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Month: January 2026

How to Improve Customer Experience with Contact Center Automation

Posted on Michael Hartsog

Key Takeaways

  • Automation augments, it doesn’t replace: The best strategies use AI to handle routine tasks, freeing up human agents for complex, high-value problem solving.
  • Efficiency drives satisfaction: Reducing average handle time and eliminating backlogs directly correlates to higher customer satisfaction scores (CSAT).
  • Scalability is key: Automation allows contact center operations to handle volume spikes without the need for frantic hiring sprees.
  • Data is the fuel: Successful automation relies on integrating with your existing systems to provide personalized, context-aware service.
  • Agentic AI is the future: Moving beyond simple scripts to AI that can reason and take action is the next frontier of CX.

In 2026, customer experience leaders no longer just ask how to answer calls faster. They are asking how to reinvent the entire interaction model to drive loyalty, increase revenue, and reduce churn.

For years, the answer to increasing volume was simply increasing headcount. But that math no longer works. To truly scale and deliver the personalized, instant experiences customers demand, forward-thinking brands are turning to contact center automation.

This isn’t about replacing your team with robots. It is about equipping your organization with the intelligence to handle the mundane, so your people can handle the meaningful.

What is Contact Center Automation?

At its core, contact center automation is the strategic use of artificial intelligence (AI), intelligent workflows, and system integrations to streamline customer interactions.

It goes far beyond the clunky interactive voice response (IVR) systems of the past. Today, automation involves sophisticated technology that can handle repetitive tasks, assist agents in real time, and resolve customer inquiries automatically across both voice and digital channels. 

Crucially, it does all this without sacrificing the quality of the experience.

Think of it as an “always-on” layer of your support stack. It identifies intent, pulls data from your CRM, and executes tasks — like resetting a password or tracking an order — without a human ever needing to click a button.

Why is Automation Beneficial for a Contact Center?

The pressure on customer experience leaders to reduce costs while simultaneously improving satisfaction has never been higher. Contact center automation is the lever that makes this possible. It transforms the contact center from a cost center into a strategic asset.

Improved Efficiency

The most immediate impact of contact center automation is the removal of friction. High-volume, repetitive tasks — like answering “Where is my order?” or “What are your hours?” — bog down human agents. Automation handles these inquiries instantly and accurately.

By automating these routine interactions, you significantly reduce the backlog of tickets. This creates a smoother operational flow where customers get answers immediately, and agents aren’t drowning in a sea of simple tickets.

Enhanced Agent Productivity

Automation can be a powerful tool for your internal teams, too. AI copilots and agent assist tools work in the background during live conversations. They listen to the interaction, understand the context, and surface relevant answers or knowledge base articles in real time.

This means agents spend less time searching through disparate systems and more time connecting with the customer. It also reduces the cognitive load on your team, making it easier for new agents to get up to speed and perform like seasoned pros.

Scalability

Every customer experience leader dreads the holiday spike or the unexpected service outage that floods the lines. Hiring and training temporary staff is expensive and time-consuming. Contact center automation provides elasticity to your operations.

Because AI doesn’t need to sleep or take breaks, your automated systems can scale up instantly to handle massive increases in volume. This ensures consistent performance during peak seasons, keeping wait times low even when demand is at an all-time high.

Customer Support

Speed is the currency of modern customer support. Customers expect answers now, not in twenty minutes. Automation delivers faster response times across every channel, from web chat to SMS.

Beyond speed, automation enforces accuracy. A well-trained AI doesn’t have “off days” or forget policy details. It provides consistent, accurate answers every single time, reducing the need for customers to call back because they received incorrect information.

Happier Agents

Burnout is a real crisis in the industry. When agents spend eight hours a day answering the same three questions, morale plummets and turnover skyrockets. Contact center automation takes the robotic work out of the human’s hands.

By handling the repetitive, draining tasks, automation allows your human agents to focus on what they do best: solving meaningful, complex problems that require empathy and judgment. This shift leads to higher job satisfaction, lower burnout, and better retention rates.

Personalized Service

One of the biggest myths about automation is that it feels impersonal. In reality, the opposite is true. Because contact center automation integrates with your CRM and customer data platforms, it uses customer history and intent in real time.

Instead of a generic script, the AI can greet a customer by name, reference their last order, and predict why they are reaching out. This delivers a tailored response that drives higher satisfaction, loyalty, and long-term retention.

Contact Center Automation Use Cases

To visualize how this works in practice, let’s look at three specific areas where contact center automation is making a massive difference.

Agent Assist

Imagine an agent helps a customer with a complex billing dispute. Instead of putting the customer on hold to read through policy documents, an AI assistant pops up on the agent’s screen with the exact clause they need, based on the conversation’s real-time transcript.

Agent assist tools also handle the “after-call work.” They can automatically generate summaries of the conversation, tag the disposition, and schedule follow-up tasks. This saves agents valuable minutes after every interaction, which adds up to thousands of hours saved across the organization.

Self Service & Virtual Agents

This is the most visible form of contact center automation. Virtual or AI agents live on your website or messaging channels, ready to resolve common questions 24/7.

Unlike old-school chatbots that get stuck in loops, modern AI agents use natural language processing (NLP) to understand what the customer actually wants. They can handle end-to-end transactions, like processing a return or upgrading a subscription, and escalate seamlessly to a human when the issue becomes too complex.

Post-Interaction Automation

The work doesn’t stop when the conversation ends. Automation streamlines the entire post-interaction process. It can auto-generate conversation summaries and update the CRM, ensuring your data is always clean and current.

It can also trigger automated workflows, such as sending a satisfaction survey immediately after a resolution or scheduling a check-in email for two weeks later. This improves reporting and quality assurance without adding manual administrative work to your team’s plate.

How to Automate Your Contact Center

Implementing contact center automation is a journey, not a switch you flip. To ensure success and drive real ROI, follow these strategic steps.

1. Identify high-volume, repetitive interactions.

Start by analyzing your data. What are the top ten reasons customers contact you? You will likely find that a huge percentage of your volume comes from a handful of simple questions. These are your prime candidates for automation.

2. Map customer journeys and friction points.

Don’t just automate for the sake of it. Look at your customer journey. Where are people getting stuck? Where are the long wait times? Deploy automation specifically to smooth out these friction points.

3. Start with automation that augments agents, not replaces them.

Your first goal should be to help your team, not replace them. Implement tools that make your agents faster and smarter. This builds trust in the technology and ensures that your internal culture adapts positively to the change.

4. Integrate automation with existing systems.

Automation operating in a silo is useless. Ensure your platform integrates deeply with your CRM, ticketing system, and knowledge base. The AI needs access to this data to provide accurate, personalized service.

5. Train AI using real conversation data.

Your automation is only as good as the data it learns from. Use historical transcripts and real customer interactions to train your AI models. This ensures the system understands the specific nuances, slang, and terminology of your business.

6. Measure outcomes tied to customer experience — not just cost savings.

While cost reduction is a benefit, it shouldn’t be the only metric. Measure the success of your contact center automation by looking at CX metrics like customer satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and customer effort score (CES).

Best Practices for Automating Your Contact Center

As you roll out your strategy, keep these best practices in mind to ensure you are building a system that serves both your business and your customers.

  • Design automation around outcomes, not deflection alone. The goal isn’t just to stop people from calling. It is to solve their problem. If you deflect a call but frustrate the customer, you haven’t won.
  • Maintain a clear path to human agents. There is nothing more infuriating than being trapped in a bot loop. Always provide an easy “escape hatch” for customers to reach a human if they need one.
  • Use AI that understands context, intent, and conversation history. Customers hate repeating themselves. Your automation should know who they are and what they talked about last time.
  • Continuously train and refine using real interactions. AI isn’t “set it and forget it.” Regularly review interactions to see where the automation failed or misunderstood, and use that data to retrain the model.
  • Track CX metrics like CSAT, FCR, average handle time, and customer effort score. Keep a close eye on your average handle time and First Contact Resolution (FCR). These metrics will tell you if your automation is actually making life easier for your customers and agents.
  • Choose platforms built for enterprise scale and security. When dealing with sensitive customer data, you cannot compromise on security. Ensure your vendor meets enterprise standards for data protection and compliance.

