The modern contact center is no longer seen as a mere service function at the periphery of the business. Instead, today’s leaders recognize its central role in fueling and future-proofing enterprise success.
Great customer experiences now come with a massive price premium—and bad ones drive even the most loyal consumers away in a hurry. When a single call, text, or even chatbot message is charged with so much potential impact, the task of effective contact center management has taken on a new level importance.
At the same time, contact center operations have also taken on a new level complexity. How do you ensure all those layers of teams, policies, processes, and technologies are pulling in the same direction?
In this complete guide to call center management, we’ll untangle some of these complexities, offering actionable strategies and best practices to optimize your contact center and drive sustainable growth—ultimately transforming it into a strategic asset that enhances customer loyalty and strengthens your business’s bottom line.
Table of Contents:
- What is Contact Center Management?
- Key Contact Center Management Roles and Responsibilities
- 30 Contact Center Management Best Practices: Tips to Take Performance to New Heights
- Managing People: Workforce Management in the Contact Center
- Managing Contact Center Processes: Strategizing for Operational Efficiency
- Managing Call Center Technology: Finding & Implementing the Right Tools
- Managing Customers: Meeting Evolving CX Expectations in the Contact Center
- Managing Contact Center Costs while Maintaining Quality
- Managing the Call Center Operation: Measuring Success and Driving Results
- The Best Metrics & KPIs for Better Contact Center Management
What is Contact Center Management?
Aspects of Oversight and Optimization
Contact center management, or call center management, is the strategic orchestration of all elements within a customer interaction hub to ensure optimal efficiency, customer satisfaction, and business outcomes.
Accounting for the oversight of people, processes, technology, customer experience, and costs, managing a call center considers all these facets of a modern operation, both individually and collectively, with the aim of assuring that the many moving part add up to something greater than their sum—resulting in seamless experiences and driving value across the entire business.
Of course, individual contact center managers and leaders can play many different roles across the organization. They may focus on one particular area or team within the operation. So, to get a better sense of how to more effectively run and optimize your contact center, let’s break down the key aspects and focuses of contact center management efforts:
Managing People:
Contact centers must ensure, first and foremost, that the right people—with the right skills—are in the right place at the right time for the customers they serve and sell to. Modern workforce management encompasses critical tasks like contact center forecasting and scheduling, as well as the staffing, onboarding, training and development processes that are part of empowering, engaging, and retaining productive contact center employees.
Managing Processes:
Ensuring that teams are in place and available is, of course, only the half of it. There’s also much work to be done in managing and improving processes the workforce is involved. From streamlining workflows and optimizing routing to implementing and improving a quality management program, managing these processes is key to ensuring a smooth operation that’s able to respond and adapt efficiently to the needs of customers and the business.
Managing Technology:
The contemporary contact center is an increasingly digital place. The right technology is key to facilitating contact center activity and accelerating improvement. From foundational infrastructure and software like omnichannel contact center solutions and CRMs, to contact center recording tools and the latest AI-driven conversation intelligence tools, technology now not only enables customer interactions; it provides contact centers with a transparent view of their performance within these interactions and across the processes that unfold behind the scenes—providing data and insights that make it easier to drive improvements.
Managing Customers:
While much of call center management deals directly with the organization’s operations, these activities ultimately tie back to one thing: the customer experience, or CX. As organizations continue to recognize the all-important role that CX plays in overall business outcomes, contact centers have come under increased focus. In the process, contact center management is evolving to be a key—or perhaps the key—site for obtaining customer feedback, uncovering insights, and delivering experiences that fuel improved customer loyalty, better strategic decision-making, and support sustainable business growth.
Managing Costs:
For leaders and managers, it goes without saying that operating contact centers comes at a price. However, for contact centers managing costs is a particularly key task and challenge. Across all the aspects of contact center management, striking a balance between costs and service quality is critical.
Strategic Planning, Measurement, and Optimization:
None of these call center management activities happen in a vacuum—or at least they shouldn’t. Ultimately, they must all be working in concert with each other, united by clear planning and goal-setting, effective measurement and reporting, and holistic optimization efforts that drive continuous—and comprehensive—contact center improvement strategies.
