Optimize Contact Center Efficiency: 20+ Focus Areas 

Contact centers are the epicenter of a company’s customer service, communication, engagement, and retention. A modern and efficient contact center is required to deliver on a brand’s promise of exceptional customer experience, seamless customer journey, and convenient service.

Additionally, contact center efficiencies lead to:

• Decrease in operational costs and budget optimization
• Improvement in call handling times and first-call resolutions
• Boost in employee productivity and effectiveness
• Better workforce management and employee collaboration

In this guide, we’ll discuss how you can leverage advanced contact center technology, processes, AI, and automations to improve operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and employee experience.

Free Report: → Benchmarking Contact Center Efficiency for CX Success

AI and Automation for Enhanced Productivity

AI and automation empower agents with real-time assistance and streamlined processes to boost productivity and efficiencies.

Dynamic scripting and automated workflows

Both automated workflows and dynamic scripting — common features in advanced contact center automation — can boost productivity and improve your overall service level.

They ensure agents have context-sensitive scripts that meet customers’ needs and automated processes to streamline interactions. This can improve consistency while offering more personalized customer experiences. It also reduces the average call handle time, freeing agents to manage more calls overall.

Real-time transcription and post-interaction summarization

Most agents have post-call work that can slow them down. This work may include creating call summaries or submitting notes to document the interaction.

However, AI-driven tools can significantly reduce an agent’s after-call work by automatically generating live transcripts and summaries. This enables agents to eliminate manual note-taking, seamlessly transfer calls with context, and accelerate engagement with the next customer.

Predictive analytics for workforce optimization

Certain contact center solutions offer workforce engagement capabilities, including predictive analytics, to optimize staffing and enhance employee engagement.

Predictive analytics can anticipate call volumes and adjust staffing accordingly. It can also provide suggestions to ensure you always have the right combination of skilled agents. This can minimize wait times, optimize agent utilization, and ensure that your callers always have access to experienced agents equipped to address their needs.

Contextual Continuity Across Channels

These days, many customers prefer an omnichannel experience. One study by Zendesk found that 62% of customers think experiences between physical and digital spaces should be seamless. In another, 40% of consumers stated that “multiple options for communicating” was the most important feature of a company’s service department.

Unified omnichannel experience

Customers’ interactions with brands are now quite complex and winding. For example, they may start by sending a message on social media and follow up with a phone call several days later if the issue hasn’t been resolved.

As a result, agents should use contact center software that integrates with their CRM. They’ll have access to a customer’s full interaction and purchase history, allowing them to personalize and improve support regardless of whether the customer contacts them through phone, chat, social media messaging, or email. An omnichannel experience is essential to creating frictionless interactions regardless of customer channel.

Cross-channel integration for efficient resolutions

Maintaining contextual continuity allows agents to address inquiries more effectively. Despite this, many agents struggle to offer seamless support across communication channels.

Our data found that 71% of call center agents struggle to meet customers’ needs when switching between multiple communication channels.

Adopting a single-platform approach and enabling seamless integrations across channels with breakdown data silos and enhancing operational efficiencies. When agents can view a customer’s entire history and access multiple communication channels on a single dashboard, they can quickly and efficiently resolve customer inquiries, leading to higher satisfaction.

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Streamline Operations Through Better Tech Integration

You likely already have an existing (and very thorough) tech stack. Use integrations to streamline processes and improve the agent experience to maximize contact center efficiency.

CRM and cloud-native platforms

Your CRM software holds vital customer information, including purchase and support history, that your contact center agents must access during interactions. Thus, integrate your CRM with the contact center platform to centralize customer data.

Doing so will reduce the need to switch between systems, improve agent productivity, ensure that nothing is missed, and improve the customer experience.

Omnichannel technology

Customers often seek assistance from brands across multiple platforms, making it harder for single-channel contact centers to keep up.

Instead of asking them to manage separate phone systems, live chat software, and social media management tools, consolidate the interactions into a single platform to provide a unified experience. This allows agents to switch between channels without losing context, which means they can deliver better and more personalized service.