Elevate Your Customer Experience with Quiq

The future of contact center automation is about taking action.

Quiq goes beyond basic automation with agentic AI — AI agents that can reason, take action, and collaborate with human teams to resolve customer needs end-to-end. We help enterprise brands move from simple deflection to true resolution, driving revenue and loyalty in the process.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is contact center automation?

Contact center automation uses AI, workflows, and system integrations to handle routine customer interactions, assist agents in real time, and automate post-interaction tasks — reducing manual effort while improving speed, accuracy, and consistency.

How is contact center automation different from chatbots?

Traditional chatbots typically handle scripted FAQs and break down when conversations become complex. Modern contact center automation, especially agentic AI, can understand intent, use context, take action across systems, and collaborate with human agents to resolve issues end-to-end.

Does contact center automation replace human agents?

No. The most effective automation is designed to augment agents, not replace them. Automation handles repetitive tasks and surfaces insights so agents can focus on complex, high-value conversations that require empathy, judgment, and problem-solving.

Which customer interactions should be automated?

Automation works best for high-volume, repetitive interactions such as:

  • Account questions and FAQs
  • Appointment scheduling or order status
  • Intelligent routing and triage
  • Agent assists during live conversations
  • Post-interaction summaries and follow-ups

More complex or emotional interactions should remain human-led, with AI support.

What is agentic AI in a contact center?

Agentic AI refers to AI agents that can reason, make decisions, and take actions — not just respond to prompts. In a contact center, agentic AI can resolve issues, trigger workflows, update systems, and collaborate with humans to achieve outcomes, not just answer questions.

Escalation Rate: Why It Matters for Modern Customer Support

Posted on Ejieme Eromosele

Key Takeaways

  • Understand Escalation Rate: Learn what escalation rate measures and why it’s a key metric for evaluating your customer support efficiency.
  • Why It Matters: Discover how escalation rate impacts customer satisfaction, operational costs, and overall CX strategy.
  • Identify Common Drivers: Uncover the main causes of high escalation rates, from training gaps to outdated tools, and how to address them.
  • Set a Healthy Benchmark: Explore what a healthy escalation rate looks like and how to track your progress over time.
  • Actionable Tips to Improve: Get practical strategies to lower your escalation rate, like empowering agents, refining workflows, and leveraging AI tools like Quiq.

Every great support leader knows the feeling: the queue is spiking, the team is scrambling, and you’re trying to figure out which fires actually need your hose and which ones can be put out with a cup of water.

In an ideal world, frontline agents would have the magic wand to solve every customer issue instantly. But in the complex reality of modern business, that’s not always possible—nor is it always strategic. Some issues should move up the chain. The problem arises when the wrong issues move up, or when they move up too often.

This is where your escalation rate becomes one of the most powerful signals in your CX dashboard. It cuts through the noise to tell you exactly how efficiently your team resolves problems at the first touchpoint. For messaging-first brands juggling thousands of real-time conversations, this metric is a heartbeat monitor for your operation’s health.

In this guide, I’m going to dismantle the mechanics of the escalation rate. We’ll cover what it actually measures, why it matters for your bottom line, the hidden drivers that push rates up, and how platforms like Quiq help you lower that number while simultaneously elevating the customer experience.

What Is Escalation Rate?

At its simplest, escalation rate measures the percentage of customer interactions that a frontline agent (or bot) cannot resolve, requiring a handoff to a supervisor, specialist, or higher-tier support agent.

Think of it this way: A customer messages in about a missing package. If your frontline agent can track it and issue a refund, that’s a resolution. If the agent hits a wall because the refund exceeds their approval limit and has to pass the chat to a manager, that is an escalation.

The Formula

To calculate it, you don’t need a data scientist. You just need this straightforward formula:

Escalation Rate = (Number of Escalated Conversations ÷ Total Conversations) × 100

While the math is simple, this metric offers a powerful view into your team’s efficiency. It tells you whether your frontline is empowered to act or if your workflow is riddled with bottlenecks that force customers to wait for “someone who knows the answer.”

Why Escalation Rate Matters

You might be tempted to think of escalation rate as purely an operational metric—something for workforce management to worry about. But for CX executives, it connects directly to revenue, retention, and customer sentiment.

When your escalation rate is high, it often signals structural gaps. It might mean your training is lagging behind your product updates, your tools are outdated, or your processes are so rigid that agents are afraid to make a decision. The result is slower resolutions, higher costs per contact, and customers frustrated by being passed around like a hot potato.

Conversely, a lower escalation rate usually points to a healthy, empowered ecosystem. It suggests your agents have the autonomy and knowledge to solve problems, your workflows are designed for speed, and your customers are getting answers without the runaround.

However, a word of caution: The goal isn’t zero escalations. If your escalation rate is zero, your frontline agents are likely spending too much time on complex issues that should be handled by specialists, potentially hurting your average handle time (AHT). The goal is optimized escalation—using it as a signal to improve, rather than a crutch.

What Drives Escalations (and How to Spot Them Early)

If you see your escalation rate creeping up, it’s rarely just “bad luck.” There are usually specific drivers at play. Identifying these early can save your team from burnout and your customers from churn.

  • Limited training or context: If agents don’t understand the product inside and out, or if they lack customer context (like purchase history), they will escalate out of caution. They can’t solve what they don’t understand.
  • Complex products or policies: Some issues simply require expert input. However, if you see a spike in escalations regarding a specific policy, it often points to unclear documentation or confusing terms that frontline staff can’t interpret confidently.
  • Outdated tools or knowledge bases: Speed is the currency of modern support. If an agent has to dig through five different tabs to find an answer, they might just escalate the ticket to avoid the delay or the risk of guessing wrong.
  • Channel mix and message volume: Messaging adds convenience to the customer, but often surfaces more requests than traditional voice channels. Higher volumes can pressure agents to escalate just to clear the queue, creating a false sense of efficiency.

We recommend adding regular “escalation review” sessions to your management cadence. Look for patterns. Are 40% of escalations coming from billing issues? That’s not an agent problem; that’s a process problem you can fix.

What’s a Healthy Escalation Rate?

Executives always ask for the magic number. What is the benchmark? The honest answer is that context matters. A company selling complex enterprise software will naturally have a higher escalation rate than a company selling t-shirts.

However, general guidance suggests that for most support teams, an escalation rate between 5–10% is a healthy range.

Rather than obsessing over an industry average, focus on your own trends over time. Is the number improving, holding steady, or did it spike immediately after your last product launch? 

And contextualize the data. Escalation rate works best when paired with other metrics like CSAT, First Contact Resolution (FCR), and sentiment analysis. A low escalation rate with low CSAT might mean your agents are saying “no” just to close the ticket—that’s not a win.

How to Lower Escalation Rate (Without Hurting CX)

Reducing your escalation rate shouldn’t come at the cost of customer satisfaction. You don’t want to create gatekeepers; you want to create problem solvers. Here is how to drive the number down strategically:

1. Automate Smartly

This is where technology lifts the load. Let AI agents handle the transactional tasks—password resets, shipping updates, appointment scheduling. This filters out the noise so human agents can focus their energy on the complex, relationship-building conversations that actually require empathy and judgment.

2. Empower Your Team

Give agents the authority to solve problems. If an agent has to escalate a $5 credit, you are spending $20 in labor to save $5. Review your approval limits and empower your frontline to make reasonable judgment calls.

3. Refine Your Knowledge Base

Your internal knowledge base is your agents’ brain. Keep it current, searchable, and easy to navigate. If the answer is easy to find, the agent won’t need to ask a manager.

4. Clarify Escalation Rules

Ambiguity breeds escalation. Ensure everyone knows exactly when an escalation is necessary (e.g., a legal threat or a technical bug) and when it is not.

