From Cost Center to Revenue-Driver: Rethinking the Call Center Paradigm

Call center interactions offer a rich source of insight for customer needs and future intent. By automating rote, manual tasks and training agents around active listening strategies and upselling/cross-selling motions, brands can transform the perception of call centers as cost centers by demonstrating ROI and driving revenue.
Two contact center agents speaking on the phone.

In a world where value is defined relative to the bottom line, it’s easy for call centers to come under scrutiny when it comes time for budget allocation. Part of that is just the nature of the business, with primary use cases revolving around KPIs weighed down by negative connotations—metrics like problem resolution rates, customer effort scores, and churn. 

In that light, goal-setting often becomes an exercise in mitigation: reducing call volumes, minimizing customer effort, and curbing churn. At times, even the insights that surfaced from customer-agent interactions can feel burdensome—an endless inbox of problems to solve. The downstream effects of this mindset can be quite limiting to the potential functions an effective call center should serve in your broader organizational strategy. 

The truth is, customers calling your call center don’t just have an issue they want you to resolve—they have a relationship with your brand that matters enough to them to raise that issue. When you listen to those concerns—truly listen—you won’t just salvage the relationship; you’ll discover opportunities to grow it in ways that directly impact the bottom line. That’s when those budget discussions become less about managing costs and more about tracking investments. 

Shifting the Cost Center Mindset

To understand the perception of call centers as cost centers, let’s start with the cold, hard math: a typical inbound customer service call costs an average of $2 per interaction. Multiply that across thousands or millions of calls a year, and it’s easy to see why companies want to save money. 

But here’s the problem: when you’re laser-focused on cutting costs, it’s easy to miss out on revenue growth opportunities. 

Imagine a scenario in which a customer calls complaining about the size of a shirt purchased online because she is dissatisfied with the fit. The agent understands the issue and resolves it by offering an exchange for a different size. Still, in discussing the logistics of the exchange, a nugget of information emerges amid the customer’s relief at having the issue resolved promptly—a comment about wanting to look professional for an upcoming work event. 

Instead of closing the conversation, the agent seizes the moment by offering a complementary product, a free styling session, to create a set of work outfits incorporating the shirt. The customer, already engaged and receptive, books the session, which results in them purchasing additional products. Now, that inbound call that would have cost you $2 has just become the foundation for an expanded relationship. For that customer, your brand isn’t just another apparel warehouse—you’re their fashion consultant, style authority, and default choice for wardrobe-building. 

For most companies, this scenario remains unrealized potential. Call centers focus on handling issues as quickly as possible, often at the expense of the bigger picture. But what if a contact center could become a powerful sales engine, transforming routine support calls into avenues for growth?

The Current State of Customer Calls: Costs and Missed Opportunities

When each call has an associated cost, it’s easy to land on North Star metrics like call volume and average handle time. And to be clear, managing those variables is mission-critical for achieving, calculating, and proving ROI. After all, an effective call center plays a pivotal role in identifying root causes to eliminate recurring issues, finding ways to redirect calls to more cost-effective channels when possible, and ultimately working to help create a customer experience that doesn’t result in a call center interaction at all.

What’s often missed, though, is that contact centers aren’t just problem hubs—they’re a rich source of customer insights that should radiate out into other parts of the business, especially when working within a fully integrated CX approach. Combining mountains of contact center interactions with feedback from other channels like surveys, chat, email, and social media gives you a fuller understanding of customer needs, behaviors, and preferences. This omnichannel approach provides a more complete VoC picture, helping you iron out the wrinkles in your customer journey to create seamless experiences across your brand. 

Now, imagine your agents, equipped with this comprehensive data, are trained not only to resolve issues but also to identify key moments when customers express interest or hint at future needs. Your call center managers will be notified when these opportunities are missed so they can identify coachable moments and refine strategies. 

With real-time access to this data, marketing and operations teams can act immediately—sending targeted offers, automating follow-up emails, or launching personalized ads based on these insights. Every conversation becomes a strategic touchpoint, driving additional sales while delivering personalized experiences that meet customers’ needs at precisely the right time.

Turning Customer Calls into Sales Opportunities: The Power of Active Listening and Suggestion

The key to transforming a contact center from a cost center to a profit center lies in how you train and empower your agents with the right tools and active listening strategies to help them see every customer interaction as a potential opportunity. 

An important note: it’s not about pushing products but understanding the customer’s needs and intentions. The agent can recommend an upgrade when a customer mentions that they’re looking for more storage space. When they express frustration with a service limitation, the agent can offer a premium tier. These are the moments where customer experience and sales intersect, and where the call center can start delivering serious returns on investment.

After all, the same math that multiplies per-call costs at scale can be applied to the calls that surface opportunities. Take, for example, a large athletic retailer that implemented InMoment’s Conversational Intelligence solution to analyze 4.4 million voice transcripts, 574,000 web chat transcripts, and 100,000 survey responses. 

Previously focused on cost reduction, their contact center strategy shifted after empowering agents with real-time customer data. Agents began listening for customer cues and started upselling, cross-selling, and suggesting relevant products, driving greater value. Even if just 2% of interactions reveal an opportunity to cross-sell or up-sell, that’s more than 100,000 opportunities to grow those customer relationships.

A conversation between a customer and a representative from the company. Predictive analytics predicts the customer wants to buy.

And it doesn’t stop there. AI-Driven Text Analytics and Conversational Analytics offer businesses a way to surface deeper insights from customer interactions. These tools unlock unstructured data, detecting feedback themes and anomalies. 

Companies can then analyze threaded conversations between agents and customers to uncover patterns that reveal unmet needs, potential sales, or growth opportunities. With these insights, agents can proactively offer solutions or products that align with the customer’s unspoken desires, turning every call into a chance to build revenue.

Implementing a Customer-Centric Approach: Empowering Agents and Leveraging Technology

The foundation of transforming your call center lies in a customer-centric approach that puts the customer’s needs and desires at the heart of every interaction. But to make this vision a reality, you must arm your agents with the right tools and training.

One of the main reasons call center agents struggle with active listening and suggestive selling is that they’re simply too busy doing other things—categorizing calls, searching knowledge bases, and following scripts. With the right tools, those sorts of rote manual tasks can be automated, enabling agents to focus on truly listening to customers and uncovering their needs. 

InMoment’s Conversational Intelligence solution features automated categorization, allowing agents to stay focused on listening to the customer.

CX insights from a conversation between customer and agent.

Imagine a company that has implemented this approach. Instead of treating each call as transactional, their agents are trained to listen for opportunities. Empowered agents offer real solutions that align with the customer’s needs, leading to higher satisfaction rates and increased sales.

Measuring Success: Metrics that Matter

Once you’ve implemented the right technologies and strategies, how can you tell if it’s working? It’s not enough to simply count the number of calls resolved—success needs to be measured by the impact of those interactions. Metrics like conversion rates, revenue per call, and customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) provide a holistic view of how well your contact center solution performs as both a support function and a revenue driver.

Consider the case of a global retail giant that recently implemented Conversational Intelligence to enhance customer interactions. By integrating post-call and post-visit survey data with sentiment analysis and real-time reporting, they can now track the revenue impact of each customer touchpoint. The solution ingests approximately 300,000 calls annually and utilizes AI-driven conversational summaries to provide timely insights into customer needs and preferences. This approach has allowed the company to break down internal data silos, analyze trends across all channels, and deliver a more seamless, frictionless customer experience.

The takeaway is clear: the success of your contact center is measured by more than how quickly agents can resolve issues. Instead, it’s about effectively identifying opportunities to create value during customer interactions. The right metrics allow you to continually refine your approach, ensuring long-term success.

In addition to traditional performance measures, Agent and Coach Scorecards help identify individual strengths and areas for improvement. With in-platform Quality Assurance features, businesses can pinpoint knowledge gaps and implement targeted training to ensure consistent performance. These scorecards, combined with Impact Prediction capabilities, allow contact centers to explore critical factors influencing their metrics. Understanding these drivers provides a roadmap to continuous improvement, whether it’s agent behavior, product knowledge, or customer sentiment.

Unlock the Untapped Potential of Your Contact Center

In an era where brands must differentiate on experiences to remain competitive, viewing your contact center as a cost center can lead to a massive insight blindspot. With the right tools and mindset, you can enhance every interaction and unlock the revenue potential of every customer call. By equipping your agents with the ability to actively listen and suggest relevant solutions, you can turn each interaction into a growth opportunity, driving customer loyalty and boosting your bottom line.

With omnichannel data, advanced AI, and deep analytics, InMoment’s Conversational Intelligence solution offers a full view of every customer interaction—across voice, chat, email, social media, and other feedback signals. This comprehensive view allows businesses to understand customer needs from every angle, empowering agents to deliver personalized solutions that drive both satisfaction and sales.

If you’re ready to shift your organization’s cost-centered mindset and start viewing customer interactions as opportunities to drive revenue, check out InMoment’s recent webinar co-hosted with CXPA—or schedule your demo today.

How Will Trump Tariffs and Other Policies Impact Consumer Shopping Habits?

InMoment’s Strategic Insights team recently conducted a Market Pulse survey and social media analysis to explore consumer perspectives on whether their shopping habits are expected to change or remain consistent in response to President Donald Trump’s proposed policies, both before and after implementation.
Primark + InMoment customer story - image of a woman behind a shopping counter handing another woman a shopping bag

While countless articles, blogs, and posts discuss the predicted economic impact of “Trump Tariffs,” which refer to policies the new administration has proposed on imported goods, few focus on how consumers plan to adjust their shopping behavior. As a customer experience company, InMoment was curious about consumers’ perspectives on whether their shopping habits will change—or remain the same—in response to his proposed policies. So, a market pulse survey was conducted with a representative sample of the U.S. population to see what they thought. 

Current Impact (Before Trump Tariffs and Policies)

Although 46% of survey respondents said they weren’t going to change their shopping habits, posts on social media sites show that people are discussing buying or stocking up on products before policies are enacted. Conversations are around purchasing products they typically buy or are planning on buying. 

The following quotes were pulled from our analysis: 

  • “Getting some electronics before tariffs shoot up the prices”
  • “I’m planning on buying a hybrid car, as we expect green tax credits to be axed”
  • “I will start the year by cutting back on all of my spending, so to prepare what may happen with the new administration”
  • “Buying things in December before new tariffs are implemented”

Anticipated Shopping Behavior (After Trump Tariffs and Policies)

Around 60% of respondents said they are expecting to change their shopping behavior, with more expecting to shop less as opposed to shopping more. Respondents are most likely to shop less for electronics and around 50% of respondents are expecting to spend less on dining. People think tariffs will have the biggest impact on their shopping habits compared to other policies like changes in trade agreements and immigration policies. 

The following quotes were pulled from the survey and social media analysis:

  • “I will be shopping a lot less due to prices going up. And I will have to budget and plan beforehand”
  • “With all the proposed tariffs, prices will go up for groceries and other products.”
  • “I would just have to be more mindful while shopping and only shop for necessities”
  • “I think groceries will be higher so I will be buying less and more generic name items”

Impact of Trump Tariffs and Policies

Most respondents (56%) expect prices to increase for goods and services. Over 50% expect prices to increase for clothing/footwear, groceries, entertainment, home products, electronics, and gas.  

The following quotes were pulled from the survey and social media analysis:

  • “Rising prices for food and gas will keep most people at home”
  • “Things will be more expensive but my shopping habits will be the same.”
  • “Wait til the tariffs hit and immigration mandates affect the agricultural industries even tomatoes cost will be insane”

Differing Expectations

The biggest discrepancies are seen when looking at political views. Those who consider themselves more Liberal are more likely to expect to shop less on products, while those who are more Conservative expect to shop more. The biggest gaps were found for clothing/footwear and groceries – Liberals were 3X more likely to say they expect to shop less. There are even bigger gaps when asked about the impact of the policies on prices with Conservatives 8X more likely to say that prices for clothing/footwear will decrease and 7X more likely to say that grocery prices will decrease. 

Recommendations for Businesses

Policies are out of companies’ control, consumers are confused with conflicting messages, and it is unclear what changes will happen and when. Here are three key strategies to employ in order to maintain the integrity of your business in strenuous economic times. 

1. Prepare A Clear Communication Strategy

A clear communication strategy ensures that you know how to relay important information to all of your customers. In order to do so, you need to create specific templates for each communication platform so that deploying customer communication is as easy as adjusting the message for each platform. 

2. Train Employees on Core Values

When consumers are faced with choices about where they will take their business, they will often turn to the organization that makes them feel the most valued. It is crucial that frontline employees, contact center agents, managers, and executives are all up-to-speed on your organization’s values so that they can be reflected during customer interactions. 

3. Monitor Social Media Platforms

Social media monitoring is one of the most important things to do in order to stay on top of market trends and shifts in customer sentiment. Use social media monitoring as a tool to connect with your customers and position your organization at the front of market shifts. 

Stay on Top of Market Shifts with InMoment

To see how customer expectations play out, InMoment plans to conduct the same study after the new administration has been in office for some time. Be sure to check back often for updated findings. 

When new federal legislation affects the way your business operates, you must have a top-of-the-line CX program to retain customers during tough economic times. With InMoment’s platform, you can monitor customer feedback from multiple sources, all in one place. See how InMoment can help your business by scheduling a demo today!

Local listing management is crucial for any business that relies on local foot traffic. That makes it an essential function for supermarkets and grocery stores, whose revenue is almost entirely local.

But keeping listings accurate and up to date across every possible service, directory, and platform isn’t easy to do. For supermarkets with numerous locations, the job becomes nearly impossible without the right local listing management software.

What Is Local Listing Management Software?

Local listing management software is a tool that helps businesses manage their online information (name, address, phone number, and other key details) across multiple directories and platforms. 

It’s an ideal solution for keeping listings consistent and accurate across all the online channels where customers may search for a local physical store. These tools are especially useful for multi-location businesses that need to maintain and update separate pages for each location.

Local Listing Management for Supermarkets vs. Other Businesses

Supermarkets and grocery stores can benefit greatly from local listing management software, as this industry deals with some unique complexities and challenges like:

  • Frequent updates to business information: Hours of operation may change with some frequency (holidays, inclement weather), and consumers want confidence the supermarket will be open before they make the trip.
  • Real-time inventory and product listings: Supermarkets have massive inventories with thousands of SKUs (the 2023 average was 31,704 unique items). Keeping this information up to date is a huge task.
  • Promotions and deals integration: Showcasing deals and promotions in local listings can be a big boost to foot traffic, but watch out for a backlash if these fall out of date.

Why Supermarket Businesses Should Use Local Listing Management Software

Despite the complexities of managing local listings in the grocery industry, supermarkets stand to benefit significantly from using local listing management software. The key is to choose a software platform that understands and effectively solves these industry challenges.

Here are some ways supermarkets benefit from local listing management software:  

Boosting Visibility in Local Search Results

First up, local listing management software is the most efficient way to improve a physical store’s visibility in local search. 

Local business listings are a significant part of optimizing for local search, also called local SEO. The more accurate and consistent these listings are, the better they look to the search engines, which tends to improve rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs). 

This is especially important for supermarkets. In the broader retail industry, some stores and brands rely on local traffic more than others. But for supermarkets, local traffic is pretty much the only traffic! Boosting visibility in local search (including Google and Apple Maps) enables customers searching in a specific geographic area to find your store.

Managing Multiple Locations Efficiently

For supermarket businesses with multiple locations, the challenges of manually managing local listings grow exponentially. Every single change must be made to each listing for every physical location. 

A local business listing management solution streamlines all of this, allowing you to batch update similar information across multiple stores. This is a great way to save time and reduce errors when updating any information that’s similar for all locations.

Enhancing Customer Trust

If a customer (or prospective customer) is taking the time to look up your local listing, it’s because they want to know something before heading to your store. If the information they’re seeking is presented consistently and accurately, you’ll build confidence, trust, and loyalty. 

