Building on the lessons of 2024
In Part One of this series, I wrote about the disappointing management of call center technology and processes I observed in 2024. The good news is, there are accessible and tangible solutions for companies that are willing to invest a little time, energy, and brainpower in learning how to improve customer service effectively.
To recap, here are the most common pitfalls of 2024 when it came to customer service best practice:
Businesses who implement AI without proper AI integration into their existing processes and workflows are doing it wrong.
Changing the names of things doesn’t mean they work better (or will be adopted by customers) – what used to be called bots and agent assist started being called digital agents and digital assistants. While the functionality improved greatly, particularly toward the end of the year, if organizations don’t implement these tools in an integrated fashion, you wind up with more chatbots that customers hate.
Attaching an AI tool to a faulty, inaccurate, incomplete, or contradictory knowledge base gets you faulty, inaccurate, incomplete, and contradictory answers faster—and who does that really help? (No one—not customers or employees, and it has devastating consequences for adoption.)
Employees, especially customer service employees, feel the impact of poorly managed integrations and changes. Upskilling, change management and communication are essential to making sure your workforce is keeping up.
How can businesses do better in 2025?
How do these ideas turn into actionable change? My short punch list of how to have a successful 2025 in your contact center says that you must prioritize these four things:
Document your knowledge: Document processes and information and know where it is—clean, accurate, synced.
Gather insights: Use customer insights tools as a diagnostic to implement new and improved processes.
Technology integration: Technology and automation should enhance—not replace—the human touch. Make sure every tech update is paired with updates to the corresponding people and process components.
Invest in talent: Upskilling and adapting your workforce to keep up with technology is key.
Garbage in, garbage out: the basis for great customer experience in the AI-driven world is knowledge documentation
Knowledge documentation, in an AI-driven world, is the linchpin that allows for great customer experiences. Without a solid, accessible knowledge base, advanced AI tools cannot give any form of proper, meaningful support. Think of it this way: garbage in, garbage out. If you’re feeding your AI tools poorly organized or limited information, it’s not going to give you much in return either.
Knowledge documentation encompasses much more than just a few articles, or some frequently asked questions; it calls for a very dynamic approach in making sure the information is extensive, relevant, and representative of real customer interactions. Policies, processes, and products should systematically captured, indexed, and easily searchable by humans and AI alike for knowledge documentation to be effective.
For customer experience-oriented businesses, this means reconsidering how knowledge surfaces within an enterprise. AI can surface the right answer at the right time, provided there is a well-crafted repository on the backend. This investment in knowledge documentation gains dividends not only in AI performance but rather in time-to-train for agents, workflow efficiency, and, most importantly, the customer journey.
Customer insights: a viable approach with a clear ROI
Customer insights have ceased to be optional; they have become vital to unlocking competitive advantage and unleashing experiences personalized in a manner customers will appreciate. Apply that leverage in data, and companies can learn behaviors, preferences, and pain points in order to provide smarter support.
The ROI of customer insights is clear:
Better personalization: With personalized recommendations and proactive services, customer satisfaction increases, leading to loyalty.
Operational efficiency: Common issues that insights uncover help organizations prioritize and optimize processes.
Strategic growth: Understanding the customer's needs reveals unexplored opportunities and guides the implementation of new channels, talk tracks, or processes for customer service.
But gathering customer insights is not about collecting data; it's about making that data work. Companies need to connect the analytics tools that synthesize data from call center interactions, chat logs, and survey responses. They need to have a holistic approach in terms of making sure that insights do not remain confined to silos but lead to well-rounded cross-functional improvements.
They can ensure improvement not only in their bottom lines but also in their reputations regarding providing quality service with the establishment of a sound mechanism for tapping and taking advantage of customer insights within organizations.
Balancing AI and technology with human touch: the new era of customer support
AI will continue to dominate the conversation. One of 2024’s biggest challenges was balancing automation with the human touch (for more on that, check out another recent newsletter about how to integrate AI into a human workforce in the world of contact centers). Technology can’t be looked at as a standalone to your existing people and processes. Before setting up new tech and AI, understand your end-to-end customer experience and underlying technology so that there aren’t gaps in customer service at any point in the journey. These steps are essential for those seeking strategies on how to improve customer service while adopting new technologies effectively.
Contact center automation with an out to an agent and the human touch will be essential for winners in customer experience. Thoughtfully designed self service options, especially if you DON’T call it a bot, chat bot, digital assistant, etc, will be more accepted by customers when they do what the customer needs done without much hassle and with an option to get to help quickly (and without repeating yourself).
AI-driven efficiency with empathy
Platform providers advanced their capabilities and allowed businesses to personalize AI tools. Contact centers could now combine natural language processing with generative AI, enabling chatbots to provide broader and more conversational service. However, the success of these tools depended on their integration with human agents.
The answer is: use AI as an extension of a people-based workforce, not as a replacement for it. AI can enable call center representatives to more easily access information or offer solutions quickly, but it can’t replace the empathy provided by a call center representative. This, perhaps, is one of my biggest call center tips for customer satisfaction: don’t forget the empathy.
AI done well
Some businesses are balancing AI-driven solutions in contact centers well. For example, a major improvement several platform providers have made is allowing call center clients to determine how much risk they can tolerate in their chatbots and combine standard AI natural language processing with generative AI’s conversational capabilities. When chatbots are configured using some of the newer technologies like digital assistants, they can communicate less rigidly and provide broader and better service to end users.
Make sure your people are keeping up with your technology
Teams should start to get their arms around what skills are needed moving forward from a few perspectives:
Technical skills to manage the platforms and improvements
Process and documentation skills to manage information in varying formats
Agent skills in the new assisted world that rely more heavily on people skills and conflict resolution
We have talked about this since 2023, but it’s finally here. Work from home teams will start to have enough data and insights to forecast how much manpower is actually needed, and human touch will become a differentiator in many organizations that adopt both technology and new skills.
The future of contact centers
What should we expect in 2025?
This will be a growth year. Companies will learn more about stacking their technology in a way that makes sense and offers the most benefit to their customers and employees. Then, they’ll refine and tweak it to meet their needs. We shouldn’t be afraid of change but we should be doing our best to make the change work in our favor.
At Blue Orbit Consulting, we specialize in helping organizations navigate these complexities. Whether you’re rolling out a new platform, integrating new capabilities, or just trying to keep your existing technology running smoothly, we’re here to help. Let’s work together to create a support model that keeps your contact center operating at peak performance. Book a 15-minute meeting to talk about how you can optimize your contact center today.
If any of this resonates with you or your organization, take a moment to share this newsletter with your colleagues who may be struggling with similar challenges. Blue Orbit Consulting guides you through methods that will transform your contact center’s operations into a world-class customer experience.
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I founded Blue Orbit Consulting in 2014 after running staff organizations in contact centers and building consulting practices in customer service, process improvement, complex program management, and channel operations. My approach – and my firm’s approach – is fundamentally pragmatic, and our clients often achieve benefits in excess of 10x their investment. We develop and deliver world-class customer interactions for our clients, whether it is troubleshooting and optimizing what they already have in place or creating strategic transformations to deliver outstanding customer interactions every time.