Why It’s So Critical to Get Contact Center Management Right in 2025
In 2025, the contact center is no longer just a cost center; it’s an essential strategic asset in the pursuit of better customer experiences. Effective management is crucial for transforming it into a hub of customer intelligence and value creation. A well-managed contact center enhances customer loyalty, drives revenue growth, and provides competitive differentiation.
The ability to deliver personalized and seamless customer experiences is paramount. This requires a holistic approach that integrates people, processes, and technology. By focusing on agent empowerment, process optimization, and data-driven decision-making, businesses can create a contact center that not only meets but exceeds customer expectations, fostering long-term relationships and driving business success.
Key Contact Center Management Roles and Responsibilities
From a top-down, bird’s eye view, contact center management encompasses the primary functions and facets of operations covered above. However, in practice, the management of a contact center unfolds across all levels of the organizational hierarchy, including:
- Call center leaders, managers, and administrators: Responsible for establishing the contact center’s vision and connecting it with broader business goals, these leaders manage financial resources, implement technology solutions, and monitor performance.
- Call center supervisors: Supervisors are responsible for the daily oversight of agent activities, often leading or making key contributions to workforce management, quality management, and process optimization decision-making. Supervisors also provide a connection between organizational leadership and frontline agents, ensuring that high-level goals translate into action.
- Quality Assurance (QA) analysts: QA analysts monitor and evaluate agent interactions to identify areas for process improvement and ensure adherence to quality standards, ultimately enhancing the customer experience. Their insights provide valuable data for management to optimize training and service delivery.
- Workforce planners: These specialists forecast call volume and customer demand, and optimize agent scheduling to ensure adequate staffing levels and minimize customer wait times. They use data-driven insights to help balance operational efficiency with customer service needs.
- Frontline call center agents: Agents are the primary point of contact with customers, handling inquiries, resolving issues, and providing support across various communication channels. While not managers themselves, they do play an important part in contact center management. Not only do they put strategies into action and contribute directly to customer satisfaction, but they provide valuable feedback and insights into the effectiveness and efficiency of contact center processes and tools.
30 Contact Center Management Best Practices: Tips to Take Performance to New Heights
Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s dig into the details and best practices of contact center management within each the key areas discussed above.
Managing People: Workforce Management in the Contact Center
Despite the digital transformation of contact centers and the even more recent rise of artificial intelligence, contact centers are still fundamentally fueled by human action. That’s why effective contact center workforce management is a cornerstone of any successful operation. Empower your people and improve operational efficiency with the help of these best practices:
1. Hire—and onboard—agents strategically
Finding the right people and getting them onboarded efficiently is hugely important in their own right but also have massive downstream effects on the entire organization. To avoid the potential future costs of turnover, speed up development, and increase engagement from the get-go:
- Hire for fit: Recruitment should center on identifying skilled candidates. Hiring should elevate those candidates that are a fit for your company culture and goals.
- Standardize your onboarding: Develop a comprehensive onboarding process to ensure new hires are well-prepared to handle customer interactions. Set clear expectations for performance and development, educate agents about both your offerings and your broader vision, and establish open lines of communication in the process.
2. Leverage advanced forecasting and scheduling tools
Meeting customer demand with optimal efficiency is both art and science. Utilizing leading contact center forecasting and scheduling software can help you master both parts. Leverage machine learning and analytics to predict call volume, anticipate changes, and then optimize schedules to minimize wait times and maximize resource utilization.
3. Enable real-time insights and responses
Workforce planning doesn’t end with the creation of the schedule. Equip supervisors with real-time adherence data and tools to monitor agent performance and provide immediate support during customer interactions. This allows for quick adjustments and helps ensure consistent service quality.
4. Add flexibility with self-scheduling
Empower agents with the ability to manage their schedules, promoting better work-life balance and increasing job satisfaction. Agent self-scheduling solutions deliver the greater autonomy that agents crave and can both improve schedule adherence and eliminate work for managers and planners along the way.
