15 Best Practices for Improving Call Center Customer Service

A call center is vital to an organization’s relationship with its customers. For many businesses, it serves as the primary touchpoint for customer interactions. As such, optimizing your call center’s efficiency, accessibility and reliability is critical to delivering exceptional customer experiences.

However, modern customer service extends far beyond traditional phone calls. While the term “call center customer service” remains widely recognized, businesses today embrace contact centers — centralized hubs for managing customer inquiries across multiple channels like voice, chat, email and social media. This evolution calls for strategies that address both traditional call center operations and the broader demands of a modern, omnichannel contact center.

Below, I outline 15 best practices to help you enhance customer service in your call center while preparing your organization for the future with a comprehensive contact center strategy.

15 Best Practices for Improving Customer Service

Improving customer service is easier said than done. While some strategies rely on advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), others focus on understanding customer needs and streamlining processes. Here’s a comprehensive list of techniques to help your organization achieve better customer service outcomes:

1. Understand your customers’ needs.

Customers don’t call your contact center just to chat; they reach out because they have a question or problem that needs resolution. Understanding the most common issues your callers face allows you to train your agents effectively and equip them with the tools they need to deliver exceptional service.

A centralized knowledge base is key to collecting and categorizing this information. Extending this practice to a contact center approach provides insights across all communication channels — voice, chat, and email — offering a holistic view of customer needs.

2. Create a centralized knowledge base.

Institutional knowledge is essential for scaling customer service. Instead of relying on informal conversations between agents to identify trends, a centralized knowledge base ensures that valuable insights are documented, organized, and accessible to all.

With the right call center solution, you can centralize data on call volume, customer issues, and agent performance, making it easier for both agents and managers to act on critical information.

3. Map the customer journey.

The customer journey encompasses every step a person takes when interacting with your business, from initial awareness to post-purchase engagement. Understanding this journey helps you anticipate customer needs, predict call volumes, and fine-tune your products, services and messaging.

A contact center approach enhances this understanding by tracking interactions across multiple touchpoints, delivering deeper insights into your customers’ experiences.

Related story: 10 Ways AI is Revolutionizing Customer Service

4. Provide omnichannel support.

Today’s customers expect to communicate on their terms — whether through phone, chat, email or social media. Offering omnichannel support ensures you meet your customers where they are and provide seamless service across all channels.

To achieve this, invest in a contact center platform with omnichannel capabilities that integrates all customer interactions into a single, unified system.

5. Emphasize empathy and emotional intelligence.

Customer service isn’t just about solving problems; it’s about building relationships. Train your agents to approach interactions with empathy and emotional intelligence. Simple gestures like addressing customers by name, actively listening, and asking open-ended questions can make a world of difference in how customers perceive your brand.

6. Use speech analytics for quality assurance.

Speech analytics uses advanced technologies like natural language processing (NLP) to analyze customer interactions. It’s a powerful tool for identifying trends, ensuring compliance, and improving the quality of customer service.

7. Focus on key performance indicators (KPIs).

Without measurable goals, it’s impossible to evaluate success. Establish meaningful KPIs — e.g., average handle time, customer satisfaction scores, and net promoter scores — to track your progress and identify areas for improvement.

8. Empower agents with customer data.

Agents perform best when they have access to relevant customer data. Equip them with tools to view customer histories, preferences and past interactions, enabling them to deliver personalized and efficient service.

9. Provide self-service options.

For customers who prefer quick resolutions, self-service tools like chatbots and interactive voice response (IVR) systems are invaluable. These technologies enable customers to solve simple issues on their own, reducing wait times and improving overall efficiency.

10. Prioritize customer inquiries.

Ensure you have enough resources to handle customer inquiries promptly, whether they come through phone calls, chat or email. Prioritizing inbound inquiries shows customers that their time is valued and strengthens loyalty.

11. Ask for customer feedback.

Post-interaction surveys provide valuable insights into customer satisfaction. Keep surveys short and easy to complete, and consider offering multiple formats (e.g., phone, email, SMS) to encourage higher response rates.

12. Incentivize agent performance.

Motivated agents deliver better results. Recognize and reward top performers with incentives tied to key metrics like first-call resolution and customer satisfaction scores.