That’s the positive news, but we need to look at the negative too, because plenty can go wrong here. If that potential customer lands on a listing that’s talking about a holiday from six months ago or features a phone number or URL that doesn’t work, it doesn’t inspire confidence. 

Worse, if they see incorrect information and take action based on it, the negative experience (e.g., driving across town only to find the supermarket doors locked) can damage your brand’s reputation and even sever a customer relationship.

In other words, your local listings can either build or destroy trust—local listing management software helps you tilt the scale toward building trust.

Increasing Foot Traffic and Driving Sales

Improving local listings means better search visibility and stronger customer trust, and both of these support the ultimate goal of getting more people into your stores and selling more products to them. After all, locals can’t become customers if they don’t know you exist.

Best Local Listing Management Services for Supermarkets and Grocery Stores

There are dozens of listing management services available, but not every option out there is a good fit for supermarkets and grocery stores. The seven reviewed below are top contenders in the grocery niche.

1. InMoment

InMoment is a full-service integrated customer experience (CX) platform designed for the needs of multi-location businesses, including supermarkets of all sizes—all the way up to enterprise scale. InMoment’s Integrated CX suite has everything you need, including listings management, competitor analysis, reputation management, and more.

With InMoment, supermarkets can keep business listings full of accurate information and stay consistent across the entire web. The platform also provides the best of both worlds in terms of automation vs. control. Updates can push automatically to any and all listings, or brands can keep granular control, fine-tuning listing updates at the directory level. 

Rich ROI-focused data insights, keyword tracking, and powerful connections to other InMoment tools round out this powerful platform that drives results.

Learn more about InMoment’s local listing management capabilities.

Key Features 

  • Unique map ranking view: See where you rank against the competition on the map.
  • Auto-fix information: Identify out-of-sync information and automatically fix those inconsistencies.
  • Robust ROI-centric analytics: Learn from your Google listings and Google Maps performance with metrics that stay focused on what matters most: ROI.
  • Keyword rank tracking: Identify how you’re ranking vs. the competition on specified keywords, then track progress over time.
  • Real-time automatic push changes: Change business hours, add photos, and more, then automatically push those changes to all relevant listings.
  • Granular directory-level control: Gain full control at the directory level, auto-publishing information as unique as you need it to be for each directory.

2. Yext

Yext focuses on automated listing management, and its thorough citation network helps supermarkets build search authority. With Yext, businesses pay per listing service, enabling an a la carte approach where a business can choose to focus on Google Business, Yelp, Bing, Apple Maps, or a hundred other services—whichever best supports their goals.

Yext is big on AI, with AI insights, an AI-powered Listings Recommendations tool, and AI-search compatibility (meaning generative results on Google and elsewhere can find and pull from your local listings).

Key Features 

  • AI-search: Google Gemini and other AI search tools can read and understand Yext-made listings.
  • Full automation: Listing management is 100% automated, saving time but limiting your ability to manually intervene.
  • Listings Recommendations: AI-powered suggestions based on current performance.
  • Data cleansing/duplicate prevention: Avoid headaches associated with duplicate listings and old data hanging around.

3. Moz Local

Moz is one of the longest-standing and biggest names in SEO strategy, and Moz Local is the company’s set of local SEO tools, which includes listing management.

Moz Local centralizes listing management, allowing supermarkets to update business information once and then push that update to more than 70 listing destinations (including online directories, search engines, social media platforms, and more). Like Yext, Moz Local includes tools for identifying and removing duplicate listings, and it will help you refine existing listings so they perform better.

Moz Local works in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., making it an ideal choice for businesses with a presence in multiple countries. Like InMoment, Moz Local enables supermarkets to monitor and interact with reviews and publish Google Posts updates—but only at the higher price tiers.

Key Features 

  • Familiar Moz interface: Businesses already using Moz can quickly adapt to Moz Local.
  • Search Visibility Score: Moz Local continually monitors search visibility and updates businesses with an easy-to-read score.
  • Data-rich reporting and insights: Moz Local’s robust insights outperform many others.

4. Whitespark

Whitespark is a little different from the listing management tools reviewed thus far. It’s a local search service with a big focus on local citations, which are separate instances of name, address, and phone number (collectively known as NAP) across the web. It also allows businesses to manage Google Business Profiles centrally, and you’ll find other tools like review collection and management and local rank tracking.

But what sets Whitespark apart is that it isn’t automated in the way Yext and Moz Local are. Working with Whitespark means working with (and, yes, waiting on) a real team of humans who intelligently refine your listings and help you improve. 

You also own your listings, which means they don’t disappear when you cancel your subscription. So Whitespark is a good choice for businesses that want a more hands-on approach.

Key Features 

  • Local Citation Finder: Build a better network of local citations.
  • Local Platform: It’s a powerful way to manage Google Business Profiles, including rejecting unwanted automatic updates.
  • Listings service: Enjoy a hands-on, nearly bespoke refresh of your business listings.

5. Brightlocal

Brightlocal is a popular and affordable solution for listing management built around three primary tools: Citation Builder, Active Sync, and GBP Post Scheduler.

Like Whitespark, Brightlocal uses a one-time payment structure for building citations and gives businesses ownership of their listings. The other tools (Active Sync and the post scheduler) do carry a monthly cost, but many businesses find BrightLocal to be the most affordable option for the services it provides.

You’ll have to sacrifice some features for cost savings though, as analytics, listing recommendations, and AI capabilities aren’t available here.

Key Features 

  • Citation Builder: Build and manage a network of local citations and remove inaccurate information.
  • Active Sync: Centralize business listing management and sync changes across multiple sites and services. 
  • GBP Post Scheduler: Create, schedule, and post Google Posts to one or more Google Business Profiles simultaneously.

6. Uberall

Uberall is another AI-powered and mostly automated solution, but this platform is designed specifically for multi-location businesses (like restaurant franchises and national brands). The tools may feel geared toward restaurants and banks more than supermarkets, but if you’re a leader at a supermarket chain of any size, then Uberall may be worth a closer look.

The platform helps protect against suggested edits in Google Business Profiles, runs duplication checks, delivers performance insights, and offers suggestions for improving listings—all geared toward businesses with multiple locations. Bulk changes to listings can be extremely helpful, though some businesses may chafe at the lack of customization or flexibility.

Key Features 

  • Automated review response: Create prebuilt answers and let Uberall handle the rest.
  • Voice assistant integration: Uberall connects to Alexa and others, giving brands greater exposure to audiences using these devices and services.
  • Bulk GBP management: Make adjustments to multiple local listings simultaneously.

7. Birdeye

Birdeye is much more than just local listing management software. Its primary features revolve around social media management and online reputation management (both powered by AI). Local listing management is a complementary tool, but it works well. 

Birdeye takes a heavily automated approach to creating and maintaining listings on all major platforms and in many industry-specific directories. Other notable capabilities include image uploads, appointment request links, and a deep scan tool that puts your listings up against relevant benchmarks in your industry. 

Key Features 

  • Automated listings management: Create listings at scale with generative AI.
  • Reputation management: Automatically respond to reviews across multiple platforms.
  • Social media management: Create and schedule social media posts from a central interface.

Manage Your Local Businesses and Drive Revenue With InMoment

Supermarkets face unique barriers when it comes to managing their local listings, so they need a uniquely powerful solution that equips them to solve those challenges, thrive, and scale. 

InMoment combines powerful listings automation, granular control, stellar visibility, ROI-focused analytics, and much more into a feature-packed solution. And for brands that need additional reputation management capabilities and a fully integrated CX, InMoment delivers it all through one comprehensive, intuitive platform.

It’s time to see what InMoment can do for your supermarket brand: Schedule your free demo now.

Too often, growing retail businesses end up with a growing image problem.

By the time a company has dozens or even hundreds of locations, many processes have become standardized and efficient. But not everything that worked well with just a handful of stores scales as effectively as company leaders hope. 

One of those complexities is what to do about all the online reviews streaming in. We’re talking the good, the bad, and the ugly here—to keep a brand’s reputation intact, every review must be evaluated, understood, and (if possible) responded to.

Without making an effort to streamline review management across multiple locations, brands risk significant reputational harm, which can hamper or even stall growth. 

But effort isn’t enough if your business’s processes are unscalable. That’s why growing businesses need a way to unify multi-location review management.

Challenges in Multi-Location Review Management

Managing reviews and online presence across numerous locations is a difficult task, and the larger you scale, the more complex the challenges grow. 

Maintaining Consistency Across Locations

Whether you have 10 locations or 1,000, your brand has a voice, tone, and image it wants to convey consistently across all of your locations. But this can be difficult to do with decentralized review management.

When every single outlet is responsible for responding to location-specific reviews, you’re leaving quality and brand voice in the hands of dozens (if not hundreds or even thousands) of individuals. 

Managing High Volumes of Reviews

Review volume can also be a challenge, whether you leave management up to individual locations or use a centralized approach. 

In most cases, an individual store, branch, or restaurant can’t afford to hire a full-time employee just to deal with Google reviews. So someone typically has to handle all the various review platforms in addition to their other job responsibilities. Often, this devolves into a choice between timely responses and staying on top of other responsibilities.

For brands using a centralized approach, volume can still be an issue. Manually responding to thousands of reviews is time-consuming and error-prone, which can lead to embarrassing brand reputation issues.

Addressing Localized Issues

Multi-location business is local business—just in numerous different localities. That’s why centralized review management sometimes fails to ring true. 

A customer experience (CX) agent in Albuquerque or Mumbai may have difficulty responding authentically and empathetically to customers in urban New Jersey or rural Oregon. Some multi-location brands need an approach that supports location-specific concerns, unique customer experiences, and local market dynamics.

Handling Negative Reviews and Crisis Management

When negative feedback occurs (and especially when it occurs in large quantities), multi-location businesses need strategies to quickly address that feedback and manage potential reputation crises effectively. Brands seeking to do this at scale often find it difficult to be nimble, timely, and appropriately empathetic.

Local-Level Review Handling vs. Company-Wide Review Coordination

One of the first decisions to make about review management across multiple locations is this: Should individual locations manage their own reviews, or should a team at the corporate office manage business reviews for all locations company-wide?

Both approaches carry pros and cons that businesses should consider. 

Individual Locations Manage Their Own Reviews

When individual locations handle reviews at the store/branch level, it’s easier to address issues more personally (such as a restaurant replying to a poor review in the manager’s first-person voice). Local stores can also manage regional quirks and conventions more effectively.

But this approach has plenty of downsides and can increase reputational risk. Inconsistent responses and brand voice can range from embarrassing (typos and grammar issues) to disastrous (a local manager lashing out inappropriately). The person doing this work at each individual location likely has other responsibilities as well, making it difficult to control response times. 

There’s also the risk of factual or experiential inconsistencies. One location could easily make exceptions or offer discounts that other locations don’t know about (and won’t honor), adding to brand inconsistency. 

Company-Wide Review Coordination

While it’s true that a company-wide or corporate approach reduces location autonomy and could lead to missed location-specific details, this approach provides numerous advantages.

It’s much easier for corporate teams to maintain a consistent brand voice and to ensure consistent, accurate responses to similar issues at different locations. Responses tend to be more professional, more timely, and more carefully planned as well, further improving your brand image.

Last, centralized review management adds a powerful benefit that isn’t possible using a localized approach: rich data insights across your company’s entire portfolio of locations. Brands can use these insights to identify trends and outliers that can help struggling locations improve. This data can also improve reputation management efforts themselves.

Best Practices for Managing Reviews Across Multiple Business Locations

Use these best practices to manage reviews across multiple business locations in ways that are healthy, scalable, and effective.

1. Centralize Efforts With a Reputation Management Platform 

For most businesses, centralization is the clear winner, as it allows companies to pull together review tracking, response management, and performance analysis across all locations. This combined information leads to insights that can help all locations improve. 

We recommend adopting an Integrated CX solution like InMoment, which pulls a wide range of CX functions (including review management, local business listings, sentiment analysis, and more) into one easy-to-use platform. 

2. Establish a Unified Response Policy

Centrally managing reviews is a strong approach, but it must be executed well. For this to happen, businesses need to establish clear guidelines that apply across the board when responding to reviews. These should include:

  • Company style manual (formatting, vocabulary, etc.)
  • Guidance on tone of voice (how you want to sound)
  • Brand guidelines (adherence to branding and values)
  • Professionalism dos and don’ts

The good news is that, at your current operational scale, some version of these materials (hopefully) already exists. So it’s just a matter of adapting them into a unified response policy.

3. Ensure Prompt Responses to Negative Reviews

Third, make sure you’re responding to reviews promptly—especially when those reviews are negative.

Why? Because prospective consumers and guests are reading these reviews. A 2024 survey found that 88% of consumers will choose a business that responds to every review, but only 47% would choose a business that never replies to reviews.

If consumers are reading reviews—including the negative ones—then they also see something else about your business: either a reply or silence.

A reply gives your brand a chance to share another perspective, commit to making it right, empathize, or show the watching world that you care about resolving customer concerns.

A lack of reply is a much bigger risk. For some, it will communicate nothing at all. But for others, it will read like indifference, incompetence, or overwhelm—none of which is a good look. 

4. Showcase Your Positive Reviews

Sometimes a little bragging is a good thing. In the realm of reviews, this is certainly true! Use whatever methods you have (website, social media, and other marketing channels) to highlight or showcase great positive reviews. 

Put them front and center for any consumers who go looking for reviews, which is most consumers—69% of shoppers will pull out their smartphones while physically in a business to check review sites.

By putting the good reviews front and center, brands can build trust with consumers and pull in more first-time or hesitant customers.

5. Build a Process To Encourage Satisfied Customers To Leave Reviews

Of course, following the previous best practice requires collecting those golden reviews in the first place. So building a process to pull in reviews from satisfied customers is key. 

Follow-up emails and in-store prompts are tried and true tactics here, and modern CX platforms may offer additional ways to incentivize positive reviews.

6. Leverage Geotargeted Insights

Businesses that centralize review management have access to better data about their locations. Geolocated insights can reveal patterns and regional trends that could allow a multi-location business to tailor strategies for regions, groups, and even specific locations.

7. Integrate With Customer Experience Platforms

It’s possible to centrally manage reviews separate from other customer experience efforts. But integration is better. An Integrated CX platform allows businesses to sync review data with broader CX initiatives. 

Does a spike in negative reviews at a location coincide with other CX information you have? Probably, but figuring this out manually and at scale just isn’t workable. With Integrated CX, you’ll see both types of information in context with the other, creating a seamless feedback loop that helps you keep improving.

8. Invest in Training for Local Teams

For brands that choose to stick with the distributed approach (where each location manages its own reviews), boosting the quality of local efforts is key. Providing training for local teams is relatively costly and can be logistically challenging, but it’s the only surefire way to improve response quality and adherence to brand standards and voice. 

9. Automate Routine Tasks

Where it’s possible to do so, automate any repetitive or routine tasks in your review management workflow. One small example is automating the process of sending review requests. This can be an email or text message that you write once and send automatically after every new purchase. 

Numerous other automation possibilities exist depending on a business’s size, market, and digital maturity. Automating responses to certain reviews is possible (thanks to sentiment analysis and similar tools), and even manual responses can automatically generate follow-up workflows.

10. Regularly Audit Review Responses

Last, healthy review management efforts should include periodic audits of review management processes. No business gets every process perfectly right on the first go-around, and circumstances will change over time. New technology enters the picture, consumer expectations change, and your processes have to keep up.

These periodic audits are the perfect time to ensure the processes you have in place are consistently leading to the results you want to see. If adherence to brand guidelines still isn’t happening, or you identify any other challenges or areas for improvement, take the time to make adjustments. Then reassess at your next audit and continue fine-tuning. 

How a Reputation Management Platform Simplifies Multi-Location Review Management

Reputation management software is the answer to many of the customer-centric scalability problems that growing businesses face. 