5. Use Your Data

Review your escalation reports regularly. If one agent has an escalation rate of 20% while the team average is 8%, that’s a coaching opportunity. If the whole team spikes on Tuesdays, look at your staffing or release schedule.

How Quiq Helps You Keep Escalations in Check

Managing escalation rate manually is a heavy lift. This is where Quiq transforms the process.

Quiq combines unified messaging with advanced agentic AI to help you manage escalations without losing the human touch. With automated routing, inquiries are directed to the right agent—human or AI—from the very start, preventing the “bounce” that drives up escalation numbers.

Furthermore, Quiq’s AI doesn’t just deflect; it assists. It provides frontline agents with suggested responses and real-time information, effectively upgrading their skills instantly. This means a Tier 1 agent can handle a Tier 2 issue because the AI guides them through it.

For managers, Quiq provides granular visibility into where escalations are happening and why. You can spot friction in your product or process before it becomes a trend, helping you balance automation with empathy to drive faster service and stronger relationships.

Recap and Next Steps

Your escalation rate is more than a number on a spreadsheet. It’s also a reflection of how confidently and efficiently your team communicates with your customers. It reveals the friction points in your business and offers a roadmap for where to invest in training, technology, and process improvements.

To turn this insight into action:

  1. Measure your current escalation rate to establish a baseline.
  2. Identify the top three drivers behind your numbers (is it billing? technical bugs? a specific product line?).
  3. Refine your workflows using those insights—train smarter, automate wisely, and empower your agents.

Ready to see how Quiq can help your team cut down on escalations and turn every customer interaction into an opportunity for connection? Schedule a demo with our team today.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is an escalation rate?

Escalation rate is the percentage of customer conversations that must be handed off to a higher-tier agent, specialist, or manager because the initial agent couldn’t resolve the issue. It’s calculated with a simple formula: Escalation Rate = (Number of Escalated Conversations ÷ Total Conversations) × 100.

Why does escalation rate matter?

Because it’s one of the clearest indicators of how smoothly your support operation is running. A high escalation rate often signals issues like missing training, outdated tools, or unclear processes. Lower escalation rates usually mean agents are empowered, customers get faster resolutions, and senior team members aren’t bogged down with preventable escalations.

What causes escalation rates to go up?

Common drivers include limited agent training, complex products or policies, outdated or hard-to-navigate knowledge bases, high messaging volume, and channel-mix complexity. These factors make it difficult for frontline agents to resolve issues without passing them to someone else.

What’s considered a healthy escalation rate?

There’s no universal benchmark, but many support teams aim for a 5–10% escalation rate. The most important thing is to track your trend over time. Look for sudden changes or consistent increases that might signal workflow breakdowns or training gaps.

What metrics should I pair with escalation rate?

Escalation rate works best alongside metrics like CSAT, first contact resolution (FCR), average handle time, and sentiment analysis. Together, they paint a fuller picture of whether your team is effectively resolving issues—and how customers feel about those interactions.

How does Quiq help reduce escalations?

Quiq combines unified messaging, agentic AI, and intelligent routing to help teams resolve more issues at the first point of contact. AI agents can handle simple tasks automatically, human agents get real-time assistance, and managers gain visibility into where escalations happen and why. The result: faster resolutions, fewer unnecessary handoffs, and stronger customer relationships.

What is a CES? Definition & How to Measure It

Posted on Ejieme Eromosele

Key Takeaways

  • Effort drives loyalty (or disloyalty): Research shows that high-effort experiences are the primary driver of customer churn, far outweighing the impact of “delight.”
  • Timing is everything: Unlike relationship metrics, CES is transactional. It must be measured immediately after an interaction to be accurate.
  • AI is the new frontier for CES: Traditional automation often increases effort (think clunky chatbots). Modern agentic AI reduces effort by actually resolving issues autonomously.
  • Context is king: A low CES score is a warning light, but you need operational data to know exactly where the friction is occurring in the customer journey.

If you’ve ever had to repeat your account number three times to three different support agents, you already know what high customer effort feels like. It’s the friction that burns goodwill faster than any marketing campaign can build it.

For CX leaders, the question “what is a CES?” is about understanding the single most accurate predictor of customer loyalty. While many organizations are still chasing the elusive goal of “delighting” customers, the data shows that your customers don’t necessarily want to be dazzled. They just want their problems solved without breaking a sweat.

Customer Effort Score (CES) has emerged as the definitive CX metric for the digital age, shifting the focus from sentiment to simplicity. In this guide, we’ll explore the mechanics of CES, how to measure it, and how leading enterprise brands are using agentic AI to drive effort down to zero.

What is a Customer Effort Score (CES)?

At its core, Customer Effort Score (CES) is a metric that measures how much work a customer has to do to get an issue resolved, a request fulfilled, or a question answered.

Think of it as your friction meter. When a customer interacts with your brand, are they gliding on ice or trudging through mud?

The concept was popularized by CEB (now Gartner) in the book The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty. Their research shattered a long-held myth in the customer service world: that the way to win loyalty is to go “above and beyond” to delight customers. It turns out, exceeding expectations has a negligible impact on loyalty. However, failing to meet expectations—by making things difficult—has a massive negative impact.

Lower effort equals a better experience. It’s that simple. When you lower the barrier to resolution, you respect your customer’s time. And in the creator economy, where attention is the most valuable currency, respecting time is the ultimate sign of a trustworthy brand.

Why is Measuring Customer Effort Scores (CES) Important?

If you are only tracking satisfaction (CSAT), you might be missing the silent killer of your business: friction. A customer can be “satisfied” that their issue was eventually resolved, but if it took them an hour of hold time and two transfers to get there, they aren’t coming back.

The Effortless Experience research dropped a bombshell stat that every customer experience leader should have tattooed on their whiteboard: 96% of customers with a high-effort service interaction become more disloyal, compared to just 9% who have a low-effort experience.

CES is vital because it is a predictor of future behavior. It tells you who is about to churn before they actually leave.

This is especially critical for contact centers and digital CX. In a world of instant gratification, your customer expects immediate answers. If your IVR is a maze, your AI agent is a brick wall, or your knowledge base is outdated, your CES will spike, and your CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) will tank. CES shines a spotlight on these operational cracks, forcing you to look at your processes from the outside in.

What are the Benefits of Tracking CES Scores?

Tracking CES is about operationalizing empathy. When you commit to reducing effort, you unlock benefits across three key tiers.

Operational Benefits

From an ops perspective, CES is your smoke detector. It identifies friction points in support journeys that might otherwise go unnoticed.

  • Pinpoints Broken Workflows: If customers consistently rate a specific process (like returns or password resets) as “high effort,” you know exactly where to deploy your engineering or process improvement resources.
  • Highlights Tool Limitations: High effort often stems from agents not having the right data. CES can reveal where your team lacks the context needed to solve problems quickly.
  • Reduces Repeat Contacts: High effort usually means the problem wasn’t solved the first time. By targeting effort, you inherently improve First Contact Resolution (FCR).

Customer Benefits

For the people buying your products, a low-effort strategy signals respect.

  • Faster Resolution: Low effort means speed. For customers, it means getting back to their lives sooner.
  • Less Frustration: By removing hoops, you lower the emotional temperature of interactions.
  • Consistency: Tracking CES across channels ensures that a messaging interaction is just as easy as a phone call, creating a seamless omni-channel experience.

Business Impact

Ultimately, ease of use hits the bottom line.

  • Lower Churn: As mentioned, easy experiences create sticky customers. This is crucial for retention.
  • Higher Repurchase Rates: Customers who find it easy to buy (and get support) are far more likely to buy again.
  • Reduced Cost-to-Serve: Friction costs money. Repeat calls, long handle times, and escalations are expensive. Low-effort experiences are lean, efficient, and cost-effective.

When to Use a CES Score Survey

Context is everything. You wouldn’t ask someone how their meal was before they’ve taken a bite. Similarly, you shouldn’t ask about effort at random times. CES is a transactional metric, meaning it works best when tied to a specific event.