5. Put agent engagement at the center of your call center management strategy
In the dynamic and often demanding environment of a contact center, agent engagement is not just a nice-to-have—it’s a critical driver of success. When agents feel valued, supported, and empowered, they are more likely to deliver exceptional customer experiences. To foster a healthy, engaged culture, prioritize open communication, provide regular feedback and recognition, and offer opportunities for professional development.
Go Deeper: Related Resources to Explore
Managing Contact Center Processes: Strategizing for Operational Efficiency
With empowered agents in the right place, your contact center will go far. But how do you manage and improve the contact center processes and workflows they’re involved in? Create an agile, efficient call center with the help of these related best practices.
6. Implement Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)
Establish clear, consistent guidelines for handling common customer interactions and tasks, ensuring uniformity and efficiency. Standardized processes minimize errors and improve response times—but they also create a clear, transparent point of reference for agents and managers alike.
7. Use intelligent routing tools
Efficiently routing customers to an agent that’s equipped to resolve their case effectively is among the most critical contact center processes to manage. Intelligent routing tools go beyond simple call distribution, leveraging sophisticated algorithms and data analysis to connect customers with the most appropriate agent or resource. These tools consider factors like customer history, agent skills, real-time availability, and even sentiment analysis to ensure optimal matching.
8. Automate routine (and tedious) tasks with the help of AI
Some processes don’t need to be processes at all. With the help of automation and AI-driven solutions teams can focus more of their efforts on what matters most. Enlist AI to handle routine customer inquiries, replace manual quality management, eliminate after-call work and more.
9. Capture every interaction to enable transparency
Contact center activity can provide a treasure trove of valuable data. But first, you have to capture that activity. Implement a reliable contact center call recording solution to record interactions and begin the process of turning every conversation into a source of actionable insights.
10. Evaluate every customer interaction, not just some of them
Historically, contact centers have relied on dedicated QA teams and sample sizes to get a sense of agent performance and adherence within customer conversations. The latest AI-driven quality management software changes all that, enabling contact centers to evaluate 100% of customer interactions, eliminate bias from evaluations, and rapidly deliver personalized feedback to agents for faster improvement. Bring your quality assurance program up to date with the help of leading QM software.
Go Deeper: Related Resources to Explore
Managing Call Center Technology: Finding & Implementing the Right Tools
In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, the right technology can be the difference between a successful contact center and one that struggles to keep pace. Selecting and implementing the right tools is crucial for enhancing agent productivity, improving customer experiences, and driving operational efficiency. Here are some ways you can make the right targeted investments in today’s tech to give your contact center an edge—and ease the burden of managing call center technology down the line:
11. Innovate with true cloud-based solutions
Leverage cloud-based technologies for scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, enabling seamless integration and remote access. Cloud solutions provide the agility needed to adapt to changing business needs.
12. Use analytics to understand current tech issues and define future needs
Utilize analytics tools to identify technology-related challenges and inform future technology investments. Data-driven insights from tools like desktop and process analytics help identify bottlenecks and ensure that technology supports business goals.
13. Breakdown barriers and eliminate silos
Developing your contact center’s tech stack shouldn’t simply be a matter of adding individual solutions. Be sure that your solutions integrate together seamlessly and help deliver a unified view of your contact center performance and customer interactions.
14. Make the most of advances in AI
AI is no longer a pipedream technology—it’s now fully mainstream. Most contact centers are using AI, but their contact center management strategies need to be updated to match. Support adoption and buy-in from agents by providing direct, hands-on support for AI-driven tools and workflows. Meanwhile, implement AI tools with an eye toward enhancing and supporting the work that agents do—not necessarily replacing it.
15. Look for partners, not just providers
The best technology providers deliver much more than just the best contact center tools. Choose technology vendors that offer efficient implementation and a short time to ROI, as well as ongoing support, training, and tailored innovation. Invest in more than a provider—find a vendor that’s a true partner and real asset in your pursuit of success.