AI and automation for scalability

Contact center leaders can implement AI tools to automate routine and time-consuming tasks like call routing, basic query resolution, and post-call analysis. These customer service automations can deliver the following results:

• Agents are free to tackle complex interactions when chatbots, interactive voice response, and FAQ pages on your site can manage basic inquiries.
• Customer calls are routed to the right department the first time, reducing hold times and transfers.
• Repetitive tasks are reduced or eliminated, preventing manual error and allowing agents to spend more of their working day helping customers.
• Agent productivity increases without raising the risk of burnout.

Implement a Performance Management Framework

Well-trained and high-performing agents will be more productive and able to implement new processes more successfully. To support this, contact center leaders must have a clear and transparent framework for tracking and improving the center’s performance.

Use a holistic approach with stakeholder engagement

When looking for ways to improve processes and agent training, gathering input from all stakeholders, including staffing managers, call center leaders, and frontline agents, is often most effective.

Each stakeholder group will have its understanding of potential pain points or challenges and may have creative solutions for resolving them. Agents, for example, will have a helpful front-line understanding of whether or not the current call scripts are effective for customer interactions or if processes are slowing them down. Business leaders would have more insight into potential staffing issues affecting the customer experience.

Having collaborative and holistic approaches to identify areas for improvement and devising solutions can significantly impact operational efficiency. And when agents are involved in formulating a solution, they may be more likely to implement it enthusiastically.

Combine quantitative and qualitative insights

It’s important to use quantitative and qualitative data to understand how your contact center operates and what impacts agent productivity, revenue, and the customer experience.

Quantitative data is any data that can be expressed in hard, reported numbers. You’ll use key performance metrics (which we’ll discuss later) to track data points such as customer satisfaction scores and first-call resolution rates. For example, you can see if the number of calls handled drops off or if customers become less likely to recommend your business to others.

Qualitative data is essential to understanding quantitative data at a high level. Nonnumerical data may be more complex and include agent or customer feedback in written responses.

For example, you may use customer surveys to assess customers’ satisfaction with your company’s services or experiences.

Continuous customer feedback gathering can help uncover patterns, emerging trends, and gaps in the service provided. These actionable insights will be critical in prioritizing the areas of improvement and efficiencies that can have an immediate and significant impact on the customer experience.

Customer feedback and performance metrics should be reviewed regularly. This can help you make incremental improvements and address potential issues in real time.

Must-Track Contact Center Efficiency Metrics

There is a long list of call center metrics leaders should track to monitor everything from agent performance to the customer experience. However, there are a few specific key performance indicators that you should track when assessing call center performance as it relates to efficiency.

First contact resolution

The first-contact resolution metric tells you how often your team can resolve a customer’s issue the first time they contact you. It is also sometimes called the first-call resolution rate.

This metric is essential in high-stakes industries like finance and healthcare. Solving issues during the first interaction is critical for customer trust and satisfaction. Reducing the number of attempts customers make and the time spent trying to resolve a single issue increases efficiency significantly.

Agent utilization and occupancy rate

Your agent utilization and occupancy rates tell you how much time agents spend handling customer calls and other critical tasks, such as completing after-call work. These metrics compare agents’ “active” time working on customer calls with their total logged-in time, which can measure how busy or productive they are during their shifts.

This is where tooling and automation help behind the scenes, assisting agents in documenting interactions, surfacing helpful resources, and minimizing unnecessary clicks.

To ensure balanced agent workloads, you should monitor their active versus idle time. You want to increase productivity without causing agent burnout, so an optimal occupancy rate is usually around 85-90%.

Cost per contact

The cost per contact is the average cost of each customer interaction. This metric is particularly important for retail and financial services, as it can help track opportunities for efficiency improvements that can lower costs.

For example, you may realize that you’re overstaffed and your costs are increasing. Expanding self-service options could reduce costs and agent workload.

Customer effort score

The customer effort score measures the ease of customer interactions. It’s particularly important in omnichannel contact centers, as it allows you to identify areas where processes are causing delays or increased burdens in customer support.

Analyze this with a customer-centric mindset. If it’s hard for customers to get help, they will seek expedited live help across multiple channels, even if using self-service options is in their best interest.

Call abandonment rate

Your call abandonment rate is the percentage of inbound calls the customer ends before receiving service. A common reason for call abandonment is long hold times, which may reflect potential agent utilization or staffing issues.

However, if you deploy relevant announcements, self-service IVRs and IVAs, and queue callbacks, this metric may indicate deflection. Balance these efficiency initiatives with customer survey responses.