Ideal moments to deploy CES surveys include:

  • Immediately Post-Interaction: Right after a live chat ends, a ticket closes, or a phone call wraps up. The memory of the “struggle” is fresh.
  • Post-Resolution: Confirming the issue is actually solved is a prerequisite for asking about effort.
  • Post-Onboarding: After a new client sets up their account. If onboarding is hard, they are likely to churn before they even see value.

CES is generally not the right metric for measuring overall brand health or relationship sentiment (that’s where NPS comes in). A customer might love your brand (High NPS) but hate your returns process (High Effort). If you mix these up, you lose the actionable granularity that makes CES so powerful.

How to Measure the Customer Effort Score (CES)

Measuring CES is refreshingly straightforward, but consistency is key.

The Structure:
The industry standard has evolved to a specific statement (CES 2.0):
“To what extent do you agree with the following statement: The company made it easy for me to handle my issue.”

The Scale:
Typically, this uses a 1–7 Likert scale:

  1. Strongly Disagree (High Effort)
  2. Disagree
  3. Somewhat Disagree
  4. Neither Agree nor Disagree
  5. Somewhat Agree
  6. Agree
  7. Strongly Agree (Low Effort)

Calculation:
You can calculate a CES average (Total sum of scores / Total number of responses). Alternatively, some organizations track the “Top 2 Box” percentage—the percentage of respondents who selected 6 or 7 (Agree or Strongly Agree).

Contextualizing the Data:
A raw number is useless without context. You must pair your CES data with operational metadata. Was this a chat or a call? How long was the wait time? Was the customer transferred? By slicing CES data by these variables, you move from “we have a problem” to “we have a problem with transfers in the billing department on Tuesdays.”

💡Pro tip: Applying agentic AI to conversation analytics is a thing now! You can use AI to slice and dice this kind of data faster, in the specific ways your business cares about, and looking at entire data collections—not just small samples.

What is a Good CES Score?

“What is a good score?” is the most common question we hear, but it’s a bit like asking “how long is a piece of string?” 

Generally speaking, a score of 5 or higher is considered good on a 7-point scale. Important to note: Customer Effort Score is not universally standardized, and is most often measured using either a 5-point or 7-point scale. While benchmarks vary by industry, channel and use case, on a 7-point scale, a score of 5 or higher is typically considered strong, and scores consistently above 6 are regarded as world-class.

However, benchmarks are dangerous if they breed complacency. The goal shouldn’t be to beat a generic industry average; it should be to beat your score from last month. I’ll also reiterate my point above that there’s natural variability with the score.

💡Trend Analysis over Static Benchmarks: Watch for the dip. A sudden drop in CES is a canary in the coal mine for a broken process or a buggy product release. Also, beware the “Vanity Metric” trap. A high CES score is meaningless if the customer’s problem wasn’t actually solved. Always cross-reference high effort scores with reopen rates to ensure you aren’t just making it easy for customers to get the wrong answer.

How to Improve Your CES Score

To improve CES, you need to engineer friction out of your systems.

1. Eliminate the “Context Gap”
Nothing spikes effort like having to repeat yourself. Ensure your agents have a unified view of the customer journey. If a customer started in an AI agent and moved to a live agent, the human should see the transcript.

2. Stop Deflecting, Start Resolving
Many brands use automation to “deflect” calls, forcing customers into self-service loops they didn’t ask for. This increases effort. Use automation to resolve issues. If a customer wants to check an order status, the bot should give them the status, not a link to a login page.

3. Reduce Handoffs
Every transfer is a friction point. Use intelligent routing to get the customer to the right expert the first time.

4. Audit Your Self-Service
Is your FAQ helpful, or is it a graveyard of outdated PDFs? High effort often originates in failed self-service attempts.

5. Align Around Resolution
Your tools, workflows, and incentives should all point toward making it easy. If you incentivize short handle times (AHT) over First Contact Resolution (FCR), agents will rush customers, increasing effort in the long run.

How Does CES Compare to NPS or CSAT?

Customer experience leaders often treat these metrics like distinct religions, but they are just different lenses for viewing the same object.

  • CES vs. CSAT (Customer Satisfaction): CSAT measures happiness with a specific interaction (“How satisfied were you?”). CES measures ease (“How easy was it?”). A customer can be satisfied with a friendly agent but frustrated that it took 20 minutes to reach them. NPS and CSAT tell you how they feel; CES tells you how hard they worked.
  • CES vs. NPS (Net Promoter Score): NPS is a long-term customer loyalty metric (“How likely are you to recommend us?”). It measures the overall relationship health. CES is transactional and operational.

💡Best Practice: Use them together.

  • NPS for the strategic board-level view of brand health.
  • CSAT for agent performance and sentiment.
  • CES for operational efficiency and friction hunting.

When you see High Effort (bad CES) but High Loyalty (good NPS), you have a “Captive Customer”—they are staying because they have to, not because they want to. That’s a dangerous place to be.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Even seasoned customer experience pros can stumble when implementing CES.

  • Treating CES as a standalone metric: Never look at CES in a vacuum. A super “easy” interaction that results in the wrong outcome is still a failure.
  • Measuring effort without addressing root causes: Knowing your password reset process is hard doesn’t help if you don’t fix the UX. You must close the loop.
  • Surveying too frequently: Survey fatigue is real. If you ask about effort after every micro-interaction, you are adding effort to the customer’s life. Be strategic.
  • Over-automating: Replacing humans with bad bots is the fastest way to tank your CES. Automation must be smarter than the customer, not dumber.
  • Focusing on the score, not the outcome: The goal isn’t just a 7/7. The real goal is a customer who buys again.

A Modern Approach to Customer Experience

The traditional approach to customer support—reactive, human-heavy, and prone to delays—is inherently high-effort.

We are seeing a massive shift from simple “sentiment tracking” to active “effort reduction.” And the vehicle for this shift is agentic AI.

Traditional chatbots often increased effort because they were glorified FAQ search bars. If they didn’t know the answer, they dead-ended the customer. Agentic AI agents are different.They have the autonomy to take action. AI agents don’t just tell you how to process a return; they process the return for you, update the inventory, and issue the refund, all within the chat.

This is where Quiq changes the game. Quiq enables enterprise brands to deploy AI agents that work alongside human agents, handling complex tasks with ease. By leveraging intelligent routing and deep integration, Quiq ensures that context travels with the customer across messaging channels, eliminating the repetition that drives effort scores through the roof. For example, Quiq helped a well-known, plant-based food company boost its CES to 5 and CSAT to nearly 100% by activating Apple Messages for Business along with automation.

When you use agentic AI to resolve issues instantly and accurately, you don’t just improve a metric. You fundamentally transform the relationship between brand and buyer, turning support from a cost center into a loyalty engine.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What does Customer Effort Score (CES) measure?

Customer Effort Score measures how easy it is for a customer to complete a specific interaction, such as resolving an issue, getting support, or completing a request. It focuses on effort, not satisfaction or loyalty.

How is CES different from CSAT?

CSAT measures how satisfied a customer feels, while CES measures how easy the experience was. A customer can be satisfied with the outcome but still experience high effort along the way, which CES helps uncover.

How is CES different from Net Promoter Score (NPS)?

NPS measures long-term loyalty and likelihood to recommend, while CES evaluates ease at the interaction level. CES is more actionable for identifying operational friction in support and service workflows.

How does agentic AI help improve CES?

Agentic AI reduces effort by taking action on behalf of the customer, not just responding to questions. AI agents can complete tasks, route issues intelligently, and resolve requests end-to-end, lowering friction across the journey.

How does Quiq support lower customer effort?

Quiq helps reduce customer effort through intelligent messaging, AI-powered agents, and automation designed for real resolution. By minimizing handoffs and repetitive steps, teams can deliver faster, lower-effort experiences at scale.