Go Deeper: Related Resources to Explore
Managing Customers: Meeting Evolving CX Expectations in the Contact Center
Customer needs and preferences are constantly evolving. Today, consumers are demanding ever more personalized, seamless, and efficient service across an expanding array of channels. Meeting their elevated expectations is critical for building customer loyalty and driving business growth. With the right approach to customer experience management in the contact center, you can not only satisfy more customers but you can also unlock insights that impact the entire business. Here’s’ how:
16. Deliver on omnichannel demands
Customers want to use the different channel they prefer to interact with your brand. But they also want their experiences to be consistent across channels. Develop a true omnichannel approach that’s unified in the cloud and ensures that agents have easy access to customer history and insights across all channels.
17. Offer more effective self-service options
Oftentimes, the best experience—for both customers and contact centers—is when customers can quickly and easily solve their issues on their own. Implement user-friendly knowledge bases, FAQs, and chatbots to empower customers to find answers independently. Plus, leverage dedicated chatbot analytics to empower your teams to more quickly improve chatbot performance, enhance automation capabilities, and ease the burden on your agents.
18. Prioritize action based on top customer concerns
Customers will inevitably have a wide variety of concerns. It’s just how things go. Deliver better service and drive improved productivity with a bit of triage—and the right tools. Leverage an AI-driven tool like Calabrio’s Trending Topics to understand, out of all your customer issues, which are the most common. By boiling down the whole universe of topics into a manageable list, you can take action based on what matters most your customers.
19. Turn voice-of-customer insights into better marketing and sales strategies
The contact center offers unparalleled insight into the true voice of your customer. These insights shouldn’t lead to better performance only in the contact center, though. Voice of Customer (VoC) tools used in the call center can drive value well beyond it, informing more effective marketing strategies and sales tactics. Use VoC analytics software to see what’s working, what’s not, and adapt accordingly.
20. Understand—and respond—to customer sentiment
Today, analysis of customer interactions can go well beyond what is said. Sentiment analysis enables teams to understand how things are said, by both agents and customers. Utilize sentiment analysis tools to gauge customer emotions and tailor interactions accordingly. With sentiment data, you can develop more effective soft skills training and equip your agents to deliver better experiences.
Go Deeper: Related Resources to Explore
Managing Contact Center Costs while Maintaining Quality
Balancing cost efficiency with high-quality service is a constant challenge for contact center managers. However, it doesn’t have to be a challenge that consumes contact center managers. By strategically optimizing resources and implementing the right, cost-effective solutions, you can reduce expenses without sacrificing customer satisfaction. Use these tips to effect a more holistic contact center management approach:
21. Optimize staffing levels
Over- and understaffing can be drain on costs and quality. As we covered above, leading workforce management tools can be used to more accurately forecast call volume and schedule agents efficiently, minimizing idle time and overtime. In turn, teams can avoid the contact center staffing issues that can raise costs and hurt the bottom line.
22. Go hybrid or remote
Hybrid and remote work models can deliver the flexibility that many employees want—and they can also help businesses reduce overhead costs and expand the talent pool. If you haven’t already, consider switching up the way you work to help manage costs without sacrificing quality.
23. Eliminate repetitive tasks and wasted time
This goes back, once again, optimizing contact center processes. Ultimately, in the contact center time really is money. By automating routine processes and streamlining workflows you can cut operational costs and free up agent time to handle more complex issues—a win for service quality and for lower costs.
24. Minimize agent turnover
The contact center industry has long struggled with high rates of stress, burnout, and turnover. Combatting agent attrition with a focus on support and engagement is key to bolstering performance as well as reducing costs. Because at the end of the day, recruiting, hiring, and onboarding new agents is significantly more costly than empowering and retaining the talent you already have at your organization.
25. Lower TCO with fully integrated solutions
Investing in fully integrated contact center solutions reduces the total cost of ownership and improve operational efficiency, delivering the tools and capabilities you need within a single streamlined solution.
