Contact Center Optimization: 3 Essential Tips for Managers

In the world of customer service, the heart that keeps the lifeblood of customer satisfaction pumping is undoubtedly the contact center. It’s a central point from which all customer interactions across various channels are managed—an essential tool for businesses in maintaining relationships with customers. 

A notable 61% of customers switch to a competitor because of poor customer service¹. Today, an excellent product with bad customer service loses to a mediocre product with great customer service. This is what statistics are showing us.

Contact centers are the needle of the scale of customer satisfaction (CSAT), the core point where interactions happen. It’s the most essential tool to maintain a relationship with customers. Contact center optimization is not something contact center managers should do, rather something they must do.

Optimizing your contact center’s operations is critical to staying ahead in today’s dynamic market, where phone conversations demanding a wait in line just aren’t enough anymore.

Here’s how managers can facilitate contact center optimization with three strategic tips.

1. Contact Center Optimization: Omnichannel support

Customers today expect to engage with businesses on their terms, through channels they are comfortable with. Contact centers in 2024 are mostly omnichannel, but if your company’s one is stuck to the good old voice call without any other communication mean for customers, it’s probably losing money. 

Implementing omnichannel support means allowing your contact center to interact with customers via WhatsApp, Messenger, email, social media, live chat, and even text messaging, in addition to traditional phone support. In a nutshell, the first and easiest step managers can take to start a real contact center optimization.

This flexibility not only improves customer satisfaction by offering choice, but it also helps distribute the load more evenly across various channels, potentially reducing wait times and streamlining the service process.

For example, if a customer just needs to know what time you’re open for business, they’re more likely to scroll on your website than to call you. Maybe they can’t find the information right away and after some time they do end up calling your business. Making a chat available to them means less researching time for them, and a one less useless call for you, bringing together contact center optimization and time optimization for both managers & employees.

2. Contact Center Optimization: AI Automation.

Manual processes are often the kryptonite to efficiency in contact centers. Put simply, after making your contact center omnichannel, infusing it with AI is the next step in contact center optimization.

AI chatbots and voice bots are becoming increasingly common for two main reason:

• They’re available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all year long. This ensures continued service as per customers’ demand.
• They cut repetitive questions from agents’ schedules, allowing them to focus on more complex and meaningful tasks.

Some managers might think AI will lead their contact center to negative CSAT. It’s no secret that some customers may hold negative views on chatbots and voice bots due to negative experience. But it’s all about quality. AI assistants with defined use cases and a clear flow play a crucial role in contact center optimization.

Concretely, a voice bot might be in charge of answering repetitive questions and transferring calls to people and departments, while a chatbot can take on operative tasks like booking appointments, shipment checking, locating stores, and more depending on your vertical sector. It’s all about bringing together the human and virtual side of customer service to deliver a perfect, optimized mix that doesn’t keep customers waiting in line and relieves agent workload. Overall a great addition for managers to expand and expedite contact center optimization.

3. Contact Center Optimization: AI Voice Analytics

Most if not all contact centers record their calls. They do it for compliance reasons, to review interactions, to ensure legal protection, and more. Recording calls has become a commodity.

But recordings don’t allow for structured feedback. Conversations hoard a wealth of data about customer preferences, behaviors, script adherence, and more. To analyze all this data, a supervisor (or manager) should listen to every contact center conversation. They need to find interesting parts, analyze them, and give feedback to employees.

Leveraging AI voice analytics in your contact center can be a game-changer for identifying both pain points and successful tactics faster, smarter, and easier.

Conversations hoard a wealth of data about customer preferences, behaviors, script adherence, and more. AI Voice Analytics can transcribe and analyze voice interactions in real-time, giving supervisors immediate insights into customer sentiments, call quality, and agent performance. 

The best part is, supervisors and managers don’t even have to read the whole transcript, because sophisticated Voice Analytics can highlight items needing attention through smart tagging, email notifications, sentiment analysis, and more. 

This empowers managers to quickly pinpoint issues like recurring complaints or inefficient service approaches, and to also spot and replicate successful interaction strategies – all data that can also be used for self-service targeted agent training.

Additionally, the integral process of call recording for voice analytics serves a dual purpose by ensuring regulatory compliance. Recorded calls can be audited for adherence to legal standards, providing a safeguard for the company while simultaneously enhancing service quality.

Let Imagicle help you optimize your contact center.

Of course, this contact center optimization requires the right tools. Ideally easy to implement and use, intuitive, integrated with your calling platform. 
Managers, don’t look any further – turn to Imagicle for everything related to your contact center optimization. The Imagicle UCX Platform provides you with a sound Call Recording with Voice Analytics, human-like AI chatbots and virtual assistants, and even an Auto Attendant or Advanced Queueing system to streamline your call management. All directly infused in your calling platform.  Discover what we can do to enhance agent & supervisor experience.