RCS for Business: A Step-by-Step Organizational Roadmap

Posted on Max Fortis

Key Takeaways

  • Discover how RCS for Business enhances customer engagement and communication.  
  • Step-by-step guide to implementing RCS for your business.  
  • Learn the benefits of rich media, read receipts, and interactive features.  
  • Understand how RCS can improve conversion rates and customer satisfaction.  
  • Explore best practices for integrating RCS into your marketing strategy.

For years, the promise of Rich Communication Services (RCS) felt a bit like a concept car—sleek, futuristic, and exciting, but not quite ready for the mass market highway.

That changed fast.

With Apple’s adoption of the RCS standard in iOS 18 and the GSMA’s recent release of Universal Profile 3.0, the roadblocks have been cleared. We are no longer talking about “what if.” We are witnessing the evolution from cryptic, 160-character notifications to branded, secure, app-like experiences that live natively in your customer’s pocket.

For CX executives, this is a strategic pivot point. The capability to deliver verified, rich interactions without forcing an app download is the kind of efficiency lever that drives revenue and crushes churn.

But capability is nothing without execution. Navigating this landscape requires more than just turning on a new channel—it demands a roadmap. Here is your guide to the current state of RCS business messaging news and a strategic framework for adopting it within your enterprise.

Everything You Need to Know About RCS

To leverage RCS effectively, we must first strip away the jargon and look at the mechanics of the channel. It is not just “better SMS”. It’s a different beast entirely.

What is RCS for Business?

RCS business messaging is an enhanced version of text messaging that lets companies send richer, more interactive messages—like images, buttons, carousels—straight to a customer’s native messaging app.

It works like SMS, utilizing carrier networks, but it layers on features that were previously the domain of proprietary apps like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. It offers stronger security, verified sender identities, and a smoother, app-like experience that doesn’t require users to install anything.

The Difference Between SMS and RCS Messages

The leap from SMS to RCS is comparable to the jump from dial-up to broadband. It changes the nature of what is possible.

  • One-way vs. Two-way: SMS is typically a broadcast channel—great for “Your code is 1234,” but struggles with “I have a problem with my order.” RCS enables fluid, two-way, app-like conversations.
  • Capabilities: SMS is text-only with strict character limits. RCS supports high-res images, video, carousels, and action buttons (like “Track Order” or “Reschedule”).
  • Security: SMS is more prone to spoofing (or smishing). RCS uses Verified Sender IDs, meaning your customers see your brand logo and a verification badge, instantly building trust.

For the enterprise, these differences translate to tangible business outcomes: higher engagement rates and clearer conversion pathways. But integration is key. RCS shouldn’t exist in a silo; it fits alongside Apple Messages for Business, WhatsApp, and webchat, ideally orchestrated by a platform that can manage fallback logic and unified reporting.

The Current State of RCS

If you haven’t checked the RCS business messaging news lately, the landscape has shifted dramatically over the last 18 months.

Global Adoption and Apple’s Entry
The biggest domino fell with the release of iOS 18 in late 2024. Apple’s support for the RCS Universal Profile finally bridged the gap between Android and iOS users. While the “green bubble” remains for iPhone users messaging Android devices, the experience within that bubble has transformed. High-quality media sharing, typing indicators, and read receipts are now standard across platforms, removing the friction that plagued mixed-device markets.

Standardization and Security
Earlier this year (March 2025), the GSMA published the Universal Profile 3.0. This was a critical maturation point for the technology, introducing standardized requirements for end-to-end encryption (E2EE) across platforms. For industries like finance and healthcare, where data privacy is non-negotiable, this update was the green light needed to move beyond basic notifications.

The Numbers
With Google announcing over 1 billion monthly active users on Google Messages even before the full iOS rollout, the reach of RCS is now practically ubiquitous. It has moved from a “nice-to-have” for Android-heavy markets to a global standard.

The Unified Experience
The market is shifting toward richer customer engagement frameworks. Enterprise platforms like Quiq now unify these channels—SMS, RCS, WhatsApp, voice, and webchat—into a single agentic AI-powered environment. This allows brands to design a conversation once and deploy it across any supported channel, ensuring that no matter what device a customer uses, the experience feels premium—exactly what your customers deserve.

How to Adopt RCS Business Messaging

Adopting a new channel in a large enterprise is rarely a “flip the switch” moment. It requires a measured, tiered approach to manage risk and prove value.

Begin with Low-Risk

Don’t overhaul your entire support structure on day one. Start with low-stakes, high-volume use cases where the visual upgrade of RCS provides immediate clarity.

  • Target Transactional Flows: Delivery updates, appointment confirmations, and account alerts are perfect candidates.
  • Identify Value: Where does SMS fail? If your customers frequently ignore “Your order has shipped” texts because they look like spam, RCS’s verified branding can fix that immediately.
  • Run Controlled Pilots: Use A/B testing to compare engagement and click-through rates (CTRs) between plain SMS and rich RCS cards.
  • Leverage Agentic AI: Use AI to automate the creation of these initial message flows, testing variations of button copy and carousel order to optimize the design before a full rollout.

Measure what Actually Drives ROI

In the C-suite, “engagement” is a vanity metric if it doesn’t tie to the bottom line. You need to move past open rates and look at business impact.

  • Deflection and Resolution: Does a rich “Track Order” button reduce inbound calls to the contact center?
  • Conversion Velocity: Does sending a visual carousel of upgrades shorten the purchase cycle compared to an email drip campaign?
  • Industry-Specific KPIs to Start with:
    • Retail: Cart recovery rates.
    • Healthcare: Appointment show rates.
    • Finance: Fraud alert response times.

Use AI-powered insights to analyze behavior inside the message threads. Are customers getting stuck? Are they tapping “Talk to Agent”? These insights allow you to calculate the true ROI of the channel.

Scale and Orchestrate

Once your pilots prove value, it’s time to scale. This is where orchestration becomes critical. You cannot manually decide which customer gets an RCS message and which gets SMS.

  • Smart Fallback: Your platform must automatically detect if a user’s device is RCS-capable. If yes, send the rich card. If no, instantly fallback to a text-optimized SMS.
  • Campaign Shifting: Move promotional campaigns and loyalty messaging to RCS to take advantage of rich media.
  • Agentic AI Orchestration: This is the future of scaling. AI agents can handle smart channel switching and personalized routing in real-time, ensuring the message lands on the most effective channel for that specific user at that specific moment.

Stay Compliant as RCS Adoption Grows

As you scale, compliance complexity increases. RCS opens up new data points, and with great data comes great responsibility.

  • Unified Audit Trails: Maintain rigorous logs of every interaction.
  • Consent Management: Just because RCS is “richer” doesn’t mean you can bypass opt-in rules. Best practices for consent still apply.
  • Verified Senders: Use the verification process to your advantage. It’s not just about branding; it’s a security feature that reduces fraud and protects your customers from bad actors. Agentic AI can enforce compliance by validating message content against policy rules in real-time before it ever leaves the system.

Use Cases for RCS for Business

RCS shines when it simplifies complex interactions. Here is how different industries are deploying it:

  • Customer Support: Instead of “Text YES to confirm,” RCS offers a tap-to-resolve menu. Customers can reschedule appointments or troubleshoot issues via interactive buttons, significantly reducing call center volume.
  • E-Commerce: Abandoned cart recovery gets a makeover. Instead of a link, show the customer the exact item they left behind in a visual card with a “Checkout Now” button.
  • Travel & Hospitality: Send a rich boarding pass or a hotel check-in card directly to the messaging app. No digging through emails, no app downloads required.
  • Financial Services: Secure alerts are critical here. A verified fraud notification with a “This was me / This wasn’t me” button creates immediate actionability and trust.
  • Healthcare: Send pre-visit instructions with visual maps and “Add to Calendar” buttons.
  • Retail Loyalty: Show a visual progress bar for reward points and allow one-tap activation of offers.

In every use case, agentic AI agents enhance the experience by managing the conversation flow, ensuring that if a customer replies to a notification, the context is understood and resolved instantly.