Go Deeper: Related Resources to Explore
Managing the Call Center Operation: Measuring Success and Driving Results
To drive continuous improvement and achieve operational excellence, contact centers must measure performance and track progress against key objectives. But first, they must also define clear goals, implement robust reporting and analytics, and foster a culture of data-driven decision-making. Bring together all the elements of your contact center management approach with these strategic best practices.
26. Define SMART goals
To truly drive contact center performance, begin by setting SMART goals—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. These clearly defined objectives provide a roadmap for your team, ensuring everyone understands what success looks like and how to achieve it.
27. Benchmark against industry standards
Don’t operate in a vacuum; compare your contact center’s performance against established industry benchmarks to identify areas where you excel or fall short. This practice illuminates opportunities for improvement and helps you adopt proven best practices. By understanding where you stand relative to your peers, you can make informed decisions to enhance efficiency and customer satisfaction.
28. Don’t neglect compliance
In today’s regulatory landscape, compliance is non-negotiable for contact centers. Implement robust measures to ensure adherence to all applicable regulations, safeguarding customer data and avoiding costly penalties. Building a culture of compliance not only mitigates risk but also strengthens customer trust, which is essential for long-term success.
29. Foster a complete contact center culture
Cultivate a thriving contact center culture that values agent input, promotes collaboration, and encourages continuous improvement. A positive and supportive work environment can significantly boost agent morale, leading to higher productivity and exceptional customer service. By prioritizing culture, you create a foundation for sustained success and employee loyalty—and likely make your job as a contact manager easier in the process.
30. Focus on the right mix of metrics
With concrete measurement you can quantify the effects of—and make improvements to—your contact center management efforts. Implement comprehensive reporting and analytics to track KPIs that are tied to your business goals and identify important areas for improvement.
Go Deeper: Related Resources to Explore
The Best Metrics & KPIs for Better Contact Center Management
As we concluded above, consistent tracking of contact center KPIs is essential for making management measurable. And if you can measure it, you can improve it. To help elevate your contact center’s performance and make your management more effective, look to these KPIs:
- Average Handle Time (AHT): This metric measures the average duration of a single customer interaction, encompassing all stages from initiation to resolution. AHT is a key indicator of operational efficiency within the contact center.
- Transfer Rate: The percentage of calls transferred to another agent or department. High transfer rates may indicate issues with agent training or call center routing processes.
- Abandon Rate: The percentage of callers who hang up before speaking to an agent. High abandon rates indicate long wait times and poor customer experience.
- First Contact Resolution (FCR): The percentage of customer issues resolved during the first interaction. High FCR rates improve customer satisfaction and reduce repeat calls.
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Measures customer satisfaction with the service provided. High CSAT scores indicate effective service delivery.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measures customer loyalty and advocacy. High NPS scores indicate strong customer relationships.
- Occupancy Rate: Measures the percentage of time agents are actively engaged in handling calls. Optimizing occupancy rates can improve agent utilization.
- Schedule Adherence: Measures how well agents adhere to their scheduled work hours. High adherence rates ensure adequate staffing levels.
- Customer Effort Score (CES): Measures the ease of a customer’s experience. Lower CES scores indicate a smoother customer journey.
- Churn Rate: Measures the rate at which customers discontinue using a company’s products or services. Lower churn rates reflect higher customer retention.
- Bot Automation Score: Evaluates the performance and effectiveness of AI-powered chatbots in handling customer inquiries, reflects the success of automation initiatives.
- Containment Rate: Measures the proportion of customer issues resolved through self-service channels, such as knowledge bases or automated systems.
Simplify Contact Center Management & Elevate Experiences with Calabrio ONE
From optimizing workforce engagement to leveraging cutting-edge technology and delivering exceptional CX, the best practices outlined in this guide provide a roadmap for a more comprehensive, more effective approach to contact center management. However, implementing these holistic strategies requires the right tools and the right platform.
Streamline your operations and unlock the full potential of your contact center with the help of Calabrio ONE’s comprehensive suite of performance solutions. Book a demo today to see what a fully integrated, true-cloud suite of intelligent tools can do to drive your contact center—and your business—forward.