Not convinced? Take a look at these features and capabilities made possible through reputation management software: 

  • Comprehensive review monitoring across multiple platforms: The right reputation management tool can aggregate reviews from various channels and platforms into a unified dashboard. Businesses can more easily track and manage feedback across locations, regardless of where that feedback lives.
  • Centralized data and insights: With data and insights centralized, businesses gain a holistic view of customer sentiment across all regions and locations. They can identify trends more effectively, identifying reputational and even performance issues earlier. Equipped with this knowledge, multi-location businesses can respond faster and with greater precision.
  • Automated alerts and responses: Businesses can set parameters that monitor reviews and alert responders when new reviews arrive. Pre-configured response templates speed up response times and ensure that customer engagement is both timely and consistent.
  • Localization: An Integrated CX platform can enhance local search visibility and local SEO by optimizing individual business profiles (Google Business Profile / Google Posts, Bing search, Apple Maps, etc.) and keeping them updated and accurate in near real-time. With better localization, customers can easily find and engage with any location they are near.
  • Sentiment analysis: Businesses can use advanced sentiment analysis tools (like InMoment’s Adaptive Sentiment Engine) to understand customer emotions at scale.
  • Social media integration: Some reputation management platforms can integrate with a business’s social media accounts, giving businesses the ability to monitor and respond to feedback from multiple social media platforms via one unified interface. With social media integration, businesses can extend their review and reputation management efforts into the social media realm.
  • Scalability for enterprises: Enterprise businesses benefit from features designed for companies at their scale, including multi-brand reporting and hierarchical permissions. Robust reputation management platforms also empower enterprises to scale seamlessly across a large number of locations.
  • Multi-language: Support for managing reviews in English and Spanish helps businesses streamline review management with fewer linguistic hurdles. Other globally minded features further help businesses manage their reputation effectively across the world.
  • Competitor analysis & alerts: With a better understanding of how a business compares to rivals (across numerous key metrics), leaders can make more informed decisions and keep employees informed of what’s happening in the industry. Businesses can adjust more quickly based on competitor moves, helping them retain a competitive edge.
  • SMS surveys: Turning microsurveys into two-way SMS-native surveys boosts response rates by a stunning 3–4x. It also reduces friction (text messages are stickier and more intrusive than emails or receipt messages) and allows for richer, more actionable feedback. InMoment’s Ask Tool (a paid add-on) is incredibly easy to set up, providing deeper insights and massive ROI.

Plus, when you choose InMoment’s Integrated CX platform for reputation management, you also gain Enhanced Location Scoring with Industry, Target, and Performance Scores:

  • Industry score benchmarks locations against standards using data-driven metrics. 
  • Target score allows for customized scoring to meet specific business goals
  • Performance score provides actionable insights into location effectiveness.

Using these enhanced scoring metrics adds unprecedented clarity, helping businesses make smarter prioritization decisions and understand what’s driving performance.

Turn Your Reviews Into Revenue With InMoment

Managing reviews at a growing multi-location business can be a key driver of new customers (and the revenue that they bring). But this becomes increasingly difficult as your brand scales. Manual processes can’t handle the load, and leaving the task to individual locations can lead to less-than-effective results.

InMoment is the integrated CX solution growing businesses need to effortlessly handle reputation management at any scale—and much more. The platform is incredibly easy to set up and use, greatly increasing your brand’s capacity to respond to customer reviews wherever and whenever they occur.  

Ready to see how InMoment’s Integrated CX suite helps you manage reviews at scale? Explore our reputation management capabilities.

For enterprise grocery businesses with hundreds or even thousands of individual stores, local SEO is tricky business.

Maintaining an effective online presence is crucial for increasing foot traffic and online visibility. But manually keeping every listing on every site and service up to date is challenging with a single store. Scaled up to hundreds or thousands, it starts to seem impossible!

Plus, due to several unique characteristics of the industry, grocers must contend with extra logistical challenges in their local SEO compared to other businesses.

Local SEO for Grocery Stores vs. Other Types of Businesses

Local SEO is strategically important for any business that relies on local foot traffic, grocery stores and supermarkets included. Yet, in the grocery industry, local SEO is even more important—and simultaneously more complex to get right. Here’s why:

  • Hyperlocal focus: Supermarkets generally pull from a smaller geographic footprint, requiring a focus on neighborhoods, villages, townships, shopping districts, street names, and so on—not just on big city names.
  • Real-time updates for inventory and promotions: Sales change weekly, and inventory changes constantly. Keeping digital materials consistent and up to date is a challenge.
  • Importance of reviews for freshness and quality: Potential customers are especially concerned about freshness and quality, so grocery stores need reviews that mention these elements positively, not just generically good reviews.
  • Visual content optimization: The age-old truism, “We eat with our eyes,” affects how grocers approach print and digital marketing. No matter where viewers are finding information about a store, the visuals must be appealing and on target.

The Top Local SEO Challenges for Grocery Store Businesses

As supermarkets and grocery stores (from enterprises down to local multi-store businesses) seek to implement effective local SEO strategies, these are the 12 most pressing challenges they face.

1. Optimizing Both Your Overall SEO and Local SEO Strategy

Overall search engine optimization (SEO) works differently than local SEO, and it can be tricky to balance the two or, better yet, to build them into a cohesive SEO strategy that supports both well.

Especially for enterprise grocery businesses, overall SEO focuses on brand-wide goals, such as brand awareness, prestige, and dominance in specific search categories. Local SEO involves a different set of priorities centered around helping prospective local customers find specific locations based on both branded and unbranded search queries.

Both are important, and it’s tough to strike the right balance.

2. Multi-Location Management

Another challenge is managing SEO effectively for multiple locations. Each store needs its own optimized online presence and local business listings

A Google Business Profile (formerly called Google My Business) is especially essential, as it allows stores to collect Google Reviews and communicate information to searchers, like the business name, address, phone number, and hours.

Numerous other services and directories have similar functions, and they all need to be kept current—for every location.

3. Optimizing Google Business Profiles

Speaking of Google Business Profiles (GBPs), they need to be optimized for each store. These listings provide information in Google Maps and location-oriented Google searches, popping up as a sidebar or card, depending on the service and device people use. 

Optimized profiles are a key way to increase location visibility and store traffic. Brands can control most of the content that appears in their GBPs, but keeping everything accurate, visually pleasing, and search-optimized is difficult at scale.

4. Review and Reputation Management Across Various Platforms

Reviews are another tool that consumers use to decide where to shop. The trouble for brands is that these reviews pop up everywhere, and no matter how well-run the business is, not every review is positive.

Monitoring reviews across numerous platforms and sites, for dozens or even hundreds of unique stores, is daunting and difficult to scale while maintaining brand consistency. The same goes for responding to reviews and other reputation management activities.

5. Ensuring Consistency in Business Listings Across Online Directories

Local citations are one factor that helps determine placement in local search engine results pages (local SERPs). Search engines identify as many mentions as they can find of a local business across website content, review sites, directory services, mapping services, and more. They’re looking for consistency in certain elements, like name, hours, address, and phone number.

To rank higher, a location needs lots of local citations that are extremely consistent. When a search engine doesn’t find enough citations or finds too many discrepancies, SERP suffers. So consistency in business listings across directories and destinations is crucial.

6. Mobile Optimization

Mobile optimization is vital just about everywhere. Around 65% of internet traffic comes from a mobile device, leaving roughly 35% for full-sized browser windows on laptops and desktops.

The mobile split is certainly higher in the grocery space, where an everyday use case for most consumers is pulling out their phone, opening their preferred navigational app, and searching for what they need.

So, to rank well and provide a good experience for searchers who land on your properties (websites and listings), grocery brands must prioritize responsive design and mobile optimization.

7. Managing Seasonal Campaigns and Promotions

Seasonal sales and promotions are a huge driver for grocery stores—but they can be a logistical nightmare for brands that need to ensure these campaigns are: 

  • Accurate at stores of varying sizes and differing inventories 
  • Optimized for local search across hundreds of locations
  • Kept up to date on any third-party services that list promotional information

Missing the mark in any of these areas means missed traffic and revenue opportunities during key shopping periods.

8. Proving ROI for Local SEO Efforts

It’s just good common sense that improving an individual store’s search visibility in maps and elsewhere will improve foot traffic to that store. But proving exactly how much of a difference it makes is nearly impossible. 

The change happens over time, not instantly, and there are always concurring factors—maybe there was a good sale or big event or snowstorm that coincided with the changes. Without clear insights, it’s hard to prioritize what’s actually driving results (and hard to allocate budget accordingly).

9. Competing with Local Independents

Competing with local independents is a unique challenge for enterprise grocers. Independent grocery stores often dominate search results in their local communities thanks to proximity, preferences, and a loyal customer base. Competing in search against these hyper-local small businesses takes a well-tuned, location-specific SEO strategy.

10. Managing Location-Specific Social Media

Social media may not be a direct ranking factor, but it does a lot in terms of visibility and can create a hometown feel and familiarity for individual physical locations of otherwise impersonal large brands. But keeping up with comments, tags, and location-specific content across multiple platforms adds another layer to the challenge. 

11. Staying Ahead of Algorithm Changes

The big local search algorithms are always evolving, and even a small change to what Google prefers can mean big adjustments to hundreds of profiles. Keeping them all updated and compliant with the latest requirements is a constant uphill battle.

12. Leveraging User-Generated Content

Customer reviews, photos, and questions can boost visibility, but they need to be managed well. Good photos are great, but bad user-generated content (UGC) of an icy parking lot or messy store shelf is less than helpful. 

Then there’s the issue of responding to reviews and other UGC. It’s essential to respond, especially to negative reviews, but poorly moderated or inconsistent responses can do more harm than good.

How Grocery Businesses Can Overcome Local SEO Challenges and Improve Online Visibility

The barriers to successfully executing local SEO are real, but these proven strategies can help grocery store and supermarket businesses overcome those challenges and start achieving more online visibility through local SEO. 

Unify Efforts With Local Listing Management Software

Many of the challenges grocery businesses face boil down to issues of scale. There are so many local listing services to keep track of, and it has to be done for every single location.

Local listing management software is the solution to scalability challenges. It’s also the single most impactful technology businesses can use to improve local SEO. These solutions help multi-location businesses update listings in bulk, monitor and respond to online reviews and comments, and fine-tune business listings based on the needs and priorities of each platform.

Listing management software solves both types of scalability issues, making it much easier to update all platforms and listings for an individual store and make mass updates to all stores in a group or region.

Features of Local Listing Management Software

  • Local business listing management: Seamlessly manage and automate business listings on various local directories, review sites, and other online platforms, keeping business information maintained and current.
  • Streamlined Google post management: Create these SEO-boosting mini-posts in a central platform, then publish them to one or many GBPs.
  • Customer review monitoring and response: Receive notifications when customers post reviews on various sites so you can respond promptly. Some tools include automated or partially automated responses.
  • Advanced geotargeting features: Target specific local and hyperlocal areas with SEO and search engine marketing (SEM) efforts, such as location-specific landing pages and highly targeted ads.
  • Local search ranking insights: Understand how stores are ranking compared to local competitors over time.
  • Reporting and analytics: Access robust information on local SEO performance and ROI to justify efforts and investments and fuel optimization.

Explore InMoment’s local listings management software

Engage With Local Audiences 

No matter how large an enterprise grocer grows, individual stores can still connect with organizations and community members in their immediate local area, building a sense of local camaraderie and even loyalty. Here are a few ideas stores and corporate teams can implement:

  • Create a local store presence on social media and post local content.
  • Regularly and promptly respond to reviews, using personal/first-person language where appropriate.
  • Host local in-store events.
  • Partner with and support local mission-driven organizations.

Enhance the Mobile Experience

A seamless mobile experience is critical because searching for grocery stores via a smartphone browser or map app is the default method for many customers. 

Practically speaking, this means prioritizing fast-loading pages, easy navigation, and mobile-friendly design. All three are essential for improving local visibility and conversion rates.

Leverage Schema Markup

Using local business schema markup on individual store pages can help search engines better understand and display essential information like store hours, locations, and services in search results. Providing this data in the right format improves the likelihood of ranking highly in local search and map searches. 

Implement Location-Specific PPC Campaigns

Paid search campaigns targeting local audiences can complement organic efforts by getting local stores in front of local eyes. This approach is especially effective when promoting new stores, seasonal events, or time-sensitive deals.

Encourage and Amplify Customer Photos

UGC can be a powerful tool, especially when you encourage it from your biggest fans. Including customer-generated photos in reviews and social media posts can boost engagement and improve local search rankings. 

Put systems in place that incentivize customers to share positive reviews (and associated photos) with stores, then showcase those photos across numerous platforms.

Utilize Hyper-Local Keywords

Unless you’re managing high-end, unique, or specialty grocery stores, customers in a typical city aren’t going to drive an hour across town (passing 20–30 competitors along the way) to visit a specific grocery store. So it pays to be specific.

Include highly specific keywords focused on neighborhoods, villages, townships, and the like—not just the name of the nearest big city. It’s the difference between “grocery stores in Cincinnati” and “grocery stores in Hyde Park / Eastgate / Westchester.” Both matter, and it’s crucial not to overlook the latter.

Using hyper-local, neighborhood-focused keywords will help your content, listings, and ads better align with the localized search intent of your target audience.

Optimize for Voice Search

Voice search (think questions to phones or smart devices, most of which begin with “Hey Siri,” “OK Google,” or “Alexa”) is becoming a dominant way customers find local businesses. For many consumers, it’s just easier to ask their living room speaker for a recommendation than it is to open up a laptop, find a browser window, open a new tab, type in a URL, and then ask the question.

Sure, these kinds of searches can’t provide visually rich map information (at least not directly), so a follow-up search in Google or Apple Maps is likely. But the first question—“Where should I go for groceries?”—is increasingly happening via voice search.

So what should grocery stores do about it? Optimize their websites and listing pages for voice search. Include easy, helpful answers to natural language queries like “near me” searches, and implement the right tools to help format and technically optimize your online content.

Integrate Geotargeted Offers

Businesses can also use geotargeting to create promotions and offers tailored to specific regions or demographics. This is a great way to drive foot traffic and improve engagement, and it also reinforces local relevance to search engines.

Regularly Audit Online Listings

Last, make sure to perform frequent audits of business listings to ensure consistent and accurate information across platforms. Keeping up with this reduces the risk of ranking penalties due to discrepancies. Many listing management tools automatically perform these audits, and some even auto-fix problems when found.

Simplify Your Local SEO Efforts and Drive Revenue With InMoment

The challenges large grocery chains face in local SEO are significant and surprisingly complex. But by following the right best practices—and implementing the right tech tools—grocery businesses can simplify, streamline, automate, and start excelling at local SEO across their entire fleet of locations.

InMoment is the perfect solution for local listing management across all locations, ideal for enterprise grocery businesses, local multi-location grocers, and everything in between. Our full suite of Integrated CX tools transforms every aspect of your CX approach, enabling your business to form better, more meaningful connections at scale.

Ready to simplify your local SEO management? See InMoment in action.

Best Practices and Strategies to Master Call Center Management

Call center management involves planning, coordinating, and optimizing the technology and teams required in a call center. Effective call center management blends strategic oversight with advanced technology to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
call center management

In the fast-paced world of customer service, call center management is pivotal for organizations working to maintain efficient operations, improve customer satisfaction, and improve customer experience

Understanding the ins and outs of call center management is crucial for seasoned professionals and newcomers to the field. When successful call center management is achieved, it can affect the entire organization, from a reduced number of customer complaints to increased revenue. 

What Is Call Center Management?

At its core, call center management is the art of overseeing the day-to-day operations of a call center, ensuring that it runs smoothly and efficiently. Call centers serve as hubs for customer interactions, making them a vital customer support element.

The role of call center management extends beyond the daily operational aspects. It also encompasses strategic planning, workforce management, and technology integration. This multifaceted approach is essential for meeting today’s customers’ ever-evolving needs and expectations. 

With the advent of omnichannel customer experience programs and increasing customer demands, effective call center management has become more challenging and pivotal than ever before. It requires a harmonious blend of leadership, technology, and a customer-centric mindset to succeed in this dynamic landscape.