13. Try skills-based routing.

Directing customer inquiries to the most qualified agents ensures faster resolutions and higher satisfaction. Use IVR systems to categorize issues and route calls accordingly.

14. Automate workflows.

Automation streamlines repetitive tasks, reduces agent workload, and enhances efficiency. AI-powered tools can help with call triage, data collection, and workflow optimization.

15. Adopt a cloud-based contact center solution.

A modern cloud-based contact center platform provides flexibility, scalability, and advanced tools to improve customer service. Look for a solution that integrates seamlessly with your existing systems and supports omnichannel communication.

How important is customer service?

We’ve identified 15 ways organizations can improve call center performance and, therefore, improve their CX. Every company wants its customers to be happy, but just how much does customer service contribute to this? Can’t a business simply focus on making a better product or service and trust that this will lift customer satisfaction? Not exactly.

Customer service interactions have a huge effect on CX. This, in turn, has major implications for overall business performance. The benefits of exceptional customer service are practically limitless. Not only do positive experiences reflect well on the brand, but they also have tangible business impacts. For example, consider the following statistics:

• Customers who rate an interaction as five-star are more than twice as likely to buy more from a company than those who had a one- or two-star experience. This makes CX as important to customer retention as the quality of the service or product itself.
• Improving customer satisfaction can generate a 37 percent increase in spend. By contrast, a negative experience may lead to an 8 percent drop in revenue.
• Two-thirds of businesses that prioritize CX increase customer retention. Moreover, they grow customer lifetime value by 2.3 times on average.
• The opposite is also true, though. Poor CX can have very negative consequences. In fact, 80 percent of consumers have switched brands because of a negative experience — 43 percent after just one bad interaction. It’s frightening to think customer loyalty can be so capricious, but it can. That’s why an effective contact center that leaves customers satisfied is so crucial to overall business success.

What Are the Responsibilities of a Call Center Agent?

How do call center agents affect customer satisfaction? What role do they play in a call center? Some common responsibilities of call center agents include:

• Answer incoming calls and respond to customer questions, or direct their calls to someone who can.
• Empathize with frustrated or dissatisfied customers and de-escalate situations when necessary.
• Help callers with troubleshooting or finding the information they require.
• Help train new agents, inform them about company policies, and teach them how to use the call center platform.
• In outbound call centers, agents call customers to inform them about important company policies, offers or features, or to generate leads or conduct market research.
• Relay customers to other agents and communicate with them to create the best possible call outcome.
• Review and update client accounts as well as request information about billing, shipping and warranties from customers.
• Upsell or cross-sell different products or services that may interest the caller.

What Affects Call Center Efficiency?

An organization can have all the right ideas for how to improve call center performance and provide good customer service, but that doesn’t guarantee positive outcomes. There are many factors that can derail operational efficiency — and ‌therefore customer service. However, for most contact centers, there are a few common culprits. These are:

• Data silos: When customer data gets stuck in one business system and staff using other systems can’t access it, this prevents agents from doing their job effectively. Worse yet, it inhibits collaboration and may lead to inaccurate metrics — a problem in and of itself. For a call center to operate optimally, data must be easily accessible for all who need it. A good call center solution can solve this issue by collecting and displaying relevant data in an easy-to-use manner.
• Inaccuracies: Bad metrics misrepresent performance and customer needs. If agents base their decisions on wrong information, it can frustrate callers and lower customer retention.
• Agent turnover: Organizations that have a revolving door of new hires struggle to retain best practices. Plus, they need more time to get up-to-speed and meaningfully answer customer inquiries. A well-run call center with intuitive solutions and motivated agents tends to retain staff more effectively.
• Outdated tools: Legacy solutions make it hard for agents to do their jobs. They don’t integrate with other systems, they create silos, and they may even succumb to high call volumes. Switching from one platform to another may be a hassle and create friction for a short period, but by switching to a more efficient and helpful solution, companies can increase productivity long term and enjoy the benefits of that solution for years to come.

Caitlin Barrett is a content marketing manager at Webex at Cisco, the leading enterprise solution for video conferencing, webinars, and screen sharing.