RCS Business Messaging: Proven Strategies for Strong Results

Success with RCS requires a shift in mindset from “broadcasting” to “conversing.”

  1. Lead with Transactional Value: Earn the right to be in their messages. Deliver helpful, critical information first. Once trust is established via verified transactional messages, customers are more open to promotional content.
  2. Hyper-Personalization: Use the data you have. Don’t just send a generic “Sale” message. Send a carousel of products relevant to their purchase history.
  3. Continuous Optimization: Use AI to run experimentation at scale. Test different images, button placements, and copy variations to see what drives the highest conversion.
  4. Ecosystem Integration: RCS data shouldn’t live in a vacuum. Integrate it with your CRM and CDP, so that an interaction on RCS informs the next email or web experience.

The Future of RCS for Business 

We are entering the golden era of business messaging.

RCS adoption is accelerating across carriers, devices, and enterprise use cases. The infrastructure is finally catching up to the vision. Businesses are gaining new opportunities to deliver richer, more secure, and more interactive customer experiences that meet the modern consumer where they are.

Pretty soon here, RCS for Business will feature brand contact info in Google’s Featured Snippets, making the customer experience even more seamless:

The next major shift will come from combining RCS with automation and agentic AI agents. We will move beyond pre-scripted flows to dynamic, AI-driven conversations that can personalize interactions at scale, route intelligently across channels, and predict customer needs before they are even typed.

Organizations that invest early in this infrastructure will build a strong foundation for long-term customer communication improvements. RCS is not just an SMS upgrade—it’s the beginning of a more interactive, intelligent, and customer-centric future of messaging.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is RCS for Business and how does it work?

RCS business messaging is an upgraded version of SMS that allows companies to send richer, more interactive messages such as images, buttons, and carousels directly to a customer’s native messaging app. It works through carrier-supported RCS infrastructure and delivers an app-like experience without requiring users to install anything.

How is RCS different from traditional SMS or MMS?

Unlike SMS or MMS, RCS business messages support high-resolution media, branded sender IDs, verified business accounts, read receipts, suggested replies, and interactive buttons. It feels more like a mini-app inside the messaging inbox, leading to higher engagement and smoother customer journeys.

Is RCS secure for business communication?

Yes. Most modern Android devices and global carriers support RCS today, and adoption continues to grow. As ecosystem support expands, especially with Apple signaling future alignment, RCS availability will continue increasing across markets. Additionally, verified sender IDs help protect against fraud and spoofing.

What types of businesses benefit most from RCS messaging?

Any organization that relies on customer communication can benefit—especially retail, travel, financial services, and healthcare. RCS is particularly powerful for brands that use messaging to drive purchases, provide support, or deliver time-sensitive updates.

How do companies get started with RCS for Business?

Most organizations begin with a small pilot focused on simple, high-volume use cases like order tracking or appointment reminders. From there, they scale into richer engagement workflows using a customer engagement platform that supports RCS.

Can RCS messages integrate with agentic AI or automation platforms?

RCS pairs extremely well with agentic AI and conversational automation. AI can personalize messages, guide customers through multi-step flows, route interactions to the right channel, and proactively engage users based on behavioral signals—making RCS even more effective.

How do businesses measure ROI with RCS?

Companies measure ROI by tracking improvements in engagement, click-through rates, conversion rates, reduced call-center volume, and faster resolution times. Richer interactions and automated flows typically lead to stronger revenue outcomes and lower operational costs.

What’s the future outlook for RCS adoption?

RCS adoption is accelerating as carriers expand support and businesses demand richer messaging formats. The integration of agentic AI will further enhance RCS with smarter personalization, automated routing, and predictive engagement—making it a core part of the next generation of customer communication.

10 Contact Center Best Practices

Posted on Michael Hartsog

Key Takeaways

  • Strong fundamentals matter. Empathy, clear communication, and problem-solving remain the foundation of great customer service.
  • Infrastructure drives efficiency. Knowledge bases, smart routing, and modern tools reduce wait times and unnecessary transfers.
  • Consistency builds trust. Omnichannel support and shared context create more predictable, reliable customer experiences.
  • Training reduces churn. Well-trained agents perform better, feel more confident, and are more likely to stay.
  • Agentic AI amplifies teams. AI can resolve routine issues, support agents in real time, and help contact centers scale without sacrificing CX.

In the last few years, digital channels have seen tremendous growth. People can go online to find answers, send a text, chat with an AI agent, or even reach out on social media.

But while the industry’s focus has shifted to text-based communications, contact centers aren’t going anywhere.

Since customers are still dialing, we’ve put together some best practices to help call center agents shine.

1. Listen

Listening is critical for success in contact centers. It needs to be said because it sometimes conflicts with other productivity goals. Take the time to listen to a customer’s complaints before diving into a script. Not only will you be better equipped to solve their problems (without a bunch of clarifying questions), but you also give the customer a chance to vent their frustrations and feel heard.

2. Demonstrate Empathy

There’s a big gap between customer expectations and reality.

Make sure to use phrases like “I understand” or try repeating back what your customer said to show you were listening. These types of responses are especially important over the phone when you can’t rely on visual cues like eye contact and head nodding.

3. Go off Script

Scripts are great tools to help call center agents solve customer problems, but they can sound stiff and stale. Customers can tell when you’re reading from a script, and it can immediately put a wall up between you.

While it’s helpful to follow the general outline to ensure you don’t miss any important information, inject some of your own personality and mannerisms into it.

4. Reduce Wait times

Customers have come to expect quick resolutions to their problems, especially when choosing to call customer service over other channels.

The truth is, customers don’t want to speak with multiple people to solve their problems. It often means they have to repeat themselves (something customers don’t like), and it increases the time they spend on hold.

Reducing wait times and limiting transfers largely comes down to infrastructure, not individual agents. Key improvements include a centralized knowledge base, modern contact center software, intelligent call routing, and thorough agent training. Together, these ensure customers reach the right resource quickly and agents have the information they need to resolve issues faster.

5. Prepare to Tackle Complex Issues

Call centers aren’t the hub for information anymore. Online communications are growing in popularity.

Between easily accessible information and various other communication channels, making a phone call isn’t the go-to reflex for many customers.

So what does that mean for call center agents? You need to be prepared for anything.

In addition to knowing your products and services inside out, consider conflict resolution training to help upset customers.

Keep these steps in mind when you have to deal with an angry customer:

  • Stay calm: Don’t take it personally or respond defensively.
  • Show empathy: Acknowledge their frustration and listen.
  • Avoid arguing: Facts can wait until emotions cool.
  • Take responsibility: Apologize when appropriate.
  • Offer a solution: Resolve the issue within your guidelines or escalate if needed.

Sometimes it’s walking them through a difficult application setup. Other times, it’s offering a replacement product when there’s a failure. Ask call center supervisors for guidance on what’s acceptable to offer a customer to keep them coming back.

6. Personalize Interactions

Customers expect to be treated like individuals, not ticket numbers. Personalization means using context to tailor responses and avoid forcing customers to repeat themselves. When agents understand who they’re talking to and why they’re reaching out, conversations feel faster, more relevant, and more human.

7. Offer Omnichannel Support

Offering omnichannel support ensures customers can move seamlessly between text, chat, social, and voice without losing context. Consistency across channels reduces friction, shortens resolution times, and creates a more cohesive customer experience.

8. Invest in Training

Even the best tools can’t compensate for underprepared agents. Ongoing training helps agents handle complex situations, use technology effectively, and communicate with confidence. Well-trained teams resolve issues faster, deliver better experiences, and are far more likely to stay engaged and retained.

9. Set Clear Goals & KPIs

Without clear goals, it’s impossible to know what success looks like. Defining KPIs—such as CSAT, first contact resolution, and response time—helps teams focus on what matters most. Clear benchmarks also make it easier to identify gaps, measure progress, and continuously improve performance.

