Call center basics: A return to fundamentals

Everything changes, everything stays the same. Cliche though it may sound, it’s an expression customer experience (CX) leaders should be thinking about right now.

On the surface, the pace of change today is relentless. Advances in technology. Shifts in customer expectations. Fluctuations in political and business environments. And yet, underneath it all, there are enduring truths. Your customers and team members are still humans, after all. These enduring truths give customer experience leaders cause to dig deeper. To think deeply. To hold on to the widely applicable core principles that set businesses and their call centers up for stable, lasting success.

These timeless principles form the bedrock of exceptional customer service, even as the industry, and everything around it, changes. Read on for a discussion of five contact center fundamentals, with perspectives from leaders who have a deep understanding of what it takes to run an effective operation.

Invest in agent engagement to lengthen tenure

There’s good reason to begin with a focus on the frontline. As Richard Bledsoe, vice president of customer experience innovation at TELUS Digital, puts it, “If you can get employee experience right, you can get customer experience right.”

Worded another way, the agents in your call center will deliver better care when they are treated well. According to a Gallup survey, highly engaged teams show 21% greater profitability. Engaged employees tend to stick around, deepening their knowledge, developing skills and reducing costly attrition rates.

“Attrition is the laziest cost in the business,” says Estuardo “Ligo” Ligorría, regional vice president of operations at TELUS Digital. “Hiring, training, rehiring, retraining — it’s cyclical. And after spending the time, money and energy to replace those who’ve left, you’re just back where you started.” Research from SQM Group shows that 47% of managers feel their biggest challenge in operating an effective and efficient call center is agent turnover.

So what does it mean to treat your agents well? While specific approaches are best mapped to your unique business, consider the following general strategies:

• Create the right environment. Modern call centers should provide spaces for agents to excel in their work and take a break from it. To help your agents help your customers, make sure they have the tools and information at their disposal to deliver satisfying support. Your facilities should also include well-equipped break rooms, including spaces to eat and spaces to unwind.
• Establish pathways for growth. Make it clear to your frontline agents that opportunities to advance in their careers exist within your organization. Highlight those who have progressed into management positions so that there are templates to follow, and consider introducing programs for top performers that enable them to shadow leaders and develop a wider understanding of your business.
• Make sure your agents feel heard. Your frontline team members know your customers better than anyone else. Provide ample opportunities to relay insights on pain points and opportunities, and importantly, take the time to highlight improvements that have been made as a result of agent input.

While investing in agent engagement is crucial for internal operations, the same people-first philosophy should extend to your outsourcing partnerships.

Foster transparency with your partners

In a recent survey conducted by TELUS Digital, in collaboration with Statista, 82% of executive respondents said they are currently working with, or planning to work with, an outsourcing partner in 2025. When you put trust in a third party to design, build or deliver any aspect of your customer experience, you’re relying on them to uphold your standards.

The ability to deliver on your service-level agreements is a given. The strongest partnerships, however, go further by relying on real human relationships and mutual respect between the two parties. This trust between brands and outsourcing providers enables a level of transparency that can be hugely beneficial in the long term.

Ligo muses: “If we know two-thirds of the calls one of our clients is receiving are about a singular topic, why wouldn’t we tell them? Why wouldn’t we try to help address the cause?” While comparatively weak partnerships might see the outsourcing provider not wanting to overstep and simply handling the incoming calls, in a strong partnership, the outsourcing provider will have the latitude to be proactive and suggest ways to address the root cause. “There has to be trust. Together, we can make things easier. But we need to be able to be transparent with each other.”

Strong partnerships bring people together regularly to foster strategic alignment, exchange insights and identify opportunities to improve processes — ultimately providing the perfect environment for co-innovation.

Digital customer experience priorities in 2025

Discover the digital customer experience priorities of enterprise leaders with survey results from TELUS Digital, in collaboration with Statista.

Access the report

Use call center data to inform strategies across your organization

As we’ve already established, there’s no one in your company who spends more time interacting with your customers than your call center agents. If nothing else, CX teams have access to a limitless supply of unstructured data.

Call centers have long had spreadsheets packed with interaction data. And while the tools and technologies available today are changing the way businesses analyze that data and put it to work, the end goal is the same: to identify trends and insights, and to share that information beyond your call centers for the purposes of continuous improvement at an organizational level.

Smart CX leaders implement processes to distill call center data into clear, shareable insights. For example, AI-powered tools can be deployed to analyze call transcripts and identity patterns and emerging issues. These derived insights will surely benefit the CX team if you develop an understanding of what’s happening and how to equip your agents to help customers out — but the benefits shouldn’t stop there. To extend the same example, your product team could use this information to make critical enhancements to your products and services, helping to curb future customer contacts about recurring issues and improving customer satisfaction. Likewise, your marketing and sales teams could take what you’ve learned in order to refine messaging and demonstrate a deeper understanding of customer pain points, potentially contributing to new customer acquisition.

