in our An Introduction to… Customer Access Strategy article:

Brad Cleveland

“A Customer Access Strategy is a well-documented, overall plan that guides your contact centre. It helps to think of it as a blueprint for your day-to-day operations, helping you make far better decisions when faced with challenges and questions you need to answer.

Covering everything from how your contact centre should be organized (with skills and knowledge), what your employees need, and more, it really helps to support the overall direction and longer-term strategy of your organization.

Those that don’t have a Customer Access Strategy in place risk decisions being more fragmented and haphazard and wasting a lot of time along the way.”

If you aren’t quite sure what a Customer Access Strategy is, then watch the video below to get started:

4. Delivering Against Metrics That Foster Great CX

It’s equally important that your metrics align with delivering a fantastic customer experience and don’t contradict your efforts.

The leading industry metrics – as seen our What Contact Centres Are Doing Right Now (2023 Edition) research are very customer-centric.

Customer satisfaction, service level, quality scores, and First Contact Resolution are being monitored across a majority of contact centres – with less than a third preoccupied with efficiency-centric metrics, such as cost per call.

5. Mapping Processes to Drive Continuous Improvement

Process mapping is a key component of CX. At the Specsavers Contact Centre in Nottingham, they create process maps to support ongoing improvements.

As John Forster, Head of Contact Centre Operations at Specsavers, explains, “Dedicate time to making process maps for everything you do. After all, if you don’t know what’s actually happening across all of your business processes, how can you make improvements?”

To discover what else we learnt on our site visit to Specsavers, read our article: 16 Things We Saw at the Specsavers Contact Centre in Nottingham

6. Embracing the Latest Technology

Industry-leading contact centres are also embracing the latest technology to deliver against their CX strategy and customer expectations, as evidenced What Contact Centres Are Doing Right Now (2023 Edition) research.

As the graph below shows, 10% of contact centres are already using ChatGPT, there’s been a significant jump in the number of contact centres using analytics, and an increasing number of contact centres are making smartphone apps available too.

TX Takes CX to the Next Level

Whilst a robust CX strategy is undoubtedly critical to success, some would argue that it’s only the tip of the iceberg and that CX is delivered far more effectively as part of a TX strategy, as Rob Clarke, Director and Co-Founder of Elev-8 Performance, explains in our An Introduction to Total Experience (TX) article:

“TX is an acronym for Total Experience – a strategy that combines brand, user, customer, employee experience, and more. It’s about bringing people together across the business with a single mission, in a unified way.

“Total Experience creates a more coherent strategy across all departments to wow customers, whereas a Customer Experience (CX) strategy only focuses on the external customer touchpoints – like the contact centre. In short, TX takes CX to the next level.”

As Katie Stabler, Founder and Director of Customer Experience at CULTIVATE, elaborates in our article on The 10 Pillars of EX (Employee Experience), “EX and CX go hand in hand; you can’t really have one without the other. But so few companies lean into this with the deliberate, cohesive design of the two.

“In its most simple form, I’m talking about the EX–CX Loop: Happy employees create great CX – which makes for a happy customer – which in turn results in a happy employee… and so we go round and round again.”

For more great information on improving customer experience in the contact centre, read these articles next:

• Building a Customer Experience Audit
• The Top 10 Customer Experience (CX) KPIs
• Customer Experience Management (CEM) – The Latest Thinking in Looking After Customers

Author: Megan Jones
Reviewed by: Jonty Pearce