How to Transform Your Contact Center: 2025 Recommendations

Contact centers are constantly faced with ever-advancing digital technology, increasing numbers of communication channels, and rising customer expectations.

What worked five years ago may no longer be enough if you want to offer top-tier customer support. With 80% of organizations expecting to compete with each other based primarily on customer experience (CX), you can’t afford to get stuck in the past.

Because service and CX can be the differentiators that determine where customers make purchases, it’s essential to recognize the signs that suggest you may need a digital transformation. We’ll discuss how to know if it’s time to reassess your current technology and business processes and how to launch a successful contact center transformation.

Signs That You Need Contact Center Transformation

CX transformation for your call center may include changes to your tech stack, processes, support channels, and agent training. As a result, contact center transformation can be a complex process, and it may be difficult to know when it’s needed. Let’s review the most common signs that it’s time to consider digital transformation initiatives.

Declining CX quality

The most urgent sign that you need to reassess your contact center operations is that your customer service KPIs are declining.

These metrics are all warning signs:

• Low customer satisfaction score (CSAT): Measures how satisfied customers are with a specific interaction or overall experience, typically collected through surveys asking for ratings on a scale, such as 1–5 or 1–10.
• Low net promoter score (NPS): Gauges customers’ loyalty by asking how likely they are to recommend a company, product, or service to others, rated on a scale from zero to 10, with promoters (9–10), passives (7–8), and detractors (0–6).
• High customer effort score: Assesses how much effort customers must exert to resolve an issue, make a purchase, or achieve a goal, often rated on a scale that uses lower scores to indicate smoother, more positive experiences.

You also need to watch for frequent complaints about long wait times, inconsistent service across digital channels, or lack of personalized service. Poor or fragmented experiences frustrate customers, damage loyalty, and potentially result in decreased customer retention rates. So, digital experience management is a key priority for many contact centers.

Operational inefficiencies

Operational inefficiencies can reduce agent productivity, increase costs, and decrease customer satisfaction.

Inefficiencies can be caused by several factors, including:

• Inexperienced agents who struggle to resolve issues effectively.
• Workflows that reduce agent productivity and require additional staffing or result in longer customer hold times.
• Difficulties in staffing the right number of agents who have the right skills.

Signs of inefficiencies in your contact center operations may include:

• Low first-call resolution (FCR) rates and frequent escalations.
• Overwhelmed agents due to insufficient tools or business processes.
• High call volumes with inadequate routing and resource allocation.
• Ongoing personnel issues like overstaffing, understaffing, or a dearth of agents with the necessary specialized experience.

Technology limitations

Outdated systems can lack now-critical features like artificial intelligence (AI), omnichannel integration and support, personalization capabilities, and automation. All of these features can improve the employee experience — and productivity.

Failing to consider new technologies can limit scalability for growth and prevent you from adopting functionality to support new channels. It may also result in poor analytics visibility, making it harder to track agent performance and customer behavior insights.

These may be the signs you notice:

• You’re struggling to scale up in size or adopt new digital channels.
• You’re incapable of offering advanced service features like AI chatbots that your competitors are using.
• You’re having trouble tracking key performance data and consequently can’t effectively improve the user experience.

Financial strain

Inefficient processes and outdated technology can decrease productivity, which can increase costs in multiple ways. Digital transformation can actually yield long-term cost savings, even if it’s an up-front investment.

If your contact center is experiencing increasing financial strain, you may notice the following signs:

• Rising operational costs from inefficiencies and turnover.
• Missed revenue opportunities from poor upselling or customer churn.
• High turnover costs due to agent dissatisfaction and burnout.

Strategic gaps

Many large organizations have team members whose only job is to create and implement new strategies to improve CX. Strategic gaps that can cause you to fall behind your competition may be indicated by the following signs:

• You’re falling behind competitors that offer similar products but superior CX.
• You’re struggling to adapt to modern trends that customers actively want, like AI, self-service, and omnichannel communications.
• You’re delivering inconsistent brand experience across diverse touchpoints, which impacts your reputation.

How to Improve Your CX With Contact Center Transformation

Whether you’re already seeing signs that you need to undergo a digital transformation or you want to be proactive, the following steps will help you develop and implement a contact center transformation strategy.

