7 Best Practices for a Modern Contact Center

By: Hebé Lugo

A modern contact center does more than just handle customer inquiries—it creates an experience that defines how consumers perceive your brand. Recent data shows that 86% of consumers are willing to pay more for a better interaction experience. In fact, customer experience is now considered the main competitive advantage for businesses—ranking even higher than price and product quality—according to a study by Walker.

Despite this, many contact centers struggle to meet customer expectations due to outdated processes and inadequate technology. A study by Calabrio revealed that:

• 60% of customer service agents say they lack the necessary technology to perform their jobs effectively.
• 34% of agents report not having access to the customer data they need when interacting with clients.

At Strategic Minds, we specialize in improving contact center operations, helping companies in highly competitive markets deliver superior customer experiences through better strategies and technological solutions.

So, how can you elevate your contact center’s performance and make it a true driver of business success?
Here are 7 best practices that will help transform your contact center into a competitive advantage:

1. Let automation reduce the workload. Don’t be afraid of technology. Sure, even Facebook has had famous service outages, but nowadays, cloud storage solutions are reliable, and the chances of failure are minimal, almost nonexistent. Business continuity requires a focused workforce that spends as little time as possible distracted by processes that can be automated. For instance, virtual agents for basic tasks that operate based on machine learning, handling essential responses.
2. Constantly train your staff. Not just based on what you want them to know but also on feedback from your agents themselves. Listen to what works, what doesn’t, and take action. Even the most familiar tools and applications have new versions every month, and sometimes it’s hard to adapt. New employees need to learn easily, and long-time employees need to feel comfortable. Provide all the necessary support.
3. Drive work outward. The variety of channels available in a contact center increases the options for upselling and cross-selling, as well as the possibilities for more creative promotions and ways to improve our customer databases. Develop personalized scripts for different types of customers and use automated tools that go beyond the initial contact.
4. Invest in analytical tools. Data analytics specialists have become an essential part of new marketing efforts. Don’t overlook their contributions, nor the value of investing in software to enhance your work. Measuring performance provides elements for making better decisions; remember, intuition and experience have limits in the face of the new technological landscapes offered by the competition
5. Explore new forms of management. Creative team management in a contact center will not only help achieve objectives but exceed them. Hiring the best, providing proper initial training, keeping an open-door policy for ideas, rewarding achievements, eliminating toxic behaviors that cause team stress, delegating responsibility, and implementing job shadowing are some ideas you can incorporate into your daily operations.
6. Move from a contact center to an experience center. Eliminate all those extra steps between the consumer and your client. Show etiquette and good manners even in automated recordings. Provide friendly options in situations such as network congestion or customer crises that take extra time to resolve. Manage performance based on data, optimize workflow, and keep technology and data easily accessible in the cloud so your agents can perform their tasks comfortably.
7. Adapt your services with the customer at the center. There are sentiment analysis tools—what do they tell you? Are you willing to break your paradigms in response to unfavorable feedback? Analytics and reports are there not to stress you out but to help you. Optimize your processes and customer interactions based on solid data, especially if you have the advantage of a contact center culturally identified with your consumers. Speak their language, use their colloquialisms, and react in the most friendly way possible.

There is a long way to go, as recent figures show that only 31% of companies strictly monitor the quality of interactions with their target consumers. And while 67% of organizations view access to real-time or near-real-time metrics as a very important feature, only a few (8%) obtain access to their metrics as soon as they are generated.

About Strategic Minds

Strategic Minds, founded in 2011 by Hebé Lugo in Puerto Rico, is a consultancy specializing in marketing and sales strategies, offering omnichannel services in Latin America and the United States. The staff at Strategic Minds’ Multichannel Contact Center has extensive experience using strategies to increase client sales, helping them make smart decisions on their growth journey. Strategic Minds focuses on implementing improvements in business operations, culture, marketing, sales, and all areas where sustained growth and profitable operations can be achieved.