How Do Call Centers Work?

Call centers are the central point for customer inquiries, issues, and support. They employ skilled agents who communicate with customers to address their concerns, answer questions, or provide assistance. Call centers bridge the gap between a business and its customers.

Successful call centers have evolved their operations with conversation analytics software, embracing a more comprehensive approach to customer engagement. Modern call centers not only handle inbound customer inquiries but also proactively reach out to customers through outbound communications. 

These centers are equipped with advanced technologies, including customer relationship management (CRM) software, predictive dialers, and analytics tools. This technology allows them to provide a more personalized and efficient service. Whether it’s resolving issues, processing orders, conducting market research, or offering technical support, the modern call center is a versatile hub for customer interactions, adapting to the diverse needs of businesses and their clientele.

Benefits of Having Call Center Management

Effective call center management offers many advantages for businesses, propelling them towards enhanced customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and, ultimately, improved profitability. 

Enhanced Customer Experience

Implemented call center management can significantly enhance the overall customer experience. Well-managed call centers ensure that customers receive prompt, accurate, and helpful support, resulting in higher levels of customer satisfaction. This boost in customer satisfaction, in turn, can lead to increased customer loyalty and long-term relationships.

Increased Operational Efficiency

By efficiently handling a high volume of customer inquiries, well-managed call centers minimize customer wait times and ensure that issues are resolved swiftly. This not only improves customer satisfaction but also optimizes the utilization of resources and reduces operational costs, leading to significant cost savings for the organization.

Improved Data-Driven Insights

Call center management also provides invaluable data-driven insights. By collecting and analyzing customer data, businesses gain a better understanding of customer needs, preferences, and pain points. This data, in turn, informs strategic decisions, helping businesses refine their products, services, and customer support processes.

Call Center Management Best Practices

Creating and maintaining an effective call center can be a difficult task. But, with the right tools and procedures in place, you can build a call center that contributes to the success of your business. Here are some of the best call center management practices to follow to ensure your team stays on the right track: 

  1. Set Clear Objectives
  2. Hire the Right Team
  3. Train & Coach Agents
  4. Implement Self-Service Functionality
  5. Automate Mundane Tasks
  6. Focus on First Contact Resolution
  7. Leverage Call Center Scripts
  8. Use Prediitve Analytics
  9. Prioritize Omnichannel Communication
  10. Implement A Call Center Dashboard
  11. Invest in Leadership Development
  12. Develop A Crisis Management Plan
  13. Create A Knowledge Base
  14. Maintain Compliance
  15. Promote A Healthy Work-Life Balance
  16. Utilize QA Scores to Monitor Performance
  17. Recognize Employees
  18. Optimize Scheduling
  19. Gather Customer Feedback
  20. Monitor Metrics Over Time

1. Set Clear Objectives

Before you develop training programs, offer incentives to employees, or purchase a contact center platform to improve your operations, you need to have a clear vision of what you want out of your contact center. 

Take the time to define goals for your contact center, such as improving overall customer satisfaction or identifying the most frequent customer complaints so that other teams can fix those problems. 

2. Hire the Right Team

You need the best employees handling customer inquiries to set your contact center up for success. As part of your contact center management process, recruit employees with the right skills and experience, such as strong communication skills, empathy, problem-solving skills, and past experience working in customer service. 

3. Train & Coach Agents

Your agents are the lifeblood of your contact center and should be treated as such. Implement agent performance metrics and programs that help your agents perform their best. 

When sufficiently trained, agents are prepared to deal with a wide range of customer inquiries. 

InMoment’s contact center solution gives managers the power to create action plans for employees based on smart recommendations from past interactions. With these customized action plans, managers can effectively improve employees’ performance. 

Smart employee action planning in InMoment's XI Platform.

4. Implement Self-Service Functionality 

Did you know that over a quarter of all consumers will give up solving a problem if they can’t find the answer themselves? In order to retain these customers, your call center must have self-service options. 

Self-service options such as chatbots, IVRs, and online FAQs help reduce the workload of your call center employees while also improving the overall customer experience. 

5. Automate Mundane Tasks

In another effort to ensure your agents are being as efficient as possible, make it a priority to automate repetitive tasks. Tasks such as data entry or follow-up communications can be easily automated using the right technology. By automating these tasks, your agents spend more time on the highest-priority customer inquiries. 

InMoment’s contact center automation platform leverages generative AI to provide quick, on-brand responses to customers. When your agents can respond to customer inquiries within 24-48 hours, your business can realize a boost in retention of over 8%. 

Review response automation using InMoment's XI Platform.

6. Focus on First Contact Resolution 

First contact resolution is a great way to measure the effectiveness of your call center. When your agents are able to solve inquiries on the first call, it reduces repeat call rate and customer churn. 

7. Leverage Call Center Scripts

A good call center script can create consistency in the customer experience. Consider making a standardized script that agents can use in your call center. This ensures that customer interactions stay on track and that they head to a swift resolution. 

 8. Use Predictive Analytics 

Incorporate predictive analytics to anticipate customer needs, forecast call volumes, and optimize resource allocation. 

InMoment’s predictive customer analytics solution helps you analyze current conversational data to understand complex data and give you insights to improve future performance. 

Conversational CX insights being highlighted in InMoment's platform.

9. Prioritize Omnichannel Communication 

The majority of consumers want to be able to have consistent interactions with customer service teams, regardless of the channels those interactions start and end on. In order to do this, it is important that your call center can operate as an omnichannel contact center that supports interactions from channels such as call, web chat, email, SMS, etc. 

With InMoment’s omnichannel contact center software, you can house all your customer data in one place, allowing your agents to quickly come up to speed on customer interactions.

10. Implement A Call Center Dashboard

A call center dashboard provides real-time insights into the performance of employees and the call center as a whole. They can be customized to meet your specific needs in order to help you make the most informed decisions regarding call center operations. 

11. Invest in Leadership Development

Train call center supervisors and customer experience managers in leadership skills to ensure that they can effectively support the teams under them. Strong leadership fosters a positive work environment, improves employee morale, and improves service delivery. 

12. Develop a Crisis Management Plan

During unexpected events, your call center may receive a large volume of specific calls. To successfully handle these situations, it is important to have a contingency plan in place that helps maintain service continuity. 

These plans include disaster recovery challenges, communication protocols, and other solutions to adapt to different challenges. 

13. Create A Knowledge Base

Develop a centralized knowledge base for agents and customers that includes FAQs, troubleshooting guides, and other information that can reduce call handling times and call volume, as well as give agents the most up-to-date information for handling customer inquiries.  

14. Maintain Compliance

Stay up-to-date with industry regulations and ensure that your call center management practices are compliant with current legal and ethical standards. This includes adherence to data privacy laws, industry certifications, and fair labor standards. 

15. Promote A Healthy Work-Life Balance

It is no secret that call center employees have a high turnover rate. By promoting a healthy work-life balance, you can prevent burnout among your employees. You can promote a healthy work-life balance by providing flexible scheduling, wellness programs, and training other management staff to be supportive.  

16. Utilize QA Scores to Monitor Performance

Regularly assess agent performance through quality assurance (QA) scores. Use this data to identify strengths and areas for improvement, provide targeted coaching, and maintain high service standards.

17.  Recognize Employees

Acknowledging and rewarding employees for their hard work boosts morale and motivation. Celebrate individual and team achievements through incentives, public recognition, or personalized thank-you notes. Regular recognition fosters a culture of appreciation, increasing employee satisfaction and retention.

18. Optimize Scheduling

Workforce management tools can help you create efficient schedules that align staffing levels with call volumes to minimize understaffing or overstaffing. For example, a retail call center will want to have more employees working during the holiday season to keep up with the increased number of customer service requests. 

19. Continuously Gather Customer Feedback

The goal of most call centers is to resolve customer complaints. That being said, collecting customer feedback can show your commitment to improving the customer experience and help you proactively solve future customer complaints. 

Consider asking customers to rate their experience after each call. You can collect more in-depth feedback during quarterly or annual customer feedback questionnaires to help you make the necessary changes to improve call center performance. 

20. Monitor Main Metrics Over Time

For successful call center management, you will need to continuously monitor and track the performance of your main metrics over time. 

Organizational Structure of a Call Center

The organizational structure of a call center is a critical component that ensures efficient operations and a seamless customer experience. It typically comprises several key roles and layers of management to function effectively, including:

  • Managers
  • Supervisors and team leaders
  • Agents
  • Support staff

What Is a Call Center Manager?

At the top of the hierarchy, you’ll find the call center manager. This individual oversees the entire call center operations, sets strategic objectives, and makes crucial decisions. They are pivotal in aligning the call center’s goals with the broader organizational objectives. The call center manager’s leadership is essential in maintaining a high level of service quality and ensuring that the team meets performance targets.

Supervisors and Team Leaders

Reporting to the call center manager, there are often several supervisors or team leaders. These roles involve more direct oversight of agents and day-to-day operations. Supervisors provide guidance, monitor agent performance, and act as a bridge between the front-line agents and upper management. They play a vital role in maintaining order, supporting agents, and ensuring that the call center meets its targets.

Call Center Agents

The backbone of any call center is its agents. These individuals directly engage with customers, addressing their inquiries, resolving issues, and delivering the quality of service that the organization strives for. Agents are typically divided into teams or departments, each specializing in a particular area of customer support.

Support Staff

In addition to the core roles mentioned above, call centers may also have support staff responsible for tasks like quality assurance, training and development, data analysis, and IT support. These support functions are integral to the call center’s overall effectiveness. Quality assurance ensures that customer interactions meet the desired standards, training and development keeps agents updated and skilled, data analysts gather valuable insights, and IT support maintains the technology infrastructure.

The organizational structure of a call center is designed to create a clear chain of command, establish accountability, and ensure that each component of the operation contributes to the overall success of the center. Effective communication and coordination among these roles are essential for providing exceptional customer service while meeting performance objectives and maintaining a positive work environment for all involved.

How to Successfully Manage a Call Center

Managing a call center operation that consistently delivers exceptional service and meets its objectives is no small feat. It requires a combination of strategic planning, effective management, technology integration, and a dedicated focus on continuous improvement. These effective call center management strategies ensure that your contact center can realize continuous success:

Clear Objectives and Strategy

Success begins with setting clear objectives for your call center. Whether it’s achieving a specific customer satisfaction rating, reducing response times, or increasing first-call resolution rates, having well-defined goals is essential. 

These objectives should align with your organization’s broader business objectives and customer expectations. A well-thought-out strategy, supported by a comprehensive business plan, will guide your call center toward achieving these objectives.

Technology Integration

Embrace technology to enhance your call center’s efficiency and customer experience. Implement advanced call center technologies, such as customer relationship management systems, automated call routing, and workforce management software. These tools streamline processes, reduce errors, and provide agents with the information they need to serve customers effectively. 

Integrating multi-channel support capabilities, including phone, email, live chat, and social media, is crucial in today’s omnichannel customer service landscape. The right technology empowers your agents to deliver timely and accurate support while also providing valuable data for performance monitoring and decision-making.

Data Analysis and Continuous Improvement

Analyzing customer data is a cornerstone of call center success. Regularly review key performance metrics, such as average response time, first-call resolution, and customer satisfaction ratings. This data provides insights into your operation’s effectiveness and helps identify areas that require improvement. Implement a continuous improvement culture by gathering customer and staff feedback and using these insights to refine your processes. This iterative approach ensures that your call center stays aligned with changing customer needs and market dynamics, fostering long-term success. 

In summary, running a call center successfully requires a combination of well-defined objectives, technology integration, and a commitment to continuous improvement. By focusing on these key aspects, your call center can provide outstanding customer service, optimize its operations, and adapt to the ever-evolving demands of the modern customer service landscape.

Key Success Metrics for Effective Call Center Management 

To measure and improve the performance of your call center operations, it’s important to identify, align on, and track the most important call center metrics associated with the outcomes you’re looking to achieve—for your customers, your agents, your call center, and the business as a whole. 

A comprehensive call center management program should incorporate every measurable element of the call center experience—both from the agent’s perspective and the customer’s—but an effective program will highlight the key drivers of the experience and prioritize improvement efforts where they’ll have the most impact. 

InMoment key driver analysis can help your business understand what is having the greatest impact on your contact center and customer experience and give you the insights to make informed business improvements. 

Key customer experience drivers ranked in InMoment's platform.

To make sure those key drivers point you in the right direction, there are three primary sources you should look to for capturing insights on an ongoing basis: 

  1. Operational data: in most cases, this can be extracted from the systems and technologies used to handle calls 
  2. Customer experience data: captured via post-call surveys and unstructured datasets (call transcripts, chats, email threads, etc.)
  3. Agent experience data: captured by surveying agents and used to ensure teams are trained and equipped to excel in their roles

Operational Metrics for Call Centers

Some metrics are inherently embedded within call center operations—things like Call Availability, Average Hold Time, First Contact Resolution, and others. Because these sorts of operational metrics are universal to all call centers, an effective call center management program provides benchmarking analyses to:

  • Put performance in perspective by comparing it against industry standards
  • Identify areas where you’re falling short of customer expectations
  • Prioritize improvement strategies according to potential impact 

Customer Experience Metrics for Call Centers

To add further context and ensure the call center experience measures up to your standards, it’s important to go a click deeper. Many call centers leverage post-call customer satisfaction surveys to surface insights related to service standards by going straight to the source and asking customers about the following:

  • Details of the experience: What type of issue they were calling with, how it was handled, and whether it was resolved
  • Perceptions of the experience: Agent Knowledge, Problem Solving Ability, Courtesy/Professionalism, Ease of Interaction, etc.
  • Satisfaction with the experience: Typically asked in the form of a CSAT (Customer Satisfaction), NPS (Net Promoter Score), or CES (Customer Effort Score) depending on which North Star customer experience metrics the company uses across other feedback channels 

To surface insights beyond the questions they think to ask, brands capture qualitative feedback in the form of open-ended questions. Advanced call center management programs take this unstructured feedback to a new level by leveraging advanced technologies like Conversational Intelligence, which apply natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, and artificial intelligence to gain insights from recorded or written conversations. 

Agent-Specific Metrics for Call Centers

As you can see in the operational and customer experience metrics used thus far, effective call center management aims to understand how easy it is for customers to interact with a business and where to focus improvement strategies. Agents are the ones tasked with facilitating those interactions, so it’s mission-critical to ask them about their experiences and whether they’re adequately trained and equipped to succeed. 

Agent Effort Score (AES) is a unique metric that provides insight into agent performance from their perspective. It measures how easy it is for agents to address and resolve callers’ issues. A low score indicates obstacles or sub-optimal structures that make it difficult for agents to achieve their goals.

You can measure AES by surveying agents on how much effort they have to put into customer interactions. The feedback will highlight the issues preventing agents from being their most productive selves. For example, they might not have easy access to customer data, making it difficult to resolve issues quickly.

Determining the Right Metrics for Your Call Center Management Program

Ultimately, the metrics you use to track performance will be used to prioritize improvements and celebrate successes, so you want to focus on measuring and monitoring what truly matters. While there are many call center metrics to choose from, the main objective is to capture insights on what matters for your brand specifically.

Whether the company is focused on NPS, CSAT, or CES in your post-transaction surveys, make sure that’s reflected in your call center management program as well. Aligning on as many metrics as possible across the business will make it easier to gain organizational buy-in, socialize insights, and celebrate wins.  

From Buy-In to All-In: Linking Call Center Metrics to Financial Outcomes 

While improving operational performance, customer satisfaction, and agent retention will undoubtedly generate some enthusiasm around your call center management program, that buzz and level of commitment won’t be sustainable if it doesn’t translate to bottom-line impact. A truly effective program drives financial outcomes by reducing costs, curbing customer churn, and ironing out wrinkles identified by customers throughout their purchase journeys. 

Use the interactive ROI calculator below to determine what success could look like for your brand using InMoment’s conversational intelligence tools. 