Critically, sharing intel in this way goes a long way toward showing your leadership peers that your call center is not a cost center, but a revenue generator. And when you do that consistently and emphatically, you demonstrate a level of efficiency that is likely to inspire confidence and further investment, setting your CX operations up for success in any circumstance.

Map technology investments to specific pain points

To make intelligent investments in technology for your call center, start with a problem, not a solution.

Though the technology available to CX leaders today is redefining what’s possible in a call center, it’s important not to lose sight of the problems you’re trying to solve. Otherwise, you risk committing your budget to tech you don’t need or that doesn’t sync up with your existing stack.

Ask yourself:

• What do my customers expect?
• What do my agents need to make it happen?
• What results will the C-suite want to see?

The answers to these questions will help to shape the problems to solve, and the technology that will help you solve them.

Increasingly, what your customers expect from you is defined by the best customer experiences available to them. This phenomenon is referred to as “liquid expectations,” and describes how a positive experience with one brand influences what customers expect from everyone else. There is a tendency for CX leaders to evaluate their operations against past iterations, concluding that they’ve made great progress, but the customer calling you today isn’t likely to care much about how you delivered support in the past. They are going to compare the experience you deliver to the very best.

Consider, for example, how leading ecommerce brands have shaped customer expectations across all industries. When customers can track their packages in real-time, receive proactive updates about delivery delays and access instant support through multiple channels, they begin to expect this level of visibility and proactive communication from every business they interact with — whether you're a retailer, a healthcare provider or a financial institution.

While you might not need to deliver the exact same capabilities, or spend wildly, you do need to think critically about where you might be lagging behind. Take the time to understand which aspects of these best-in-class experiences matter most to your customers and align your technology investments accordingly. For example, what your customers value most isn't the ability to track every minute detail, but rather proactive communication about issues that might affect them.

When you know what problems need solving, you can better identify which technologies are worth the investment. Maybe you’re facing high contact volumes, and you know wait times are lengthening. If you’ve noticed trends in what your customers are looking for help with, there’s likely a range of self-service options you can consider. For instance, a robust knowledge base with easily searchable FAQs might empower customers to find answers on their own, reducing call volumes altogether.

Ultimately, the most effective technology investments are those that solve real problems for your customers and agents. By starting with a clear understanding of these needs, rather than chasing the latest trends, you can make strategic decisions that truly enhance your customer experience.

Embed empathy in CX to fortify customer connection

No matter what technology choices you make, embedding humanity throughout your customer journey is imperative. Empathy in the call center isn’t just about the tone your agents take up on the phone, either. At its core, empathy is about understanding. Customer experience leaders must take the time to understand their customers, and to demonstrate that understanding back to them.

As more and more customers take to self-service channels to get their needs addressed, often they’re only reaching your call center after they’ve been unable to answer their questions on their own. Empathy is critical here in at least two ways. First, knowing they’ve likely already searched for a solution, it is important to make it easy for them to escalate to other means and connect with a human agent. Don’t hide your contact information, or keep funneling customers back to an FAQ or a chatbot that doesn’t answer their questions. Asked what method they’d choose if they could only get customer service in one way for the rest of their lives, 46% of respondents to a TELUS Digital survey would opt to speak to a real human. Second, once your customers do connect with your call center, there’s an onus on your team to develop an understanding of what they’re looking for and help them to reach a solution. “AI. Automation. Self-Service. What’s left are the most difficult inquiries,” explains Richard Bledsoe. This underlines the need for agents willing to ask good questions, gather information and wade through complexity to arrive at clarity for the good of your customers.

To call back the importance of call center data, what you hear in these direct customer touchpoints can also be leveraged to show empathy proactively. Product improvements, based on user feedback, are a great way to demonstrate you’ve heard, you understand and you’re going to make improvements to prevent it from becoming a recurring issue. Similarly, acting proactively might mean sending status updates before customers ask for them, creating content that answers questions before they're asked or reaching out to customers who might be experiencing issues based on their behavior patterns. This proactive approach demonstrates a deep understanding of your customers' needs and shows that you value their time — perhaps the most empathetic gesture of all.

Optimize for call center best practices

It’s clear that, for many, the discourse right now around call centers, and CX in general, is all about what has changed and what is changing. There’s maybe never been a more exciting time in this industry, and yet, leaders must not forget the fundamentals while acting on what’s new.

The most successful CX operations will be those that embrace innovation while staying true to core principles: investing in your agents, fostering strong partnerships, turning data into actionable insights, making strategic technology choices and maintaining genuine connections with customers. These fundamentals aren't constraints on innovation — they're the foundation that makes meaningful innovation possible.

If you want to learn more about how a capable outsourcing provider can help you optimize for these call center best practices, get in touch today.