How to Provide a Great Contact Center Experience — Every Time

When it comes to customer service, the contact center experience can make or break your relationship with your customers.

An efficient, personalized experience can cement customer loyalty and foster future business opportunities. A clunky or slow contact center experience, however, can lead to customer dissatisfaction and even the loss of business. In fact, 43% of consumers say a poor customer service experience will prevent them from making a repeat purchase.

Let’s dive deeper into what a contact center experience is and explore strategies, technologies, and contact center software for enhancing yours so you can ensure customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

The words “contact center” might evoke thoughts or memories of hold music while you wait to connect to a service representative on the phone.

But a contact center experience extends far beyond the traditional concept of a call center. It encompasses all touchpoints a customer encounters while engaging with your service teams, whether it’s a self-service portal, chat or messaging session, phone call, email, or AI agent interaction.

A contact center experience also spans various stages of the customer journey, from initial research to post-purchase support. After all, your customers value speed, convenience, and interactions with knowledgeable reps who can provide efficient and personalized service.

The quality of your contact center experience significantly impacts how customers perceive your brand. A good contact center experience isn’t just a competitive differentiator – it’s directly correlated with customer retention, customer loyalty, and lifetime value. It also influences a customer’s initial and repeat purchasing decisions.

And with all of the competition out there, you don’t have a lot of chances to get it right.

For example, if a customer receives a damaged garment in the mail just one week before a big conference they’re speaking at, who are they going to order from in the future: the company that takes several business days to process a return, or the one that immediately starts the exchange process to ensure they get what they ordered, on time?

One negative experience with your contact center can drive customers away – for good.

So how do you know if your contact center is performing well? How do you know if customers are receiving the best experience possible?

To gauge the effectiveness of your contact center experience, it's essential to track various metrics across three key categories:

• Rep productivity metrics: These metrics assess service rep performance and include average handle time, rep utilization rate, and average speed to answer.
• Contact center performance metrics: Metrics such as cost per contact and service levels provide insights into the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the contact center.
• Customer experience metrics: This measures the quality of your customer service. Let’s dig into specific metrics more:
  • First contact resolution is the cornerstone of all contact center key performance indicators (KPIs) and tracks the number of times a service rep is able to resolve a customer’s issue on the first attempt.
  • Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) determines how satisfied customers are at the end of the interaction.
  • Net promoter score (NPS) measures customer loyalty and captures how likely a customer will recommend your product or service.
  • Customer effort score (CES) measures how easy it is for customers to use your products or services.

Remember: if you’re not using metrics, you won’t know how successful you’ve been, or where you need to improve.

Improving your contact center experience begins with setting your reps up for success right away. When you give your people the processes and technology they need, you also help them to deliver better customer service.

One place to start: cutting down on the number of apps and systems your reps manage. Switching back and forth between screens to find customer information and keeping up to date on trainings for five different apps takes time – time your reps could be spending on more important tasks. With just one platform – like Service Cloud, which unifies customer data, automation, and engagement channels – reps have all of the customer data and tools they need in one place to deliver efficient and effective service.

Another way you can improve your contact center experience is by investing in an omnichannel customer service strategy. What does that mean, exactly?

Omnichannel customer service integrates multiple channels of engagement within a single platform. You can also use omnichannel routing to automatically route cases from any channel to the right reps based on skill set, availability, or capacity. So whether it’s chat or phone call, your service reps can get a comprehensive view of a customer’s interactions in one place – no data silos and no disjointed experiences in your customers’ journeys.

AI shouldn’t sit beside your contact center — it should be embedded inside it. With Service Cloud, AI agents work alongside human reps to resolve cases faster, automate routine work, and deliver truly connected service.

Start with intelligent automation. AI agents can handle common requests end-to-end, from answering policy questions to processing simple transactions — 24/7. When complexity rises, they seamlessly hand off to a human with full context, so customers never have to repeat themselves.

Then AI empowers your human reps. Real-time AI copilots surface relevant knowledge, summarize conversations, draft responses, and recommend next best actions — all within the flow of work. That means less searching, less manual note-taking, and more time focused on empathy and problem-solving.

The outcome isn’t just efficiency. It’s a contact center experience that feels faster, smarter, and more human.

AI is just one way to improve contact center experience for customers. Let’s look at a few others:

• Digital channels: Chat, messaging, email, and social aren’t separate queues — they’re part of one connected conversation. A single workspace preserves context across touchpoints so customers never have to repeat themselves, and reps can pick up right where the AI left off.
• Knowledge management: By making institutional and continuously updated knowledge articles available in a centralized library, reps and customers alike can access fast, quality information. Content continuously improves based on resolved cases, making both self-service and agent-assisted service smarter over time.
• Self-service: A majority of customers still prefer to use self-service for simple issues. With self-service, customers can resolve simple inquiries on their own when it’s convenient for them – even at 3 am. Those who need more one-on-one support can engage with an AI agent.
• Voice: Voice remains critical — but it must be intelligent. AI-powered voice integrates directly with CRM data, enabling real-time transcription, sentiment detection, and automatic summaries. Every call becomes structured, actionable insight.

Ready to create the best contact center experience for your customers? Get started by first setting clear goals and defining KPIs. These metrics will serve as your North Star, guiding your strategy and ensuring alignment with overarching objectives.

Prioritizing contact center experience is vital if you want to deliver great customer service and foster long-term relationships with customers. By using a single platform to handle all of your interactions, implementing agentic AI, and harnessing performance metrics, organizations can elevate their contact center experience and differentiate themselves today.