Calculate your business’s ROI using InMoment’s conversational intelligence tools.

Estimated Revenue Growth
Use the calculator to find an estimated ROI
Total ICX ROI

Submit two or more calculators to show an overview of what your integrated CX program could return.

Why Call Center Management is Critical for Business Success

The role of call center management cannot be overstated when it comes to ensuring business success. From providing a seamless and satisfying customer experience to optimizing operational efficiency, the benefits of effective management are undeniable. The call center serves as the frontline of customer support, bridging the gap between businesses and their valued customers. By implementing best practices, investing in technology, and nurturing a culture of continuous improvement, businesses not only meet the ever-evolving demands of their customer base but also gain a competitive edge in the market.

To learn more about how InMoment’s conversation intelligence capabilities can take your call center to the next level, schedule a personalized demo today!

References 

Gartner. Top Priorities for Customer Service Leaders in 2024. (https://emt.gartnerweb.com/ngw/globalassets/en/sales-service/documents/trends/customer_service_support_2024_top_priorities.pdf). Accessed 1/2/2025.

Contact Center Automation: Reduce Agent Burnout and Boost Customer Satisfaction

Contact center automation streamlines operations, reduces costs, and helps deliver effective customer service. There are various types of automation, from intelligent chatbots to auto dialers, that help contact centers improve experiences and drive business growth.
InMoment Contact Center intelligence solution for faster action and better insights

Contact centers play a significant role in customer experience management. They provide a central platform for handling customer interactions across various channels. Customers expect quick and seamless support when they pick up the phone or type an email. 71% of customers expect personalized communication, and 76% are frustrated if contact centers can’t meet these expectations. From the agent’s perspective, delivering this type of service can be exhausting, which is where contact center automation can help.

What Is Contact Center Automation?

Contact center automation is the process of using AI-enabled software to automate repetitive tasks. It leverages technology like automatic call distribution (ACD) and real-time transcription to reduce the manual workload for agents. As a result, agents can focus on strengthening customer relationships with a personalized and empathetic approach.

Automation empowers businesses to boost operational efficiency, enhance customer satisfaction, and reduce costs. For example, a call transcription tool prevents the need to listen to lengthy recordings and provides quick insight into customer experiences. These insights ensure agents don’t miss out on valuable information they can use to satisfy and retain clients.

Businesses looking to increase their contact center ROI should invest in automation. It enhances the customer-centric approach without adding excessive strain on agents and managers.

What Are the Benefits of Contact Center Automation?

Contact center automation offers the following benefits to businesses:

  • It improves agent productivity and satisfaction. Automation reduces repetitive tasks, allowing agents to focus on complex customer queries. Tools like real-time call transcriptions provide agents with the information they need for quick and effective issue resolution.
  • It increases sales and conversions. Automation helps identify upselling and cross-selling opportunities by analyzing customer behavior. Personalized interactions help drive revenue growth by fulfilling customer needs and converting prospects.
  • It helps reduce contact center costs. Automating repetitive tasks like call routing and data entry enables call center cost reduction for businesses. It addresses bottlenecks to enable smoother workflows and prevents the need for additional staffing during peak times.
  • It boosts customer satisfaction. Automation speeds up resolution times, provides accurate responses, and ensures 24/7 availability for inquiries. These positive results support seamless interactions that satisfy customer needs.

How Does Contact Center Automation Work?

  1. Data Collection and Integration
  2. Natural Language Processing
  3. Response Generation
  4. Continuous Improvement

Contact center automation is a structured pipeline integrating AI-powered tools to streamline operations. Here are the key stages of a typical automation workflow:

Data Collection and Integration

The first step is to collect and connect customer data from various channels. Companies leveraging omnichannel engagement retain 89% of their customers. Therefore, it’s essential to enable customer input from every relevant source.

InMoment’s omnichannel contact center solution helps manage interactions beyond traditional phone calls. It ingests feedback from email, social media, and chat and integrates it with customer relationship management (CRM) data.

Customer data from multiple sources such as calls, reviews, and more.

This approach provides a comprehensive view of the customer experience in one place. As a result, when a customer calls, the system can instantly access details like purchase history to help the agent prepare a personalized response.

Natural Language Processing

The next stage involves analyzing customer input using natural language processing (NLP). The goal is to use machine learning to understand the customer’s intent, emotions, and expectations. 

For example, sentiment analysis is an NLP algorithm that categorizes feedback as positive, neutral, or negative. This categorization provides insights into customer behavior and helps filter out disgruntled profiles for a targeted approach.

InMoment provides award-winning conversation intelligence software to analyze customer sentiment and agent performance. It uses metrics from AI-enabled text analysis to evaluate how well agents respond and handle conversations. Similarly, the insights highlight the extent to which current practices are satisfying customer needs.

Response Generation

Automation tools can also help with response generation once feedback analysis is complete. Chatbots and virtual assistants rely on their knowledge bases to respond to or escalate customer queries. 

Contact center automation platforms like InMoment use generative AI to provide quick and effective responses. Responding to customer feedback within 24-48 hours can boost retention by over 8.5%. As a result, automated responses have greater ROI than manual ones. They also free up valuable time for agents to invest in issue resolution.

Review response automation using InMoment's XI Platform.

Continuous Improvement

AI-enabled customer experience automation learns from interactions to improve over time. It analyzes past conversations, highlighting patterns and areas for improvement. These insights help enhance response frameworks, algorithms, and workflows to boost satisfaction.

For example, a chatbot can update its knowledge base after encountering a new query. This process enables it to better serve customers with similar issues in the future. This stage ensures that the automation pipeline evolves with customer needs. As a result, contact centers succeed in reducing errors and boosting efficiency.

Types of Contact Center Automation

  • IVR and IVAs
  • Forecasting and scheduling
  • Workflow automation
  • Live agent assistance
  • Auto dialer

Businesses can use various forms of automation to improve the contact center experience. Key types include:

IVR and IVAs

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is an automated system that replies to incoming calls with a pre-recorded menu. If you’ve ever called a business and heard “Press 1 for Complaints,” you’ve encountered an IVR. It works by greeting the customer with a menu and then accepting their input via keypad or voice before taking the appropriate action. 

IVR frees up time for agents by handling common queries, announcing updates, routing callers to the right agents, and offering basic support.

Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) are AI-powered chat assistants that can have context-aware conversations with customers. As a result, they can resolve customer queries without requiring agent intervention. 

Traditional virtual agents are limited to responses from their pre-defined scripts. Intelligent agents, on the other hand, use AI to learn from customer interactions and maintain a natural dialogue with intuitive responses. 

A great example of this technology is InMoment’s Active Listening, which prompts customers with context-aware follow-up questions to capture meaningful feedback. Businesses relying on Active Listening witness a 10x boost in survey responses and resolve issues 62% faster. These results highlight the value of AI-powered agents for smooth contact center operations.

InMoment's AI Active Listening solution that increases the power of customer feedback.

Forecasting and Scheduling

Forecasting and scheduling tools help contact centers predict call volume and optimize staffing accordingly. They analyze historical data, trends, and real-time metrics to forecast customer demand accurately.

For example, a retail contact center could use forecasting to prepare for a high volume of inquiries and complaints during the festive shopping season. This analysis enables it to create schedules for agents who can approve or request modifications.

This automation ensures the right number and type of agents are available at the right time. It contributes to contact center optimization by reducing managers’ workloads and customer wait times.

Workflow Automation

Workflow automation streamlines repetitive tasks to free up agents for more complex interactions. It automates tasks such as call routing, follow-up reminders, and data entry to reduce human error and improve operational efficiency.

For example, when a customer submits a service request, workflow automation routes the ticket to the appropriate department based on the inquiry type. This automatic routing enables faster resolution without requiring unnecessary agent involvement.

Live Agent Assistance

Live agent assistance tools use machine learning to support agents during customer interactions. They provide real-time insights through live call transcripts and sentiment scores. 

This information helps agents provide effective responses by monitoring customer expectations and feelings. It also helps managers capture a comprehensive view of agent performance and customer experiences. For example, they can receive notifications for changes in key call center metrics to make informed decisions.

Auto Dialer

An auto dialer is an automated system that dials customer numbers from a predefined list. It detects who or what is receiving the outgoing call and connects agents only when a human answers it. If the system detects a busy signal, disconnect number, or voicemail, it hangs up or leaves a pre-recorded message. 

As a result, auto dialers eliminate the time agents spend manually dialing numbers or dealing with unanswered calls. Advanced auto dialers can even analyze customer behavior data to prioritize calls for better engagement.

What to Look for in Contact Center Automation Software

  1. Text and Speech Analytics
  2. Integrations
  3. Reporting
  4. Customizable Alerts

The right contact center automation software boosts agent productivity and customer satisfaction. It leverages AI, automation workflows, and customer data to optimize contact centers. Key features to look for include:

Text and Speech Analytics

Understanding customer sentiment is essential, but doing so manually is time-consuming. Text and speech analytics use machine learning to provide instant insights into emotions, context, and intent. As a result, agents can quickly identify pain points and opportunities for improvement based on customer feedback.

InMoment provides industry-recognized text analytics that combines machine learning and NLP to extract meaningful insights from unstructured text. The customizable solution leverages over 100 machine learning models and goes beyond sentiment to capture the intent, voiced emotion, and perceived effort in calls. These advanced insights offer a deeper understanding of customer feelings to help reduce churn and close feedback loops.

Integrations

Your automation software should offer integrations with existing systems. For example, it should be able to access data from your help desk system, CRM software, and feedback collection tools. These integrations ensure your agents have everything they need in one place to serve customer needs.

InMoment’s CX integrations allow businesses to access every relevant piece of customer data to make informed decisions. From your internal collaboration tools to call center software, these integrations connect experience data from everywhere to accelerate your product’s time-to-value.

Data sources from different integrations being combined to provide a better customer experience.

Reporting

The right contact center automation tool should offer customizable reports for tracking key metrics like Average Handle Time (AHT) and First Contact Resolution (FCR). These reports use charts, graphs, and summaries to visualize for stakeholders. Features like filtering and trend analysis provide a better understanding of agent performance and customer behavior.

Customizable Alerts

Alerts and notifications help take immediate action to improve experiences. The right software should provide real-time alerts about customer sentiment and CX metrics. This feature keeps agents and managers in the loop, ensuring they don’t miss out on urgent situations and insights.

Best Practices for Contact Center Automation

You must follow a strategic approach to implement contact center automation for your business. Here are a few best practices to consider:

  1. Define Objectives
  2. Understand Your Audience
  3. Track Key Metrics
  4. Always Offer a Live Agent Option
  5. Choose the Right Software

Define Objectives

Set clear and measurable goals for your automation efforts. Think about the exact problem you want to solve. For example, if you want to reduce your average call handle time without compromising customer satisfaction, automation can help improve agent efficiency. Real-time call transcription can provide a good understanding of customer expectations without requiring lengthy live calls or recordings.

Understand Your Audience

Knowing your audience is a great way to generate maximum impact with automation. Use demographic data, customer preferences, and insights from previous interactions to train AI tools. For example, understanding your customers’ preferred communication style will ensure more natural and effective dialogue for frictionless experiences.

Track Key Metrics

Monitor critical metrics such as CSAT and call resolution rates to evaluate your automation software’s performance. Leverage predictive analytics to track future trends in key metrics and proactively address issues before they escalate. Test and refine workflows to remove bottlenecks if your metrics start trending downward.

Always Offer a Live Agent Option

The best contact center experience involves a combination of AI and human touch. Always provide customers with the option to connect with a live agent. For example, an IVR system should route customers to a live agent if the pre-recorded answers are insufficient. Allow customers to request a callback if no agents are currently unavailable. This approach to issue resolution is key for preventing customer frustration.

Choose the Right Software

Selecting the right automation platform is crucial for delivering exceptional experiences. Start by understanding your goals, audience, and operational bottlenecks. Then, consider which features would have the greatest impact on your business. 

For instance, a company extracted actionable insights from volumes of customer feedback with InMoment’s Smart Summary solution. As a result, it was able to take immediate and effective action that helped protect over $15M in revenue at risk. 

As you can see, the right software can significantly boost your bottom line. Look for platforms featuring real-time reporting, text analytics, and seamless integrations to optimize workflows.

Fill out the calculator below to see how much ROI your organization could realize from utilizing InMoment’s platform:

Calculate your business’s ROI using InMoment’s conversational intelligence tools.

Estimated Revenue Growth
Use the calculator to find an estimated ROI
Total ICX ROI

Submit two or more calculators to show an overview of what your integrated CX program could return.

Contact Center Automation Challenges

  • Customer Trust
  • Lack of Personalization
  • Compliance

Contact center automation offers several benefits, but it’s not without its challenges. Businesses should be aware of the following obstacles when implementing automation:

Customer Trust

Automation is great for contact center productivity, but it can’t replace the human touch. In fact, it can even leave customers feeling unheard, especially if their queries are complex or emotional. Trust can erode when customers feel they only interact with bots instead of receiving human support. It’s essential to provide readily available live agent support when automation alone can’t meet customer expectations.

Lack of Personalization

Traditional automation tools struggle to deliver personalized experiences. Without machine learning algorithms that learn from customer feedback and data, these tools tend to provide generic responses. 

This lack of personalization can frustrate users and fail to resolve specific needs. Businesses should leverage conversational analytics, generative AI, and human input to tailor responses based on customer history and profiles.

Compliance

Automation tools must comply with industry regulations and data privacy laws. Mishandling sensitive customer data can have legal and financial consequences. Conduct regular audits and invest in secure integrations to ensure your systems stay compliant while protecting customer information.

How Foot Locker Uses Contact Center Automation

AI-enabled automation unlocks opportunities to improve customer experiences for business gains. An excellent example of leveraging automation comes from leading footwear and sportswear retailer Foot Locker. 

The retailer was collecting healthy volumes of feedback through channels such as email, call center logs, and social media. However, it needed help organizing this multi-channel data in one place and extracting meaningful insights.

Its partnership with InMoment enabled it to leverage Spotlight, an award-winning tool for analyzing textual feedback. Developed by Lexalytics, an InMoment company, Spotlight supports Foot Locker by automatically categorizing customer inquiries. It captures key topics, themes, and intent from feedback to highlight pain points and opportunities.

The retailer can customize the text analytics tool to suit its business needs. For example, it modifies the feedback tagging process to focus on the most relevant categories in queries. Spotlight also removes all personal identifiable information (PII) when analyzing feedback to maintain privacy. It enables the CX team to tag the information back to the original ticket to pinpoint the exact customer for personal outreach.

As a result of advanced NLP and text analytics, Foot Locker now has a unified view of feedback for actionable insights. This automation saves valuable time for staff and makes it easier to identify, retain, and satisfy dissatisfied customers.

Utilize Contact Center Automation with InMoment

Contact center automation performs the analytical heavy lifting so your agents can focus on delivering personalized customer service. It helps reduce operational costs while boosting the value of your customer-centric approach. Take a product tour today to see how InMoment can help implement automation to make the most of your contact center!

References 

Invoca. 39 Call Centre Statistics You Need to Know in 2024 (https://www.invoca.com/uk/blog/statistics-call-center-managers). Accessed on 12/18/2024.

InMoment. InMoment Market Pulse. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/weareinmoment_b2b-customersuccess-ai-activity-7251989745914818560-haGe/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop). Accessed 12/19/2024.

Do You Need a Customer Experience Manager?

A customer experience manager determines, implements, refines, and reports on the customer experience program. This role is crucial to the success of customer experience in enterprise organizations.
Do you need a customer experience manager or CX Manager

Did you know that 80% of organizations have CX teams with 11 or more employees dedicated to the business’s CX program? 

As your company begins to scale customer experience operations, it is possible for silos that cause different departments to use separate technologies and focus on different metrics, which fragments your understanding of the customer experience

To avoid this problem, you need a customer experience manager to break down silos, unify your tech stack, and unite your directors, VPs, and business units with the ultimate goal of creating a friction-free, productive, and delightful customer experience—from onboarding to renewal and advocacy. 

