Many contact centers struggle with a number of simultaneous goals. They want to improve customer engagement. They want to find ways to boost employee engagement. They’d like to cut out inefficiencies, boost revenue and improve the customer experience. While these may seem like multi-pronged goals, in reality, they all have a grand, overriding mission: improving contact center performance.

Meeting with customers at a recent event, cloud contact center solutions provider Five 9’s Richard Dumas found that it has become apparent that contact center management needs could be clearly described under four pillars that, if handled properly, can provide a framework for building strategies to improve contact center performance. They are as follows:

Keep an eye toward the future and develop plans early. According to Dumas, companies can best gain a competitive advantage by embracing new forms of customer support to provide a better customer experience. It may not be enough to simply embrace them, however: companies need to be sure they are fully integrated with the other contact center operations and universal queues. These include the increasingly important social media and mobile channels.

Focus on streamlining operations and removing barriers to success. Streamlining operations has to do with building effective processes and removing barriers to your success, says Dumas.  By cutting out unnecessary or repetitive processes, contact centers can reduce errors and redundant work, freeing up agents to achieve the contact center’s goals for the customer relationship.

“Many of the questions posed [at the event] were around how solutions can put more control into the hands of the contact center manager and her team,” wrote Dumas. “Managers were looking for ways to make changes quickly and get campaigns up and running without depending on their IT department or outside consultants. We demonstrated to substantial interest how solutions like ours allow administrators to use an intuitive Web-based UI that makes it easy to upload calls lists; manage campaigns; create routing strategies; assign agents to skill groups and access reporting.”

Make sure your technology is working for you. Your contact center solutions should be tools for success, not barriers to it. This involves finding ways to cut through all of the clutter and determine which features and technologies are really important and which are just “bells and whistles” that make solutions more complicated without adding real business value, says Dumas.

Put strategies in place to build, nurture and retain your team. Your call center agents are your best resource when it comes to customer service excellence. By training them well, giving them opportunities to flourish and ensuring that they are content and fully engaged with their jobs, you are doing the biggest possible favor for your customers…and for your company’s bottom line.