Step 1: Evaluate your current performance

Before you start creating a transformation strategy, you need to understand your current performance. Your evaluation should involve the following:

• Audit key metrics: Analyze performance metrics like average handle time, FCR, CSAT, and NPS to identify performance baselines by using analytics from your contact center software.
• Collect customer feedback: Gather insights from customers through surveys and focus groups to understand pain points and bottlenecks.
• Gather agent feedback: Use employee surveys to collect insights from your agents to discover challenges that impact their ability to deliver great customer service.
• Map the customer journey: Document the complete customer journey to identify areas where experience falters, such as long hold times, inefficient routing, or poor follow-up.

Step 2: Identify your gaps

As you’re reviewing call center performance based on the data you collected in the first step of this process, it’s also important to review your overall CX experience to look for critical gaps. These include the following:

• Channel gaps: Assess whether your contact center supports all the channels your customers prefer, such as chat, email, SMS, and social media.
• Technology gaps: Identify outdated tools or platforms that may hinder seamless communication and agent productivity, such as limited CRM integration and omnichannel capabilities or outdated reporting tools.
• Process gaps: Look for inefficiencies in workflows, such as repetitive manual tasks or inadequate escalation procedures.
• Skill gaps: Evaluate agent training programs to ensure they teach key skills, such as how to handle evolving customer expectations and use the latest technological tools.

Step 3: Focus on improvements

After identifying performance issues and gaps, you can figure out which improvements will move the needle on CX. At this stage, you should do the following:

• Prioritize high-impact changes: Start with improvements that offer the greatest ROI by reducing wait times, improving FCR, and enabling omnichannel support.
• Upgrade technology: Implement modern contact center solutions that integrate channels, CRM systems, and AI-powered analytics for service delivery optimization.
• Enhance training programs: Train agents regularly on new tools, customer service best practices, business processes, and soft skills like empathy and communication — and develop new training programs as needed.

Digital transformation tools can help you roll out new changes or identify which improvements may be the most impactful.

Step 4: Automate your CX

An important part of an enterprise digital transformation is automating your CX as much as possible, including customer interactions and agent processes. Examples include:

• Intelligent call routing: Use AI-driven routing to connect customers to the right agent based on issue type, language, or past interactions.
• Automated self-service: Deploy chatbots and IVR systems to enable customers to find answers to routine inquiries without waiting for agents — and use generative AI or conversational AI service bots to streamline digital contact.
• Post-interaction summarization: Leverage AI tools to summarize customer interactions, reduce agent workload, and speed up follow-up actions.
• Proactive outreach: Automate appointment reminders, satisfaction surveys, and follow-up messages to maintain consistent customer engagement.

Step 5: Elevate your performance

As you implement new contact center transformation initiatives, carefully monitor progress and strategy impact. Doing so can help you quickly adapt by modifying strategies, processes, or training to ensure that you’re delivering the desired CX.

Tracking your progress can also help you identify new problems as they arise so you can resolve them faster — ideally before they cost you customers.

To continually track and improve your performance, leverage the following:

• Real-time analytics and insights: Use contact center technology dashboards to monitor metrics like call volume, agent performance, and customer sentiment without delays.
• Regular performance reviews: Schedule monthly or quarterly reviews to assess progress against CX goals and adjust strategies accordingly. Conduct audits as needed to determine which initiatives are positively impacting the user experience.
• Experimentation and innovation: Test new tools and workflows to refine processes, keep your contact center at the forefront of industry trends, and make sure you meet rising customer expectations.
• Customer and agent feedback loops: Establish continuous feedback loops from both customers and support agents to identify recurring pain points and opportunities for improvement. This approach not only helps resolve immediate concerns but also drives long-term improvements in customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

Level the Playing Field With Nextiva Contact Center

If you’re considering a digital transformation for your call center, you need to start with the right tools to help you assess your current efforts, identify customer pain points, and address potential challenges that are impacting agent performance.

Cloud contact center software is critical, especially when it comes with advanced features like AI-powered functionality, omnichannel support, and detailed analytics.

Sequential Technology International, for example, is a key player in the business process outsourcing industry. The company has leveraged Nextiva’s contact center technology to better manage complex client needs with an advanced communication platform. Sequential Technology has used AI-powered features and CRM integrations to offer streamlined and personalized customer support with great results.

Nextiva simplifies communication by combining voice, chat, email, and SMS in one platform. It can help you automate tasks, support your agents with AI features, and provide valuable insights, empowering agents to deliver better customer service.

Learn more about Nextiva’s contact center solution today.