Want to lower the cost in the contact center? Improve the customer experience throughout the organization.

If you are not a sales based contact center and your mission is to handle customer issues involving a product or service. The best way to reduce the costs in the center is to improve how the customer interfaces with your organization at every level.

It might be a better website, a more understandable billing process, or better communication after a customer has placed an order. Every area of interface with the customer, whether that be physical or virtual, understand the areas of opportunities that could be improved. Be a customer of your own company and be honest about how many touch points are in need of improvement. Then improve them.

Don’t expect the contact center to improve a bad billing process. They can empathize with the customer but beyond making the issue visible to the owners of the billing department, they don’t control the issue and can’t reduce their cost until the process is improved.

So if you’re looking for contact center efficiencies: look beyond the contact center.

This has been a public service reminder to all executive teams that keep wondering why the contact center can’t reduce their costs.