Customer satisfaction and net promoter score

The customer satisfaction (CSAT) score and net promoter score (NPS) are two key metrics that help you track how clients feel about their interaction with your brand.

CSAT scores provide the level of satisfaction a customer has with your brand and their experiences, while NPS reflects customer loyalty and their likelihood to recommend your brand to others.

They’re widely used to measure customer sentiment and are often assessed alongside customer retention, churn, and other customer satisfaction metrics to provide deeper insights.

Different Metrics for Different Industries

Each industry has unique benchmarks and measurements of success. Let’s review how customer support teams may need to leverage different call center performance metrics based on their industry.

Retail and financial services

Financial services and retail businesses should focus on the following:

• Cost per contact
• Call abandonment rates
• Customer satisfaction scores
• First call resolution
• Average handle time

Ledi Lapaj, director of CX for Bank-al-Etihad, recently shared that the finance industry requires a “balanced mix of metrics” considering efficiency and customer satisfaction. He went on to say:

“A key metric is first call resolution. It directly impacts customer satisfaction, as customers often expect quick, accurate problem-solving. CSAT surveys provide real-time feedback on specific interactions, which helps in understanding sentiment at the micro-level. Additionally, tracking employee satisfaction is crucial, as satisfied employees tend to offer better customer service.

Finally, using quality monitoring through call audits or AI-driven sentiment analysis can uncover insights about customer efforts, compliance, customer needs, and agent performance.”

Thus, you might enhance self-service options like live chatbots and FAQs to reduce dependency on agents for routine customer queries.

Healthcare

Healthcare contact centers should prioritize first-contact resolution over average handle time. When agents prioritize empathy and thoroughness, their average handle time will likely be higher. Stronger interactions can improve patient outcomes and satisfaction.

In our recent report, former CareMax CXO Nicole Cable shared the following: “Average handle time is a phantom metric because it forces the agent to rush through the call, which then impacts the patient satisfaction score. That is something we need to be mindful of.”

Technology and telecommunications

Call centers supporting technology and telecommunications companies should measure the adoption of digital channels, including self-service portals and automated chatbots. Leaders should also track customer effort scores to evaluate the overall ease of support.

How Leaders Can Influence Efficiency

Call center leaders can improve efficiency by choosing the right tools and processes. They should also empower their agents to do their work well through training, flexibility, feedback, and engagement strategies.

Empowering agents

Cultivate a supportive environment where agents feel empowered to take the time needed on each call. This starts with rigorous agent training, which should include hard skills like product knowledge and dynamic scripting, as well as soft skills like active listening and empathy.

Make sure your agents know what results you want to prioritize. In healthcare and finance, for example, you may stress that agents should spend the time needed to fully understand a customer’s concern and that customer satisfaction scores matter most.

Call role-playing and training that features call summaries or call recordings can help agents understand the standard of service your brand wants to offer.

Using feedback loops and gamification

Call center leaders may use the following to improve agent skill development and performance:

• Regular sessions to gather group and individual feedback that can improve performance
• Agent focus groups to facilitate team skill development through training
• Gamified performance incentives to keep agents engaged and motivated

The above strategies can help keep contact center agents excited about their jobs, improving productivity, job satisfaction, and retention rates.

Encouraging agent autonomy

Train agents on flexible problem-solving, allowing them to make decisions within certain guidelines. Agents feeling equipped to come up with personalized solutions can reduce escalations and result in faster resolutions.

Contact Center Efficiency Starts With the Right Platform: Nextiva

Operational efficiency requires the right processes and data tracking, which allow contact centers to become more productive. As your center increases efficiency and your agents are better supported to deliver high-quality service, you’ll see significant boosts in performance, which in turn enhance customer satisfaction, brand reputation, and revenue.

And while the right processes, agent training, and data analysis are essential, everything starts with the right contact center solution. We can help with that.

Nextiva’s contact center solution offers full omnichannel experiences, CRM integrations, and AI-powered solutions like dynamic scripting, advanced analytics, and AI transcripts. We’ll make it easy to use and integrate with existing solutions and help you set up and onboard to ensure you get the most out of your software.

Nextiva is the preferred tool of many contact center leaders. Go on a self-guided product tour. 👇