Contact Centre

10 Best Practices for Contact Centres

Despite the arrival of AI and decades of change in customer experience, the basic test of a contact centre has barely changed: did the customer get the help they needed without unnecessary effort?

Qualtrics XM Institute recently found that only 62% of consumers said their issue was resolved the first time they contacted customer service. When it was, they were markedly more likely to trust, recommend and buy more from the organisation.

Technology matters too of course, but it earns its place when it makes good service easier to deliver. Here is a list of 10 best practices for contact centres updated for 2026:

Quick checklist

• Are we measuring resolution as well as speed?
• Can customers use the channel that suits the task?
• Does context follow them between channels?
• Can customers reach a human without fighting the technology?
• Is our knowledge accurate and actively maintained?
• Are we learning from customer conversations?
• Do agents receive useful coaching and authority?
• Do our KPIs measure customer outcomes as well as efficiency?
• Are privacy and security built into the operation?
• Have we deliberately decided what belongs with people, AI, self-service and outsourcing?

1. Optimise for resolution, not speed alone

Average Handle Time, service level and abandonment still matter, but speed should not become the objective. A two minute call that solves nothing is not better than an eight-minute call that actually resolves the issue.

The same applies to self-service. ContactBabel found that 19% of callers had already attempted web self-service before phoning, while 52% of businesses said customers sometimes called because they could not find any self-service functionality that was available.

Measure first contact resolution, repeat contacts and successful self-service alongside traditional efficiency metrics.

2. Give customers the right channel and keep the conversation connected

Customers choose channels according to the task, much more than according to their age or technical ability. A routine balance check may suit an app. Suspected fraud is more likely to send someone to the phone.

Whatever channel they choose, customers increasingly expect the organisation to remember what has already happened. Genesys’ 2026 global research found that 95% of consumers say carrying context across channels matters. Even so, and despite being told this by customers for a number of years, 48% of organisations still do not automatically pass information already given to a virtual agent on to the human agent.

An omnichannel contact centre is not one with lots of channels. It is one where customers can move between appropriate channels without starting again.

3. Use AI where it actually improves the outcome

Introducing AI is not a best practice in itself.

The useful question is not “How much can we automate?” but “What problem are we trying to solve?”

At least in the short term, the quickest wins from AI are likely to be in using it to help agents rather than replace them.

A routine enquiry, interaction summary, authentication step or information search may be well suited to automation. A vulnerable customer, disputed decision, unusual exception or complex negotiation may require human judgement from the beginning.

AI can also be valuable when it removes repetitive administration, brings the right knowledge into the interaction and identifies relevant customer history while an agent deals with the customer. In those cases it can improve both productivity and service without putting another barrier between the customer and the organisation.

In practice: Start with the customer or operational problem, then choose the appropriate human or automated response.

4. Make it easy to reach a human

Customers are not necessarily opposed to AI. They are much less tolerant of being trapped inside it.

When automation hands over to a person, authentication, customer details, intent and information already supplied should travel with the interaction.

A well-designed automated interaction may already have authenticated the customer, established what they want, collected information and attempted some resolution steps. That work should travel with the customer.

Making someone explain the problem to a chatbot and then repeat the same story to an agent has not reduced customer effort. The escalation path needs to be designed at the same time as the automated journey, with clear triggers for when a person should take over.

In practice: Design the human handoff before launching the automation. The customer should never have to start again.

5. Treat knowledge as infrastructure

Knowledge management now supports far more than agents searching for answers. The same information may feed websites, self-service, chatbots, Agent Assist and autonomous AI.

That makes accuracy and ownership critical. Content needs an owner, review dates and a process for removing outdated guidance. AI can improve access to knowledge. It cannot make unreliable knowledge reliable.

If the underlying content is incomplete, contradictory or out of date, automation can distribute the wrong answer more quickly and across more channels.

For the contact centre, policy and product changes need to reach every system relying on them. Superseded guidance needs to be removed, ownership needs to be clear and updates need to be reflected consistently wherever that knowledge is used.

In practice: Treat the knowledge base as operational infrastructure, with ownership, governance and maintenance rather than as a folder agents occasionally search.

6. Listen to customer interactions and fix what they reveal

Contact centres are a rich source of Voice of the Customer information. As the frontline interface with customers, the contact centre is often the first to hear when websites fail, bills confuse customers, products create problems and processes generate unnecessary contact.

