8 Action Items For Contact Center Leaders In 2017

If you oversee contact center operations, you know that the transition from caring about customers to consistently delivering for customers requires specific actions. Originally published in 2017, these eight action items focused on many of the customer experience challenges contact center leaders were beginning to face as voice, digital channels, self-service, artificial intelligence, and customer expectations continued to evolve.

• Keep Embracing Voice. Start Embracing Voice.
• Embrace Next-Generation Agent Development
• Train Based on the Voice of the Customer
• Don't Just Think About Service
• Get Smart About Artificial Intelligence
• Establish Your Corporate Identity
• Be Experiential
• Help Your Organization Say "Yes"

Keep Embracing Voice. Start Embracing Voice.

Yes, you read the header correctly. Self-service and digital channels had gained prominence, capabilities, and value, but they had not eliminated the phone conversation. Many customers still preferred calling customer support and speaking with a live agent.

Terms such as “contact center” and “customer engagement center” better reflected the multichannel nature of customer experience, but they should not have been viewed as confirmation that phone conversations were becoming obsolete.

The role of voice was also beginning to expand beyond traditional live phone conversations. At the time, technological advancements were making voice an important part of digital engagement. Mobile applications were increasingly allowing customers to speak rather than type, while connected devices such as Amazon Echo demonstrated how voice recognition could become part of everyday customer interactions.

IVR technology was also becoming more intelligent and efficient, creating opportunities to improve self-service without eliminating access to live agents.

The challenge was not to choose between voice and digital. It was to improve live conversations while finding better ways to integrate voice into the broader customer experience.

That principle remains relevant for organizations building a modern customer service contact center across multiple communication channels.

Embrace Next-Generation Agent Development

Self-service technology was becoming increasingly capable of qualifying customers, routing interactions, and resolving many transactional issues without requiring assistance from a live representative.

As self-service platforms handled more basic interactions, live agents increasingly needed to focus on deeper and more complex customer situations.

This introduced an important question for contact center leaders: were agents properly prepared to handle those more difficult interactions?

Customer service representatives had traditionally been trained heavily around transactional processes. They knew how to resolve common issues, but they might not always have been trained or empowered to manage unpredictable situations, understand customer emotion, or create meaningful human connections beyond the immediate transaction.

Leaders therefore needed to go beyond basic product and process training. Agent development increasingly required communication skills, judgment, problem solving, emotional intelligence, and the authority to make appropriate decisions for customers.

Contact centers would increasingly need more than customer support representatives. They would need customer engagement experts.

Continuous training and career development remain important elements of CCSI's company culture and employee development strategy.

Train Based on the Voice of the Customer

In addition to higher-level agent development, organizations needed to connect training more directly with the actual expectations and experiences of their customers.

Too many organizations developed processes and training programs based primarily on internal standards rather than customer feedback.

Contact center leaders were encouraged to create a clearer connection between Voice of the Customer insights and agent training, engagement, coaching, and performance management.

The best agents are the ones who best engage customers. The best training reflects that.

Customer feedback, call monitoring, scorecards, coaching, and performance data can all help organizations better understand how agent behavior affects the customer experience. CCSI's Quality Assurance and Call Monitoring solutions help connect customer interactions with measurable agent performance.

Don't Just Think About Service

Customer experience should not be viewed exclusively through the lens of customer service.

Customer service represents one important scenario in which a business interacts with customers, but it is only one of many touchpoints that influence the relationship between a customer and a brand.

Leaders were encouraged to consider the complete customer journey and every direct or indirect interaction that could shape the customer's perception of the organization.

The objective was simple: make every aspect of doing business with the organization valuable, consistent, and competitive.

This big-picture approach should not be limited to senior leadership. Functional managers, supervisors, and frontline employees also need to understand how their individual responsibilities contribute to the broader customer journey.

Customer experience is larger than the contact center interaction itself. Every touchpoint can influence how customers perceive the brand.

Get Smart About Artificial Intelligence

In 2017, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and more advanced self-service technologies were beginning to attract significant attention within the contact center industry.

The original message remains important: organizations should not assume that greater automation means the disappearance of human engagement.

Customers increasingly expect experiences that are personalized, responsive, and adapted to their individual circumstances. Well-trained live agents can provide that personalization during human interactions, while intelligent technology can help deliver more relevant experiences through automated channels.

Artificial intelligence can support customer interactions by using information about the customer and the reason for contact to provide more appropriate responses and improve self-service experiences over time.

In 2017, many of these applications were still emerging. Today, AI can support contact center interactions across voice, SMS, email, web chat, quality assurance, and other business processes.

Learn more about CCSI's current Generative AI Voice & Virtual Agent solutions.

Establish Your Corporate Identity

In an era increasingly focused on customer centricity and human connections, organizations needed to establish a clear identity and stand for something beyond the basic transaction.

Every element of an organization — from its products and marketing messages to its employees and customer service practices — contributes to how customers perceive who the company is, what it represents, and why it operates the way it does.

Transparency, consistency, and humanity can help organizations create stronger connections with customers.

Businesses ask customers for loyalty. They also hope customers will recommend and advocate for their brands.

Achieving that level of loyalty usually requires more than simply providing good products at competitive prices. Customers also need reasons to trust and believe in the organization behind those products and services.

Be Experiential

With increasing emphasis on effortless engagement and the continued migration of interactions toward digital platforms, it can be easy to forget that the experience itself remains an important competitive differentiator.

Not every interaction requires an extravagant attempt to impress a customer. Few customer service interactions should become unnecessarily long conversations unrelated to the customer's reason for contacting the business.

Every interaction, however, provides an opportunity to demonstrate that the customer is valued.

Providing an accurate resolution through the customer's preferred channel can prevent dissatisfaction. Creating a positive and memorable experience can go further by strengthening loyalty and the customer's relationship with the brand.

When designing agent-assisted and self-service experiences, organizations should consider the small or significant touches that can make an interaction feel more personal and valuable rather than purely transactional.

“Aim your experience at their hearts, not just their wallets.”

— Peter Guber

Help Your Organization Say "Yes"

Few customer experience employees enjoy telling customers “no.” In many cases, however, organizational policies, training limitations, or a lack of authority leave agents with little choice.

Contact center leaders were encouraged to transform customer service functions into customer empowerment functions.

The goal should be to create value for the customer whenever reasonably possible. Policies should not simply give agents reasons to reject customer requests; they should provide guidance and appropriate authority to solve problems.

Organizations should identify unnecessary “no traps” throughout the customer journey.

These might include:

• Not providing support through the customer's preferred channel
• Policies that prevent reasonable resolutions when the company is responsible for an issue
• Agents lacking sufficient authority to resolve common customer problems
• Different channels providing inconsistent answers or service options
• Processes that force customers to repeatedly explain the same issue

Empowering employees does not mean eliminating appropriate business controls. It means giving trained agents the knowledge, tools, guidance, and authority necessary to resolve customer needs effectively.

CCSI's bilingual and bicultural agents are supported through training and professional development designed to help them deliver strong customer interactions.

Explore CCSI's Nearshore Customer Service Solutions

Historical note: This article was originally published in 2017 and reflects customer experience priorities and technology trends discussed within the contact center industry at that time. References to emerging technologies and 2017-specific recommendations have been placed in historical context while preserving the original eight action items and their core message.

Originally published: February 24, 2017
Last reviewed and updated: July 25, 2026