What Is a Customer Experience Manager (CX Manager)?

A customer experience manager determines, implements, and refines the customer experience strategy to ensure that all customer interactions with a company are seamless, satisfying, and aligned with the organization’s values. 

Another important aspect of this role is that it determines the best way to collect, analyze, and act on the voice of customer data at key touchpoints across the customer journey. 

Benefits of Having A Customer Experience Manager

Employing a dedicated customer experience manager can profoundly enhance your organization by providing a singular leadership point for the entire customer experience program. This role ensures that all initiatives to improve customer satisfaction are strategically aligned and executed efficiently across various departments. 

A skilled customer experience manager not only fosters collaboration among teams but also takes charge of managing personnel and allocating resources wisely. By streamlining processes and integrating diverse strategies, this leader plays a pivotal role in driving both operational efficiency and sustainable growth, ultimately creating a more cohesive and impactful customer journey.

What Background Should a CX Manager Have?

It is common to see a wide range of candidates succeed in the role of CX manager—from Salesforce Administrators to Senior Sales Operations professionals to Customer Success or Customer Experience/Voice of the Customer leaders. Even marketing professionals have successfully led CX operations efforts.

It makes sense that effective CX professionals would come from different backgrounds since this role is about as cross-functional as it gets. We can tell you that certain qualities and skill sets, rather than specific career trajectories, predict success in this role. 

Key Skills and Traits of a Successful CX Manager

Customer experience managers will not all share the same background. Some customer experience managers will have marketing experience, others will have sales experience, etc. However, all successful customer experience managers share the same traits that make them successful leaders of customer experience initiatives. Some of these skills include: 

  • Diplomacy and negotiation skills
  • Tech literacy
  • Project management mastery
  • Understanding of procurement

Diplomacy and Negotiation Skills

A customer experience manager needs to have excellent interpersonal skills and be able to balance all the stakeholders’ needs and achieve goals with their available resources. They’ll need to convince a range of departments—not just the customer-facing ones—just how vital these efforts are to the company’s long-term success. 

A CX manager will lead team meetings, communicate strategies, and move projects forward while holding everyone to a timeline (including executives). On top of that, they must obtain a clear mandate and buy-in from their C-suite sponsors. This is especially important, as only 51% of customer experience decision-makers who state that improving the customer experience is a priority for their executives said that those executives act like CX is important most or all of the time

Tech Literacy

Your various technology platforms need to work together as a system. Otherwise, your information silos stay intact and your customer journey remains fragmented. 

On top of that, they’ll need to find the gaps in your current capabilities and identify solutions to fill them. Sometimes, this involves purchasing entirely new systems. Other times, it’s simply a matter of integrating what you’re currently working on. Usually, it’s a bit of both.

InMoment’s CX integrations seamlessly integrate with over 100 enterprise systems to ensure you have a holistic and unified view of the customer experience data to make better business decisions. 

Data sources from different integrations being combined to provide a better customer experience.

Project Management Mastery

Your customer experience manager will need excellent project management skills, including planning timelines and budgets end-to-end and getting personnel to stick to them. They also need to know how to purchase from vendors without using an RFP.

A Strong Understanding of Procurement

Executives have grown wary of new B2B software that promises to solve all their problems, and middle management is rarely overjoyed at the prospect of retraining staff on new platforms. That said, sometimes the current systems don’t cut it, and it’s up to the CX manager to understand the tradeoffs when evaluating new technology and delivering an integrated system that gets the job done.

How to Hire a High-Impact CX Manager

If you want a customer experience manager that will truly revolutionize the customer experience at your organization and be able to tie those improvements to business success, you are going to need to make sure you conduct a hiring process that will yield the highest-performing professionals. Here are some steps to follow that will help you hire a high-impact customer experience manager: 

1. Define the Role: 

One of the most important parts of the hiring process is to make sure that it gets started the right way. When you are looking for a CX manager, clarify what you are looking for and what they will be in charge of. 

Are you hiring a CX manager to start your customer experience from scratch? Are they taking over a pre-existing business unit? What kind of results do you expect from a successful customer experience manager? These questions ensure that applicants are educated on the role from the beginning and eliminate misunderstandings later in the hiring process. 

2. Look for Someone Who Understands the Customer

Whoever you choose as your customer experience manager should have a strong understanding of the modern consumer and the experiences they are looking to have. The ideal candidate understands that only a fraction of customer feedback comes from surveys and that an effective customer experience program will source customer feedback from multiple sources in order to tap into the 85% of customer feedback that is unstructured. 

3. Can Tie CX to Business Performance

One of the biggest challenges for customer experience professionals is to tie customer experience business improvements with business performance improvements. In the current business environment, this is a crucial skill. Regardless of their background, your chosen candidate should have experience with this to ensure that you can measure the ROI of your CX program

4. Assess Cultural Fit

Your customer experience manager will be responsible for communicating across your organization, whether it be executives or associates. Since the CX manager will touch many departments, it is important to take the time to ensure that they are also a cultural fit for your company. This will make the adoption and execution of customer experience initiatives a lot smoother. 

5. Understand the Importance of the Agent/Customer Interaction

One of the most important parts of the customer journey is the experience that the customer has with a contact center or customer support team. 78% of customers prefer to contact customer support through online chat or voice calls. Furthermore, 76% of customers get frustrated when they do not receive a personalized experience. 

It is important to hire a customer experience manager that understands the weight the contact center holds in regard to the entire customer experience and empowers the organization to invest in solutions that will meet customer expectations. 

Tools and Technology for CX Managers

For your customer experience manager to be successful, they need to be equipped with tools that give them the best insights into the state of the customer experience at your organization. These include, but are not limited to, CRM systems, analytics platforms, collaboration tools, and customer feedback platforms. 

The most important of these tools is a customer experience platform. A customer experience platform helps you connect data from multiple sources to get a holistic view of how customers view their interactions with your organization. 

InMoment’s customer experience solution is the premier choice for successful customer experience managers as it combines up to six different solutions, such as conversation intelligence, customer experience surveys, digital listening, reputation management, and more! 

How to Measure the Success of a Customer Experience Manager

There are multiple ways to measure the success of your customer experience manager to understand the impact they are having at your organization. The three main categories of metrics you can use are: 

  • Customer Experience Metrics
  • Operational Metrics 
  • Business Impact

Customer Experience Metrics

To measure the success of your customer experience manager, you will need to benchmark their performance against the customer experience metrics that were agreed upon early on in the hiring process. These can include:

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS)
  • Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
  • Customer Effort Score (CES) 

These metrics can reflect the changes in how the customers perceive their experience. For example, an increase in customer satisfaction in the six to twelve months of a customer experience manager’s time with your organization means the changes and initiatives they have implemented have resulted in a more positive customer experience.  

Operational Metrics

Operational metrics are metrics that reflect the processes within your organization. To measure the performance of your customer experience manager using these metrics, you can compare CX efforts against: 

  • Resolution time
  • Average time in queue  
  • Conversion rate

These metrics reflect the smoothness of operations in your organization or in a specific business unit. For example, the average time in queue and resolution time are often used as call center metrics. A higher resolution time and a lower average time waiting to talk to an agent means that customers have better experiences.  

Business Impact

Perhaps most importantly, you will want to measure how your customer experience manager demonstrates the ROI of CX initiatives through their tangible business impact. This can be done using metrics such as: 

  • Average order size
  • Customer churn rate
  • Cost per conversion (CPC) 

These metrics help measure the ROI of CX initiatives. Using the right tools, you can gauge the financial impact that a successful customer experience program is having on your business. 

Fill out the calculator below to see the ROI you could get from utilizing InMoment’s customer experience platform: 

Calculate your business’s ROI using InMoment’s VoC tools.

Estimated Revenue Growth
Use the calculator to find an estimated ROI
Total ICX ROI

Submit two or more calculators to show an overview of what your integrated CX program could return.

Empower Your Customer Experience Manager with InMoment

A successful CX Manager doesn’t just improve customer experience—they drive meaningful, measurable business growth by putting customers at the heart of every decision. Schedule a demo today to see how InMoment’s platform can set your customer experience manager up for success! 

References 

McKinsey & Company. The value of getting personalization right—or wrong—is multiplying. (https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-value-of-getting-personalization-right-or-wrong-is-multiplying). Accessed 12/17/2024. 

Forrester. The State Of Customer Experience Teams, 2023. (https://www.forrester.com/report/the-state-of-customer-experience-teams-2023/RES180035). Accessed 12/17/2024. 

Call Center Dashboard: Track and Analyze Call Volume for Business Growth

A call center dashboard provides real-time analytical insights into agent performance and customer experiences. These insights help managers make data-driven decisions for exceptional customer service that drives sales.
Support, training and coaching, a call center manager is happy to help her team.

Modern customers interact with many touchpoints before making a purchase. One of the most crucial touchpoints in their journey is the call center. In fact, 89% of customers say that a quick response to an initial inquiry is important when deciding where to take their business. Therefore, a positive call center experience is essential for business growth. The best way to start is by investing in a call center dashboard.

What Is A Call Center Dashboard?

A call center dashboard is a centralized digital interface providing real-time insights into call center performance. It enables call center management to monitor and analyze key performance indicators (KPIs) like call volume, agent effort score, and peak-hour traffic.

The dashboard visualizes these metrics on a unified platform to provide insight into agent and call center performance. As a result, teams can make informed decisions on improving customer relationships and resolving issues.

Call Center Dashboard vs Contact Center Dashboard

A call center dashboard tracks performance by focusing on phone-based interactions. On the other hand, a contact center dashboard covers multiple communication channels, including phone, SMS, email, chat, and social media.

  • Call Center Dashboard: This dashboard is ideal for businesses handling a high volume of phone calls. It monitors metrics like average talk time, call availability, and cost per call.
  • Contact Center Dashboard: This dashboard is ideal for teams processing customer interactions across multiple channels. It tracks KPIs like chat response times, email resolution rates, and social media engagement.

Both types of dashboards focus on conversation intelligence but serve different needs. Businesses relying on call centers to drive sales and strengthen relationships should invest in a call center dashboard.

What Is A Call Center Dashboard Used For?

  1. Monitoring Real-Time Performance
  2. Tracking Call Center Metrics
  3. Identifying Trends

A call center dashboard is crucial to managing and improving call center operations. It provides real-time visibility into KPIs, empowering teams to improve efficiency and customer experiences. Primary uses of the dashboard include:

1. Monitoring Real-Time Performance

A dashboard provides live data on aspects like call availability and agent efficiency. This real-time data collection enables immediate improvements where necessary. For example, if the dashboard indicates a spike in call volume with long wait times, managers can reallocate agents or hire additional staff to manage the load.

2. Tracking Call Center Metrics

Businesses can track call center metrics to ensure teams are meeting their objectives. It provides rich insight into areas of improvement in the customer experience.

For example, the Average Handle Time (AHT) metric indicates how long it takes to complete a single call. While a high AHT is not ideal, a low AHT isn’t great if it compromises service quality.

If your agents complete a call in record time but fail to satisfy the customer, it will hurt your business. A significant challenge with short calls is capturing relevant information quickly and accurately. 

InMoment’s contact center solution offers one-click summaries highlighting key conversation features like category, associated emotions, and the agent’s responses. These summaries can help reduce AHT by up to 33% as they prevent the need for lengthy or frequent calls.

3. Identifying Trends

Dashboards allow call center managers to uncover trends in customer expectations. It visualizes how certain metrics change over time to help teams make informed decisions. 

For example, an upward trend in Average Time in Queue (ATQ) suggests the staff struggles to minimize customer wait times. Recognizing patterns like these helps optimize performance, staffing, and call center strategies.

Benefits of a Call Center Dashboard

A call center dashboard streamlines the process of measuring agent performance and customer experiences. Here are a few key benefits for businesses:

  • It reveals bottlenecks affecting customer service. A dashboard helps identify inefficiencies like frequent repeat calls or long wait times. Uncovering these bottlenecks is key to smoother experiences that drive sales.
  • It highlights areas of improvement. Metrics on agent productivity and customer experiences help address weaknesses. These insights inform training programs and guide resource allocation for better customer service.
  • It helps agents and managers track performance. Dashboards visualize call center performance in real-time. Agents can use this information to set goals and motivate themselves. Managers can use the insights to make informed decisions on agent training and resource allocation.
  • It improves customer experiences. The analytical insights help improve customer satisfaction and retention. For example, if customers frequently complain about long wait times, managers can quickly adjust staffing or implement self-service options.

Types of Contact Center Dashboards

  1. Agent Performance
  2. Manager
  3. Customer Experience
  4. Operational
  5. Financial

There are various types of dashboards to help businesses optimize contact center workflow. Here’s a look at four key types, each serving a distinct purpose:

Agent Performance

Agent performance dashboards provide real-time insights into individual performance metrics. These metrics include Average Handle Time (AHT), First Call Resolution (FCR), transfer rate, and wrap-up time.

The main goal of these dashboards is to monitor trends in agent performance. This process helps managers identify opportunities for improvement to train staff accordingly. Agents can also use this information to set goals and motivate themselves to deliver better experiences.

Manager

Manager dashboards provide strategic insights to team leads and executives to improve long-term performance. They track key metrics like agent effort score (AES), call volume, quality assurance, and agent productivity. 

Managers use this information to understand the current state of the call center and where they can improve it. For example, the insights prove helpful in resource allocation and agent training.

InMoment’s platform gives you access to agent and manager dashboards, which can help you understand team performance, strengths, and weaknesses and identify areas for improvement.

Contact center agent and manager dashboards to track performance metrics

Customer Experience

Customer Experience (CX) dashboards focus on the customer’s interaction with the call center. They monitor customer experience KPIs like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Effort Score (CES), and resolution time.

These dashboards enable CX teams to identify and resolve customer pain points with a data-driven approach. As a result, they gain actionable insights into boosting customer retention and loyalty.

With InMoment, you can create a customer experience dashboard that is customized to your business. These dashboards help you track your business’s main metrics and can be filtered by store number, location, region, or any other classification that your business uses.

Customer experience dashboard showing different types of reporting setup.

Operational

Operational dashboards highlight the health and efficiency of regular call center activities. They track and visualize metrics like call abandonment rate, peak-hour traffic, and average speed of answer (ASA).

Managers use the insights from these dashboards to streamline call center workflows by identifying bottlenecks. For example, a high ASA indicates that the current staff struggles to handle the call volume effectively.

Financial

Financial dashboards help finance teams understand the impact of call center activities on business outcomes. They monitor metrics like cost per call (CPC) and revenue per interaction to determine the call center’s return on investment (Rter. For example, a high CPC indicates the need to adjust operations for higher profitability.

Features to Look for in Contact Center Dashboards

  1. Omnichannel Communication
  2. Sentiment Analysis
  3. Real-Time Call Transcriptions
  4. Integrations with Software Systems
  5. Visualization & Reporting

Managing your contact center experience can be overwhelming. However, the right contact center dashboard saves you several hours’ worth of time and effort by giving you a unified view of the entire workflow. Key features to look for include:

Omnichannel Communication

While phone calls are traditional channels for contacting customer support, other channels are quickly growing in popularity. 67% of customers prefer using live chat, social media, and texting to reach support teams. Unsurprisingly, 36% of Gen-Z customers are happy to use social media platforms for simple inquiries. As a result, modern contact centers should leverage data from multiple channels to increase satisfaction rates.

InMoment’s omnichannel contact center solution helps agents reduce customer friction by engaging on their terms. It allows teams to organize and track customer feedback from every relevant channel for comprehensive insights.

Overview of contact center channel interactions in InMoment's XI Platform.

Call Transcriptions

There is only so much information your agents can capture in a single call. They have to understand the complaint, the customer’s emotions, the steps they have already taken, and so on. Additionally, each agent has to quickly handle multiple calls, making the task even more daunting.