10. Implement Agentic AI

Agentic AI enables contact centers to move beyond basic automation by assigning specialized AI agents to handle specific tasks and outcomes. From resolving common inquiries in real time to assisting human agents with context and recommendations, agentic AI improves efficiency, consistency, and customer satisfaction—without sacrificing the human touch.

Contact Center Metrics to Track

Tracking the right contact center metrics is key to improving both agent performance and customer experience. Without clear benchmarks and data-driven insights, even the most talented teams can fall short of their goals. By focusing on a core set of metrics, you’ll be able to pinpoint areas for improvement, streamline operations, and deliver consistently excellent service.

While every organization has its unique needs, these five foundational contact center performance metrics offer a well-rounded view of how your team is doing and where to optimize. Mastering these metrics will help you drive measurable gains in efficiency, satisfaction, and long-term loyalty.

Average Handle Time (AHT)

Formula: AHT = (Talk Time + Hold Time + After-Call Work Time) / Total Number of Calls

Average Handle Time (AHT) is one of the most widely used contact center metrics. It reflects the total amount of time agents spend handling customer inquiries, from the initial greeting to the final documentation. While lower AHT often signals greater efficiency, it’s important to strike a balance. An AHT that’s too low may indicate rushed interactions that compromise quality.

To optimize AHT without sacrificing customer satisfaction:

  • Build out a robust internal knowledge base so agents can find answers quickly.
  • Equip your team with real-time guidance tools to reduce time spent searching for solutions.
  • Automate repetitive tasks such as call summaries or ticket categorization.

Improving AHT isn’t just about speed, it’s about empowering agents to resolve issues quickly and thoroughly.

First Call Resolution (FCR)

Formula: FCR = (Number of Issues Resolved on First Contact / Total Number of Issues) × 100

First Call Resolution (FCR) measures your team’s ability to resolve customer issues during the first interaction, no callbacks or follow-ups required. High FCR is often associated with increased customer satisfaction, reduced operating costs, and stronger brand loyalty.

Improving this critical contact center performance metric requires a combination of tools, training, and systemic insight:

  • Train agents to handle complex issues confidently and independently.
  • Analyze repeat calls to uncover and fix recurring problems.

Ultimately, a higher FCR means fewer touchpoints for the customer and a more efficient operation for your team.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

Formula: CSAT = (Number of Satisfied Customers / Total Survey Responses) × 100

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is a direct reflection of how your team is perceived. Typically gathered through post-interaction surveys, CSAT gives customers the opportunity to rate their experience, often with a simple question like, “How satisfied were you with your support today?”

To increase CSAT:

  • Send surveys immediately after the interaction while the experience is still fresh.
  • Follow up on negative responses to identify coaching opportunities and process improvements.
  • Focus on empathy and soft skills during training to build a stronger rapport with customers.

CSAT is a leading indicator of your team’s emotional impact on customers and a critical input into broader customer experience strategies.

Service Level

Formula: Service Level = (Calls Answered Within Threshold / Total Calls Answered) × 100

Service level tracks how quickly your team is answering incoming calls. Most contact centers set a goal like answering 80% of calls within 20 seconds. Meeting or exceeding your target helps reduce call abandonment and ensures customers feel heard.

To stay on top of this key contact center metric:

  • Improve forecasting accuracy to anticipate spikes in demand.
  • Adjust staffing in real-time to avoid undercoverage.
  • Use interactive voice response (IVR) systems to route calls more efficiently.

When service levels drop, customer frustration rises. That’s why maintaining high availability is so critical.

Abandonment Rate

Formula: Abandonment Rate = (Abandoned Calls / Total Incoming Calls) × 100

Abandonment rate tells you how many customers hang up before ever reaching a live agent. A high abandonment rate is often a red flag that wait times are too long, or that your system isn’t meeting customers where they are.

To reduce abandonment:

  • Offer virtual hold or scheduled callback options to eliminate long waits.
  • Display estimated wait times so customers know what to expect.
  • Implement better routing or self-service tools to resolve simple issues faster.

Monitoring abandonment closely is essential for understanding both your staffing efficiency and overall contact center performance.

Key Next Steps

Implementing contact center best practices and the right contact center metrics lays the groundwork for stronger agent performance and happier customers. But metrics alone aren’t enough. The real impact comes from acting on those insights; adjusting workflows, coaching agents, and evolving your strategy over time.

Set a regular cadence for reviewing performance, and benchmark your results against industry standards and internal goals. Whether you’re focused on voice support or expanding into contact center chat metrics, aligning your KPIs with business outcomes will keep your operation running at peak efficiency.

Call Center Agents are the Frontline

Call centers are still the backbone of the customer service industry. And the most important thing to remember as a call center agent is this: You are your company’s representative.

Follow company policy, but don’t stop there. Put these best practices to use to deliver stellar customer service experiences.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What are call center agent best practices?

Call center agent best practices include active listening, clear communication, empathy, efficient problem-solving, and using the right tools to resolve issues quickly and consistently.

What KPIs should call centers track to improve performance?

Common KPIs include customer satisfaction (CSAT), first contact resolution (FCR), average handle time (AHT), and response time. These metrics help teams identify gaps and measure improvement.

How does training impact call center performance?

Ongoing training equips agents to handle complex issues, use tools effectively, and deliver consistent service, which improves outcomes and reduces turnover.

How can agentic AI support call center agents without replacing them?

Agentic AI can handle routine inquiries, provide real-time guidance, and surface relevant context for agents, allowing human teams to focus on higher-value, more complex interactions.

9 Customer Service Challenges and How to Overcome Them

Posted on Michael Hartsog

Key Takeaways

  • Set clear expectations: Define response times and support channels upfront to prevent frustration.
  • Train for empathy: Equip agents to personalize interactions and turn issues into loyalty moments.
  • Use automation wisely: Leverage agentic AI with a solution like Quiq to speed up resolutions without losing the human touch.
  • Manage difficult requests: Stay transparent and solution-oriented when needs can’t be met.
  • Reduce turnover: Invest in onboarding, feedback, and recognition to keep service teams engaged.

When someone comes to you with a problem, they can be angry, stubborn, mercurial, and—let’s be honest—extremely frustrating. Some of this is simply unavoidable, but some stems from the fact that many customer service professionals lack a detailed, high-level understanding of customer service problems and how to overcome them. In this article, we will cover some of the most common customer service problems and how you can remedy them

What are The Top Customer Service Challenges?

After years of running a generative AI platform for contact centers and interacting with leaders in this space, we have discovered that the top customer service problems are:

  1. Understanding customer expectations
  2. Exceeding customer expectations
  3. Dealing with unreasonable customer demands
  4. Improving your internal operations
  5. Not offering a preferred communication channel
  6. Not offering real-time options
  7. Handling angry customers
  8. Dealing with a service outage crisis
  9. Retaining, hiring, and training service professionals
  10. Ignoring customer feedback
  11. Inconsistent customer experiences

In the sections below, we’ll break each of these down and offer strategies for addressing them.

1. Understanding Customer Expectations

Deciding which communication channels to offer customers depends a great deal on the kinds of customers you’re serving. That said, in our experience, text messaging is a universally successful method of communication because it mimics how people communicate in their personal lives. The same goes for web chat and WhatsApp.

Beyond this, setting the right expectations upfront is another good way to address common customer service challenges. For example, if you are not available 24/7, only provide support via email, or don’t have dedicated account managers , you should  make that clear right at the beginning.

2. Exceeding Customer Expectations

Once you understand what your customers want and need, the next step is to go above and beyond to make them happy. Everyone wants to stand out in a fiercely competitive market, and going the extra mile is a great way to do that. One of the major customer service challenges is knowing how to do this proactively, but there are many ways you can succeed without a huge amount of effort.

Consider a few examples, such as:

  • Treating the customer as you would a friend in your personal life, i.e., by apologizing for any negative experiences and empathizing with how they feel;
  • Offering a credit or discount for a future purchase;
  • Sending them a card referencing their experience and thanking them for being a loyal customer.