ContactBabel’s research on customer interaction analytics shows how conversation data can be used to improve customer experience and quality, optimise processes and generate wider operational and business insight.

The value is not another dashboard. If hundreds of customers call because a form is confusing, fix the form.

The same insight can support proactive service. If an organisation already knows an appointment has changed, a payment has failed or an order will arrive late, contacting affected customers early can prevent avoidable inbound demand.

In practice: Use interaction analytics to remove causes of contact, not simply measure what happened afterwards.

7. Give agents the support and coaching to handle harder work

As self-service and automation absorb more straightforward contacts, the work left for people can become more difficult.

Auscontact and COPC’s 2025 Australian benchmarking found a gap between management and employee perceptions of coaching: 85% of organisations said structured reviews happened at least monthly, while only 53% of frontline employees agreed.

Agents handling exceptions, vulnerable customers or emotionally difficult conversations need reliable knowledge, appropriate authority, useful technology, sensible flexibility and regular coaching.

8. Balance operational KPIs with customer outcomes

Contact centres need operational measures such as service level, response time, occupancy and abandonment. They tell managers whether capacity and workflows are functioning.

They do not, by themselves, tell you whether the customer received a good outcome.

A balanced scorecard should also examine resolution, repeat contact, customer effort, complaints, successful self-service and quality. Metrics should fit the type of work: a complex technical-support call should not be managed like a simple booking enquiry.

9. Build privacy and security into service design

Contact centres handle personal information, so privacy and security need to be designed into the operation, including access controls, retention and protection against unauthorised access or disclosure.

Depending on the organisation, that information can include financial details, health information, identity data and detailed records of customer conversations.

Under APP 11, organisations covered by the Privacy Act must take reasonable steps to protect personal information from misuse, interference and loss, as well as unauthorised access, modification or disclosure. OAIC guidance says those steps include both technical and organisational measures, including governance and training, ICT and access security, controls over third-party providers, data-breach preparedness and appropriate destruction or de-identification.

For contact centre leaders, that means knowing which systems hold customer data, which roles can see it, what external providers can access it, how long it is retained and what happens when access is no longer required. Privacy and security are operational responsibilities as well as IT and legal ones.

In practice: Map where customer data goes, who can access it and how it is protected before problems arise.

10. Design the right mix of people, AI, self-service and outsourcing

There is no single ideal contact centre operating model.

A password reset, a bereavement call, an insurance claim, a billing dispute and an urgent technical failure are different kinds of work. They do not need to follow the same path simply because they arrive at the same contact centre.

PwC Australia describes the emerging model as orchestration, which means combining AI, connected channels and people, with employees intervening where judgement or empathy is required.

The same logic applies to outsourcing. Internal teams, external specialists, self-service and AI can all form part of one model.

In practice: Decide where work belongs according to complexity, risk, skills, customer expectations and the need for human judgement.

Best practice is about making the pieces work together

The most successful contact centres do not maximise automation, minimise handle time or push every customer into the same channel. They design the operation around resolution.

Customers should be able to use the right channel, keep their context as they move, reach a person when they need one and receive accurate help. Agents need good knowledge and coaching. AI should be used where it improves the outcome. Customer interactions should feed improvements back into the wider organisation.

Technology earns its place when it makes good service easier to deliver.

If you’re interested in adopting any of these customer service best practices in your operations, contact us.  Matchboard will connect you to the right providers – whether call centre outsourcing companies, technology vendors, or consultants.

Frequently asked questions

What are the most important contact centre KPIs?

There is no single set for every operation. Service level, response time and abandonment remain useful, but they should be balanced with measures such as first contact resolution, repeat contact, quality, customer effort and successful self-service.

How should AI be used in a contact centre?

Start with a defined problem. AI can support self-service, assist agents, analyse interactions and automate suitable tasks, but more automation is not automatically better service.

What does omnichannel mean in a contact centre?

It means more than offering phone, email, chat and messaging. A genuinely omnichannel operation lets customers move between appropriate channels without losing context or repeating information.

When does contact centre outsourcing make sense?

The biggest driver for contact centre outsourcing is usually cost reduction, whether through lower operating costs, more flexible capacity or avoiding the cost of maintaining specialist capability in-house. Outsourcing can also add specialist capability, capacity, extended hours or access to skills and technology. Many organisations use a hybrid model rather than choosing between fully in-house and fully outsourced delivery.

Last updated on: November 1, 2026