The ability to transcribe phone conversations is crucial for contact centers. Call transcription tools record calls in textual format for easier analysis. These transcripts help identify customer trends and areas of improvement in agent performance. 

Instead of listening to a call recording all over again, you can save valuable time by skimming through a handy transcript. Unfortunately, most transcripts suffer from AI hallucinations, where a transcription tool generates random phrases when it encounters a pause in the audio conversation.

InMoment Advanced AI solves this problem by detecting and removing pauses in audio files. This pre-processing step enables it to generate a complete and accurate call transcript. As a result, you can better understand the interaction and make informed decisions.

InMoment’s AI technologies have helped the team better identify root cause and issues by unlocking the power of call and chat transcripts to see what customers are saying in their unsolicited feedback. The increased understanding leads to more call deflection and process improvement to reduce the number of calls to the customer support team.”

– Tyler Saxey, Director Customer Experience, Foot Locker

Sentiment Analysis

Beyond understanding the agent-customer interaction, it’s also useful to understand customer sentiment. This is where we can identify another benefit of real-time transcription: the ability to analyze customer emotions and intent.

The right contact center dashboard should help you identify how well a call is going based on customer sentiment. With InMoment’s sentiment analysis tool, you can quickly categorize real-time call transcripts as positive, neutral, and negative. This categorization is valuable for understanding customer intent and taking immediate action.

A sentiment analysis dashboard categorizing trending keywords by sentiment.

Integrations with Software Systems

Your tool of choice should be able to integrate with the rest of your contact center infrastructure. For example, it should provide integrations with your ticketing system, CRM software, and communication channels. These integrations ensure a smooth experience for agents by providing instant access to relevant customer and experience data.

InMoment’s CX integrations connect your customer experience insights with every enterprise system that your business currently uses so that the leaders in your organization have everything they need to make customer-centric decisions.

Data sources from different integrations being combined to provide a better customer experience.

Visualization & Reporting

A suitable contact center dashboard should be able to visualize CX and agent metrics. It should provide easy-to-understand reports featuring engaging visuals to inform stakeholders. Clear and concise reports help you quickly identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.

How to Set Up A Call Center Dashboard

  1. Decide what you want to track.
  2. Select the right vendor.
  3. Implement the dashboard.
  4. Train your staff.
  5. Monitor and adjust.

Set up a call center dashboard for smooth and efficient workflow using the following steps:

Decide What You Want to Track

Start by identifying the key metrics that align with your call center goals. For example, FCR highlights the percentage of issues your agents resolve in a single call. As a result, it’s a valuable metric to track if you want to improve customer loyalty and agent efficiency. Recognize what matters most to your operations to align the dashboard with these priorities.

Select the Right Vendor

It’s essential to select the right vendor to build an effective call center dashboard. Look for a platform offering:

  • Call transcription
  • Sentiment analysis
  • Customizable reports
  • Integration with existing systems

InMoment offers a comprehensive contact center tool combining advanced analytics, accurate transcriptions, and multiple integrations. These features are valuable for elevating call center operations and improving their ROI. See what kind of ROI you can get with InMoment’s conversational intelligence tools by filling out the calculator below!

Calculate your business’s ROI using InMoment’s conversational intelligence tools.

Estimated Revenue Growth
Use the calculator to find an estimated ROI
Total ICX ROI

Submit two or more calculators to show an overview of what your integrated CX program could return.

Implement the Dashboard

Work with your vendor to integrate the dashboard into your current systems. Start by establishing data channels that allow the dashboard to collect information from call logs, feedback tools, and CRM software. Set up notifications for key metrics and labels like repeat call rate and negative sentiment. Customize the dashboard to ensure the interface is as helpful as possible for agents and managers.

Train Your Staff

Train your agents to make the most of your advanced dashboard. Provide the team with the necessary skills and knowledge to leverage the dashboard’s features. The training should focus on interpreting key metrics, using real-time data, and identifying bottlenecks to improve productivity.

Monitor and Adjust 

Your work isn’t complete even when the dashboard is operational. It’s now essential to regularly review its performance for continuous improvement. A good practice is to gather feedback from agents to identify issues with the technology. Adjust the dashboard when necessary to reflect evolving business goals and priorities.

Tips for An Effective Contact Center Dashboard

  1. Customize the dashboard.
  2. Filter and drill down for better insights.
  3. Set up alerts and notifications.
  4. Review and update metrics.

The following tips will help you maintain an effective contact center dashboard to deliver better experiences:

Customize the Dashboard

Start by integrating your brand’s themes and colors to create a cohesive visual identity. Organize the layout to highlight the most relevant metrics to your operation. 

Use widgets and visual elements like charts to interpret metrics at a glance. You can also enable role-specific customizations. For example, agents require an interface with real-time CX metrics, while managers also need to see agent performance KPIs.

Filter and Drill Down for Better Insights

Filters are simple but powerful tools for effective monitoring and analysis. For example, you can filter out all customer interactions carried out by an agent to track individual performance. Useful filters include complaint type, timeframe, channel type, and customer sentiment. Leverage drill-down features to explore metrics in greater depth, including trends and causes.

Set Up Alerts and Notifications

Real-time alerts ensure you never miss out on key insights. Set up notifications for metrics like call abandonment rates and CSAT to address issues before they escalate. You can customize alerts based on roles so that agents and managers get relevant updates.

Review and Update Metrics

Business priorities and customer needs evolve. Your dashboard should reflect these changes. For example, if your business shifts its focus to omnichannel support, you should add metrics for chat response times or social media interactions.

A good practice is to conduct periodic reviews and collect feedback from team members. This approach helps ensure you’re tracking relevant metrics for business growth.

Leverage InMoment In Your Contact Center

Your contact center is a valuable asset that plays a massive role in shaping your reputation. It can be the difference between disgruntled customers and loyal brand advocates. InMoment’s industry-recognized contact center dashboard helps optimize agent performance and enhance customer experiences. Take a product tour today to see how you can gain analytical insight into agent-customer interactions!

References 

Zendesk. The business impact of customer service on customer lifetime value (https://www.zendesk.com/in/blog/customer-service-and-lifetime-customer-value). Accessed on 12/12/2024.

Reduce Customer Churn to Boost Revenue and Stay Competitive

Customer churn occurs when customers stop using your product or service. It results in losses ranging from a drop in revenue to a declining market share. The good news is that businesses can reduce customer churn by focusing on strategies like churn prediction and proactive outreach.
Two female collegues having business meeting to discuss how to reduce future customer churn

Losing customers never feels good, especially in a hyper-competitive market. You could replace them, but that’s easier said than done. In fact, it costs five times more to acquire new customers than it does to keep an existing one. But, what if you could predict and reduce customer churn to retain customers at risk of leaving you?

With the right strategies and tools, you can prevent customers from taking their business elsewhere. The key is to build trust and loyalty through positive experiences that convert potential losses into growth opportunities.

The Importance of Reducing Customer Churn

A customer-centric approach can’t succeed without addressing customer churn. High churn rates indicate dissatisfaction and missed opportunities to strengthen relationships. Here are a few reasons why reducing churn is essential for business gains:

  • It increases revenue stability: Retaining customers ensures a steady revenue stream, helping you minimize acquisition costs.
  • It boosts Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Loyal customers spend more over time, creating a positive impact on your bottom line.
  • It encourages product improvement: When you address churn, you can identify specific pain points leading to dissatisfaction. This information guides product development to better fulfill customer needs and goals.
  • It gives you a competitive advantage: Your product and business improvements will likely enhance customer satisfaction. As a result, you’ll succeed in retaining and acquiring customers to increase your market share.
  • It improves your brand image: Happy customers are more likely to recommend your business, helping support brand reputation management efforts.

What Is Customer Churn?

Customer churn occurs when customers stop using your product or cancel their subscriptions. It’s an important metric to track because it highlights the number of customers leaving you. You can calculate it by dividing the number of customers you lost over a specific period by the number of active customers at the start of that period.

Types of Customer Churn

Several types of churn can affect your bottom line, including:

  • Customer churn describes the decline in customer count during a specific period. It doesn’t address a drop in revenue, only focusing on the raw number of customers lost.
  • Revenue churn represents revenue lost due to customers downgrading their plans or leaving the business altogether. Businesses with tiered pricing models typically focus on this type of churn.
  • Early churn occurs when customers leave the business during their initial experience with the product or service. It highlights an issue with product onboarding and time to value since the product fails to demonstrate immediate utility to the customer.
  • Active churn is when customers voluntarily stop using a service or product. The most straightforward example is when a customer decides to cancel their subscription. This decision could reflect dissatisfaction, finding a better alternative, or changing requirements.
  • Passive churn is also described as involuntary churn. It occurs when customers don’t explicitly cancel their service. For example, a subscription that ends due to failure to update credit card details. This type of churn indicates issues beyond dissatisfaction, such as inadequate payment processing.

How to Reduce Customer Churn

  1. Identify At-Risk Customers
  2. Analyze Churn Drivers
  3. Collect Regular Feedback
  4. Identify Your Target Audience
  5. Focus on Proactive Outreach
  6. Deliver Excellent Customer Service
  7. Understand Your Competition
  8. Highlight Your Value
  9. Invest in Customer Loyalty
  10. Improve Onboarding
  11. Educate Your Customers
  12. Encourage Long-Term Engagement

Customer churn is a serious challenge, with U.S. businesses losing $136 billion annually due to avoidable churn. Here are 12 impactful ways to reduce churn and prevent it from impacting your revenue streams.

Identify At-Risk Customers

Knowing who is likely to leave helps you optimize your churn reduction efforts. It enables you to pinpoint specific user profiles for re-engagement. Tracking activity levels is a straightforward way to recognize at-risk customers. For example, if they haven’t renewed their subscription or completed a survey in a while, they might be losing interest in your product.

A churn prediction tool like InMoment simplifies this process by leveraging analytics to highlight these at-risk profiles and segments. It also helps you understand why churn occurs, which gives you an opportunity to take preventative action.

Customer churn analysis charts

Analyze Churn Drivers

Churn occurs for various reasons that can highlight significant areas for improvement. Customers may leave due to product dissatisfaction, poor service quality, high pricing, or simply because a competitor offers more value. 

Leverage churn prediction tools, feedback, and usage data to analyze key factors driving customers away. For example, if customers complain about a lack of features, it signals a need for product improvements. Addressing these drivers allows you to enhance satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. 

To see what this can look like in action, read this customer story to learn how this large Telecommunications organization parted with InMoment to identify the root cause of customer churn and identified $6 million in at-risk revenue!

Collect Regular Feedback

Consistent feedback collection is essential for tracking customer expectations and behavior. Businesses that actively use customer feedback for improvements experience a 10% increase in retention rates.

Use surveys and social media monitoring to capture insights into customer experiences. Leverage analytics to understand their pain points and goals. For example, if feedback reveals confusion during onboarding, you can improve your processes to make them more intuitive.

InMoment’s XI platform enables you to collect and analyze customer insights effectively. It leverages CX integrations to connect and collect feedback from every channel, making it easier to act on. As a result, you build trust, improve retention, and reduce the likelihood of customers leaving.

Fill out the calculator below to reveal how much ROI you can get from utilizing InMoment’s platform: 

Calculate your business’s ROI using InMoment’s VoC tools.

Estimated Revenue Growth
Use the calculator to find an estimated ROI
Total ICX ROI

Submit two or more calculators to show an overview of what your integrated CX program could return.

Identify Your Target Audience

You can build the best product with high-quality customer support behind it. However, it’ll struggle to keep target customers on board if it doesn’t resonate with them. Therefore, you must recognize the user profiles that can make the most of your product. These customers are less likely to be swayed by lower prices elsewhere because they see genuine value in your business.

Focus on Proactive Outreach

Proactive communication is an important part of re-engaging at-risk customers. It shows your awareness of potential issues, making customers feel valued and heard. Stay ahead of customer needs with regular check-ins and possible solutions.

The best way to recognize issues before they become churn drivers is to monitor customer sentiment online. With InMoment’s social listening tool, you can track brand and product mentions to see what customers have to say. This approach keeps you in the loop regarding customer experiences so that you can make proactive improvements.

Deliver Excellent Customer Service

Feedback collection, analysis, and social listening provide the insights you need to improve customer experiences. In fact, 77% of customers are willing to share personal information as long as they receive better experiences in return. For example, improving your e-commerce website’s user interface after listening to customers will improve your chances of retaining many of them.

Understand Your Competition

If customers are considering leaving you, guess where they might go next? Your competitors! Analyzing the major players in your space will help you stay competitive by identifying their strengths and weaknesses. It will also help you see how you can differentiate your product and service to stand out.

For example, if your competitor is receiving criticism for slow customer support, you can use the opportunity to market your 24/7 multi-channel service. Competitive analysis allows you to address market gaps and remain relevant for existing and potential customers.

Highlight Your Value

We just discussed how competitor analysis provides opportunities to establish yourself as a viable alternative. This is where you must communicate your product’s or service’s long-term value. Leverage marketing channels to highlight impactful ways in which you solve customer pain points. Your online reputation management efforts will also be crucial, as they yield positive reviews that you can use to reinforce value and reduce churn. 

Invest in Customer Loyalty

Strong customer loyalty is key to reducing churn. 64% of loyal customers are more likely to purchase frequently. Besides improving customer experiences, you can encourage loyalty with rewards and incentives. A good loyalty program goes a long way toward strengthening relationships and increasing customer lifetime value. Incentives like discounts and loyalty points encourage customers to stick with your brand over the long term.

Improve Onboarding

The onboarding process sets the tone for the customer journey with your brand. An effective product onboarding experience ensures a short time to value and reduces the chances of early churn.

For example, you can create step-by-step tutorials, welcome emails, or in-app guides tailored to new users. Proactively address common questions and offer easy access to support during onboarding to build trust. This approach sets the groundwork for long-term satisfaction by empowering customers to achieve their goals early on.

Educate Your Customers

Customers who understand how to capture value through your product are more likely to stay long-term. Educating your audience ensures they use it effectively to fulfill their needs. Leverage guides, webinars, video tutorials, and newsletters to inform customers.

Another benefit of educating your customers is brand credibility. Customers and prospects are likely to view you as a trusted authority in your space. As a result, educational initiatives promote trust and long-term loyalty.

Encourage Long-Term Engagement

Engagement is crucial to keeping customers connected to your brand. Regular interactions remind customers of the value you offer and encourage long-term loyalty. Personalized recommendations, gamification, or exclusive community access can help foster long-term relationships. This approach helps reduce churn likelihood by making customers feel invested in your brand.

How Does Improving the Overall Customer Experience Reduce Customer Churn?

The best way to hold on to a customer is to deliver consistent and positive experiences. Excellent customer experience management is key to customer satisfaction and staying ahead of competitors. Here are four key ways in which CX improvements help reduce customer churn:

  • It enhances customer loyalty: Loyal customers spend more frequently and are likelier to recommend your brand to others. As a result, they are far less likely to switch to competitors.
  • It flags potential pain points early: Analyzing the customer journey helps you spot and address issues that might lead to churn. Proactive communication and problem-solving play a huge role in retaining at-risk customers.
  • It strengthens customer relationships: Delivering personalized interactions creates an emotional bond between customers and the brand. This connection encourages long-term relationships.
  • It highlights your unique value to customers: Positive customer experiences highlight the unique benefits of your product or service. They help customers recognize your value in their daily lives, reducing their likelihood of seeking alternatives.

How to Reduce Customer Churn Using Customer Journey Analytics

Customer journey analytics helps businesses map and understand the end-to-end customer experience. It pinpoints glaring issues, tracks customer behavior, and highlights where customers might churn.

For example, if analytics reveal a pattern of early churn, you can address the issue with clearer onboarding instructions or proactive support. These insights enable you to personalize interactions and improve weak touchpoints.

You can identify at-risk customers early with customer experience journey mapping and churn prediction. InMoment combines both processes in an intuitive CX platform to enable a better understanding of user journeys. Its advanced text analytics and AI Journey Insights help identify churn drivers and hidden pain points to improve retention rates.