The key is making sure they feel seen and heard. If you do this consistently, you’ll exceed your customers’ expectations, and the chances of them becoming active promoters of your company will increase dramatically.

3. Dealing with Unreasonable Demands

Of course, sometimes a customer has expectations that simply can’t be met, and this, too, counts as one of the serious customer service challenges. Customer service professionals often find themselves in situations where someone wants a discount that can’t be given, a feature that can’t be built, or a bespoke customization that can’t be done, and they wonder what they should do.

The only thing to do in this situation is to gently let the customer down, using respectful and diplomatic language. Something like, “We’re really sorry we’re not able to fulfill your request, but we’d be happy to help you choose an option that we currently have available” should do the trick.

4. Improving Your Internal Operations

Customer service teams face the constant pressure to improve efficiency, maintain high CSAT scores, drive revenue, and keep costs to service customers low. This matters a lot; slow response times and being kicked from one department to another are two of the more common complaints contact centers get from irate customers, and both are fixable with appropriate changes to your procedures.

You are probably already tracking metrics like first contact resolution (FCR) and (AHT), but this is easier when you have a unified, comprehensive dashboard that gives you quick insight into what’s happening across your organization.

You might also consider leveraging the power of generative AI, which has led to AI assistants that can boost agent performance in a variety of different tasks. You have to tread lightly here because too much bad automation will also drive customers away. But when you use technology like large language models according to best practices, you can get more done and make your customers happier while still reducing the burden on your agents.

5. Not Offering a Preferred Communication Channel

In general, contact centers often deal with customer service challenges stemming from new technologies. One way this can manifest is the need to cultivate new channels in line with changing patterns in the way we all communicate.

You can probably see where this is going – something like 96% of Americans have some kind of cell phone, and if you’ve looked up from your own phone recently, you’ve probably noticed everyone else glued to theirs.

It isn’t just that customers now want to be able to text you instead of calling or emailing; the ubiquity of cell phones has changed their basic expectations. They now take it for granted that your agents will be available round the clock, that they can chat with an agent asynchronously as they go about other tasks, etc.

We can’t tell you whether it’s worth investing in multiple communication channels for your industry. But based on our research, we can tell you that having multiple channels—and text messaging in particular—is something most people want and expect.

6. Not Offering Real-Time Options

When customers reach out asking for help, their customer service problems likely feel unique to them. But since you have so much more context, you’re aware that a very high percentage of inquiries fall into a few common buckets, like “Where is my order?”, “How do I handle a return?”, “My item arrived damaged, how can I exchange it for a new one?”, etc.

These and similar inquiries can easily be resolved instantly using AI, leaving customers and agents happier and more productive.

7. Handling Angry Customers

A common story in the customer service world involves an interaction going south and a customer getting angry.

Gracefully handling angry customers is one of those perennial customer service challenges; the very first merchants had to deal with angry customers, and our robot descendants will be dealing with angry customers long after the sun has burned out.

Whenever you find yourself dealing with a customer who has become irate, there are two main things you have to do:

  1. Empathize with them
  2. Do not lose your cool

It can be hard to remember, but the customer isn’t frustrated with you, they’re frustrated with the company and products. If you always keep your responses calm and rooted in the facts of the situation, you’ll always be moving toward providing a solution.

8. Dealing With a Service Outage Crisis

Sometimes, our technology fails us. The wifi isn’t working on the airplane, a cell phone tower is down following a lightning storm, or that printer from Office Space jams so often it starts to drive people insane.

As a customer service professional, you might find yourself facing the wrath of your customers if your service is down. Unfortunately, in a situation like this, there’s not much you can do except honestly convey to your customers that your team is putting all their effort into getting things back on track. You should go into these conversations expecting frustrated customers, but make sure you avoid the temptation to overpromise.

Talk with your tech team and give customers a realistic timeline; don’t assure them it’ll be back in three hours if you have no way to back that up. Though Elon Musk seems to get away with it, the worst thing the rest of us can do is repeatedly promise unrealistic timelines and miss the mark.

9. Retaining, Hiring, and Training Service Professionals

You may have seen this famous Maya Angelou quote, which succinctly captures what the customer service business is all about:

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Learning how to comfort a person or reassure them is high on the list of customer service challenges, and it’s something that is certainly covered in your training for new agents.

But training is also important because it eases the strain on agents and reduces turnover. For customer service professionals, the median time to stick with one company is less than a year, and every time someone leaves, that means finding a replacement, training them, and hoping they don’t head for the exits before your investment has paid off.

Keeping your agents happy will save you more money than you imagine, so invest in a proper training program. Ensure they know what’s expected of them, how to ask for help when needed, and how to handle challenging customers.

10. Ignoring Customer Feedback

Few customer service problems are as self-inflicted as ignoring customer feedback. When customers take the time to share their experiences, whether through surveys, reviews, social media, or direct conversations, they’re offering you free insight into what’s working and what isn’t.

The problem isn’t usually a lack of feedback; it’s a lack of follow-through. Too often, feedback is collected, stored in a dashboard, and never meaningfully acted on. This creates a dangerous gap between what customers are saying and how the organization evolves.

To avoid this, feedback should be treated as an operational input, not a vanity metric. Look for recurring themes, prioritize issues that impact multiple customers, and close the loop whenever possible by letting customers know their input led to change. When customers feel heard and see evidence of you addressing their feedback, they’re far more likely to stay loyal, even when something goes wrong.

11. Inconsistent Customer Experiences

Inconsistent customer experiences are especially damaging because they erode trust. A customer might have a great interaction one day and a frustrating one the next, even though they’re dealing with the same company. From the customer’s perspective, this unpredictability feels careless or disorganized.The solution is alignment. Centralizing customer data, standardizing processes, and equipping agents with shared tools and guidance all help create a more seamless experience. Technology, when implemented thoughtfully, can play a key role here by ensuring context carries over between interactions and channels. When customers know what to expect every time they reach out, confidence and satisfaction naturally follow.

Final Thoughts on the Top Customer Service Problems

Customer service problems aren’t going away, but the way leading contact centers address them is changing. Today’s most effective teams aren’t just reacting to issues as they arise; they’re using agentic AI to proactively resolve problems, streamline operations, and deliver consistent, high-quality experiences across every channel.

With agentic AI platforms like Quiq, contact centers can automate outcomes by assigning specialized AI agents to handle common inquiries, manage real-time issues, and seamlessly hand off complex cases to human agents with full context. The result is faster resolution, happier customers, and less strain on your service teams.

To go deeper, download the Agentic AI for CX Buyer’s Kit to explore real-world use cases, implementation considerations, and strategies for solving today’s most pressing customer service challenges with agentic AI.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is the most common customer service complaint?

Many teams struggle to keep up with rising customer expectations across multiple channels. Customers now expect fast, personalized responses wherever they reach out – email, SMS, social, or chat. Tools like Quiq’s agentic AI help unify these channels, help CX leaders maintain an effective omnichannel strategy,  and maintain consistent quality at scale.

What is agentic AI?

Agentic AI refers to AI systems that can take autonomous actions on behalf of users, not just respond to prompts. In customer service, this means AI that can interpret intent, make decisions, and complete tasks – like resolving issues, escalating complex cases, or updating orders without manual intervention.

How can automation improve customer experience without feeling impersonal?

Automation should simplify, not replace, the human touch. Using Quiq’s agentic AI for repetitive tasks like order tracking or FAQs frees up agents to focus on more complex, emotional conversations that require empathy and problem-solving.

How does unified messaging impact overall CX performance?

Unified messaging ensures every interaction, no matter the channel, feels seamless and informed. Quiq centralizes customer conversations so agents have full context, resulting in faster responses, fewer escalations, and stronger relationships.

What KPIs should CX leaders track to measure improvement?

Key metrics include CSAT, NPS, first response time, and resolution rate. For teams using Quiq’s agentic AI solution, analytics dashboards provide real-time visibility into these metrics, helping leaders identify bottlenecks and continuously improve customer experience.

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