How to Use NPS to Reduce Customer Churn

Net promoter score (NPS) is a valuable metric for understanding customer loyalty and reducing churn. It categorizes customers as promoters, passives, and detractors to highlight the likelihood of customer retention. Promoters are loyal advocates, while detractors are disgruntled customers at risk of churning.

NPS surveys help collect feedback from both types of customers. Following up with detractors and resolving their issues on a priority basis can convert them into loyal customers. Analyzing the change in NPS over a specific period is also helpful in tracking the success of retention strategies.

How InMoment Can Help Reduce Customer Churn

Customer churn results in significant business losses that make it difficult to survive in a competitive market. While you can’t completely eliminate churn, you can reduce it to grow your revenue and market share. InMoment provides industry-recognized churn prediction software that enables early identification of churn drivers and at-risk customers. Schedule a demo of our text analytics solution today to see how it can help boost retention rates!

References 

Forbes. Customer Retention Versus Customer Acquisition (https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinesscouncil/2022/12/12/customer-retention-versus-customer-acquisition). Accessed 12/09/2024.

Desk365. 101 Customer Service Statistics You Need to Know in 2024 (https://www.desk365.io/blog/customer-service-statistics). Accessed 12/09/2024.

Freshworks. 50 Essential customer service statistics to know for 2024 (https://www.freshworks.com/customer-service/statistics). Accessed 12/09/2024.

Emarsys. 32 Customer Loyalty Statistics Your Business Needs to Know in 2025 (https://emarsys.com/learn/blog/customer-loyalty-statistics). Accessed 12/09/2024.

Winter 2024 CX Trends: Navigating AI, Society, and Experience Design

Learn how generative AI, customer expectations, and customer journeys as a whole are changing and how your business can be prepared for the future.

Winter 2024 is heating up the CX landscape! Generative AI is making waves, societal shifts are redefining expectations, and customer experience design is evolving beyond transactions into transformative journeys. CX leaders face a thrilling challenge: staying ahead in a rapidly changing world. Let’s dive into the hottest trends and their implications for experience improvement.

AI: Hype, Hallucinations, and Human Oversight

Generative AI stole the spotlight in 2024, offering revolutionary possibilities—from personalized marketing to automated support. Yet, the reality is more nuanced. AI is an amplifier, generating outputs based on input quality. Remember the infamous case of AI suggesting glue on pizza? It underscores the need for vigilance and human oversight.

Think of AI as an intern needing guidance—it doesn’t replace human judgment but enhances it. Successful AI integration combines AI with Human Intelligence (HI) to ensure ethical, relevant, and brand-aligned interactions.

Real-world example: Taco Bell’s voice AI drive-thru improves efficiency but keeps employees involved for complex tasks, blending AI’s speed with human empathy.

Key takeaway: Thoughtful AI integration, with human oversight, augments customer connections rather than replacing them.

Society: Divided, Yet Connected

Customers navigate a paradox: craving connection in an overstimulated, fragmented world. Societal trends are shaping new opportunities and challenges for CX leaders:

  • Wellness Culture: Self-care is booming, from non-alcoholic beverages to gut health products. But wellness culture can fuel health anxiety. CX leaders must offer authentic support without exploiting fears.
  • Social Divides: From dating apps highlighting income disparity to far-right riots affecting footfall, social inequalities are more visible. Brands must foster inclusion through thoughtful CX strategies.
  • Youth Trends: Gen Z’s rising influence demands authenticity, sustainability, and inclusivity. It’s not just their buying power but their values that matter. Aligning experiences with these principles fosters loyalty.

Key takeaway: Brands that support well-being, inclusion, and individuality will forge stronger connections and resilience in their CX strategies.

Experience Design: From Transactions to Transformations

Today’s best experiences go beyond reducing friction—they transform interactions. The goal: anticipate needs, foster emotional connections, and make every touchpoint memorable. Here’s how:

  • Sustainable Interactions: Conscious design minimizes environmental impact and builds trust.
  • Tactile Resurgence: Physical buttons are back! Companies like Apple reintroduce tactile keys, prioritizing comfort over aesthetics.
  • Preventative Experiences: Proactive strategies (like reducing return rates) prevent friction. Smart recommendations can turn these efforts positive.
  • Innovative In-Store Interactions: Gamified shopping and self-service returns transform mundane tasks into engaging experiences.
  • Preserve Human Connection: Digital efficiency (like mobile orders) streamlines tasks but can erode joy. Balance technology with personal interaction.
  • Data-Driven Design: Too much data overwhelms without context. Filter relevant insights to focus on what truly matters.

Key takeaway: Transformative experience design anticipates needs, aligns with values, and enhances human connections. In order to achieve this, you need to know how to leverage all your data.

The Psychology of Change: Helping Humans Adapt

Change is hard—especially with new technologies. The “mere exposure effect” shows that familiarity breeds comfort. Transparency and training are crucial. Frame AI as an enabler, not a replacer, to build trust and ease transitions.

Emotions Drive Decisions: Emotional experiences leave a lasting impact—sometimes positive, sometimes not. To create moments of delight and minimize friction, you need a fresh approach that combines creativity with customer behavior analysis. Take Houston Airport, for example: they famously cut complaints not by speeding up baggage delivery, but by making passengers walk longer, reducing the perception of wait time. It’s all about rethinking the journey to reshape the experience.

Psychology in Practice:

  • Behavioral Insights Matter: Simplify choices to prevent overwhelming customers.
  • Reframing Works: Change perspectives to change outcomes.
  • Action Bias Alert: Sometimes, doing less is the smartest move. Take penalty shots in football for example. Data shows that goalkeepers who stay centered instead of diving dramatically actually save more. It’s a reminder that strategic patience often beats impulsive action.

Looking Ahead: Balancing Innovation and Human Connection

As we move into 2025, the key to CX excellence lies in balance. AI offers incredible potential, but human connection defines exceptional experiences.

Key Action Points:

  • Integrate AI with HI: Enhance efficiency while maintaining brand integrity.
  • Champion Authenticity: Navigate societal divides with honest, empathetic CX strategies.
  • Engage Younger Audiences: Align with Gen Z’s values to resonate across generations.

CX leaders have a unique opportunity to meet evolving expectations, from integrating AI for seamless personalization to rethinking wellness campaigns for genuine care.

Want to learn more? Check out our 2025 Consumer Trends Report for deeper insights and practical guidance on navigating the future of customer experience.

How Customer Experience Outsourcing Could Benefit Your Business

Customer experience outsourcing involves delegating certain aspects of customer experience management to third-party providers to scale CX operations.
Businessman shaking hands with partner.

Customer experience is at the heart of modern business success. Companies constantly seek ways to improve satisfaction, foster loyalty, and drive revenue, but delivering an exceptional customer experience is no small task. From managing customer touchpoints to implementing advanced tools and strategies, achieving the desired results requires significant expertise and resources.

For many businesses, the solution lies in customer experience outsourcing. By partnering with specialized providers, companies can tap into expertise, streamline operations, and provide 24/7 customer support—without overburdening their internal teams.

As a matter of fact, customer experience outsourcing can boost efficiency by up to 25% and give your organization more time to focus on core business functions. 

What is Customer Experience Outsourcing?

Customer experience outsourcing involves delegating certain aspects of customer experience management to third-party providers. These providers manage interactions across various channels, including customer support, social media, live chat, email, and technical support.

Customer experience outsourcing does not just refer to outsourcing different channels, it also refers to outsourcing the management of your entire customer experience program to a trusted provider who can provide you with software, services, and reporting. 

Benefits of Customer Experience Outsourcing

Outsourcing customer experience can offer transformative benefits for businesses of all sizes. Here are some of the key advantages:

  • Cost Savings: Outsourcing eliminates the need for in-house hiring, training, and infrastructure, reducing operational costs. Many outsourcing providers also operate in regions with lower labor costs, further driving savings.
  • Access to Expertise and Technology: Customer experience outsourcing partners bring specialized knowledge, cutting-edge tools, and best practices that might not be available in-house. They stay updated on industry trends, ensuring your customers get top-tier support.
  • Scalability and Flexibility: Whether it’s seasonal demand or rapid business growth, outsourcing allows you to scale your operations quickly and efficiently. Providers can adjust team sizes and resources to meet your needs.
  • 24/7 Availability: Many CX outsourcing providers operate around the clock, ensuring your customers can receive support anytime, anywhere.
  • Focus on Core Operations: By outsourcing customer experience tasks, your internal team can dedicate more time to strategic business goals and innovation.

Challenges of Outsourcing Customer Experience

While customer experience outsourcing offers significant advantages, it’s not without challenges. Organizations interested in customer experience outsourcing need to be aware of potential pitfalls and address them proactively. Here are some of the main challenges of customer experience management outsourcing:

  • Loss of Brand Voice: Outsourcing can sometimes lead to inconsistencies in how your brand communicates with customers, which might impact customer trust.
  • Communication Barriers: Language and cultural differences can pose challenges, especially when working with offshore providers.
  • Quality Control: Maintaining high standards in customer interactions can be difficult without robust monitoring and feedback systems.
  • Data Security and Privacy: Sharing customer data with third parties can increase the risk of breaches or non-compliance with regulations like GDPR or CCPA.

To mitigate these challenges, your business should invest time in selecting the right customer experience outsourcing partner, ensuring alignment with their values, and establishing clear performance metrics.

How to Choose the Right Customer Experience Outsourcing Partner

Selecting the right customer experience outsourcing partner is an important step in your customer experience strategy. Here are some key factors to consider:

  • Industry experience
  • Technology and tools
  • Cultural Fit
  • Scalability

Industry Experience

When choosing a CX partner, you want a partner who understands your industry and has a proven track record of delivering excellent results in your sector. You can narrow down vendors by reading customer experience improvement stories that highlight improvements in business performance as a direct result of CX improvement.

InMoment’s team of CX experts has over 50 years of advisory and research experience across multiple industries. The InMoment team excels at program management, so you spend less time managing experiences and more time improving them.

Technology and Tools

It is important to choose a partner that uses advanced technology and tools that can also be customized to your specific needs. You can examine which vendors have the best CX technology by reading reviews and third-party evaluations. 

InMoment’s platform has been named a leader in Gartner, IDC, and Forrester evaluative reports and is the highest rated by users, according to Gartner Peer Insights. In a recent Survey by G2, InMoment performed better than Qualtrics in every category.

Cultural Fit

When selecting a customer experience management outsourcing partner, it is important to ensure that they understand your brand’s core values and maintain the same voice you embody in your current customer interactions. 

This step ensures that the experiences delivered to your customers remain consistent and reflect the essence of your brand. By collaborating with a partner who understands and upholds your principles, you can create a seamless and cohesive experience that reinforces trust and loyalty among your clientele.

Scalability

Choose a provider capable of scaling resources to meet your business’s evolving customer experience needs.

When selecting a customer experience outsourcing partner, it is important to choose one that has the capability to scale resources effectively to accommodate the changing demands of your business’s customer experience program. 

InMoment’s platform is easily scalable and customizable to match the evolving needs of your business. Regardless of your business currently falls on the customer experience maturity model, InMoment can meet you where you are and help you scale accordingly. 

Choosing the Right Customer Experience Outsourcing Approach

When it comes to customer experience outsourcing, businesses have a range of options to choose from. Some organizations may prefer fully entrusting their CX operations to an external partner and leveraging a full-service solution’s expertise and comprehensive support. 

Others may opt for greater autonomy and select a self-service solution that gives them control over their CX strategy while relying on a vendor for technology and minimal support.

Understanding the distinction between these two approaches—full-service and self-service—is essential for businesses looking to make informed decisions about customer experience outsourcing and their overall CX management strategy.

What Is a Full-Service Customer Experience Solution?

A full-service CX solution refers to a CX partnership in which the company providing the platform manages all aspects of the technology (programming, analysis, change management, etc.).

This relationship between the organization and the CX vendor is services-driven, and a brand that purchases this type of solution can expect to have a dedicated team of experienced CX and technology experts to check in with regularly and help the brand with every aspect of its CX program. 

A full-service CX vendor will help your team define strategy, implement the technology, train team members, craft surveys, import other customer data, design reporting dashboards, and beyond.  

What Is a Self-Service Customer Experience Solution?

A self-service CX vendor refers to a situation in which a person or persons within the purchasing organization are responsible for all aspects of the ongoing technology usage.

A brand purchasing a self-service CX solution can expect to have full control and autonomy in their CX initiatives. There is often a dedicated implementation team, but post implementation, there is more likely to be a helpline or contact the brand can reach out to in case of an error or if they’re in need of help.

Of course, there is a gray area between the two categories. A CX vendor that emphasizes true partnership will emphasize that customer experience is not one size fits all and will therefore offer a blend of self-service and support-driven options to fit your needs. For example, a vendor may offer DIY survey tools alongside strategic insight sessions. 

How to Determine Which Is Right for You

A full-service program can be a great choice if you’re short on resources or want to utilize customer experience management outsourcing. With a full-service program, you can fill in any gaps in resources or skill sets with the considerable expertise your full-service CX vendor has on staff. Your dedicated team will know your business, goals, and program.

A full-service CX solution will also help you to drive more long-term strategy for your program. Check-ins will help you to stay accountable to goals, and your vendor will be able to advise you on any challenges, as well as connect you with other CX professionals in your industry. 

On the other hand, a self-service program may be a better option if you have the expertise and resources to accomplish your CX goals in-house. With a self-service program, you can make changes to surveys or other initiatives in the middle of the night if you want to. 

Additionally, self-service programs can be more cost-effective in the long run, since you won’t be paying for the vendor’s management services.

Best Practices for Successful Customer Experience Outsourcing

Customer experience outsourcing is a large investment. The partner you choose to entrust your CX program with will have a direct impact on business performance. In order to ensure you choose the right partner and make the most out of your investment, follow these best practices: 

  • Set clear goals and KPIs
  • Maintain regular communication 
  • Invest in training
  • Monitor performance
  • Foster collaboration

Set Clear Goals and KPIs

Establishing clear objectives and customer experience metrics is essential for a successful outsourcing partnership. Clearly communicate what success looks like for your CX initiatives, whether it’s improving customer satisfaction scores, reducing response times, or increasing retention rates. These benchmarks will guide your partner’s efforts and ensure alignment with your business goals.

Maintain Regular Communication

Frequent and open communication is the foundation of a strong customer experience outsourcing relationship. Schedule regular check-ins and performance reviews to stay aligned with your partner. These touchpoints allow you to address any challenges, share updates, and ensure that your CX strategy remains on track.

Invest in Training

Equip your customer experience outsourcing partner’s team with the knowledge they need to represent your brand effectively. Comprehensive training on your products, services, and brand values ensures consistency in customer interactions and helps the team align with your business ethos. A well-trained team can significantly enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Monitor Performance

Effectively utilizing a customer experience dashboard will help you track the performance of your CX program and of your customer experience outsourcing provider. 

With InMoment as your CX partner, you can create customer experience dashboards and reports that can be shared throughout the organization to help stakeholders understand the current state of customer experience, evaluate the business impact of certain initiatives, and plan for the future.

Custom built CX dashboards and reports in InMoment's XI Platform.

Foster Collaboration

In order to develop the most successful partnership with your customer experience outsourcing provider, view them as an extension of your internal team. Foster a collaborative relationship by encouraging open communication, brainstorming solutions together, and sharing feedback. A strong partnership built on mutual trust and teamwork will lead to better customer and business results.

Take InMoment’s Quiz and Get Started

Ultimately, the decision on the extent of your customer experience outsourcing efforts depends on a variety of factors, including the size of your organization, your budget, and your technical expertise. 

Take the InMoment quiz below to get started and find out whether a self-service or full-service customer experience outsourcing solution is best for you!

References 

MyOutDesk. 35 Outsourcing Statistics For 2024 | MyOutDesk. (https://www.myoutdesk.com/blog/outsourcing-statistics/). Accessed 12/6/2024. 

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