How to Champion the Customer Experience on a Shoestring Budget

In 2025, organizations continue to face the challenge of doing more with less. Contact centers are navigating resource constraints — time, talent, or capital — while being tasked with improving customer experience and operational efficiency.

Ideally, if time and budget were unlimited, contact centers would upgrade technology, improve compensation, enhance training, optimize staffing and invest in product and service development to drive superior customer experiences. However, many contact center leaders must prioritize their efforts to address critical issues before they impact customer retention in a significant way.

While resource constraints can present significant challenges for contact center leaders, strategic focus on communication excellence, employee development, cross-functional collaboration and thoughtful technology implementation can still drive meaningful improvements in customer experience.

Deloitte's 2024 Global Contact Center Survey of 600 businesses revealed that organizations' top priorities are improving customer experience and increasing efficiency. For managers tasked with implementing these priorities under resource constraints, several guiding questions adapted from the survey must be considered.

1. How can you make servicing more manageable and effective for agents and customers?

Emphasize communication excellence:

• Coach agents to develop high emotional intelligence, recognizing that effective communication requires both listening and speaking.
• Create space for customers to express concerns while enabling agents to empathize and advocate for optimal solutions.

Address personal bias:

• Train agents to recognize and manage their biases. For example, an agent might become frustrated with customers who initiate complex account opening processes near closing time. Teaching agents to identify and manage these reactions ensures consistent service quality.

Transform customer feedback:

• Encourage staff to view all feedback — even complaints — as valuable insights for improvement.
• Establish cross-functional workgroups to analyze feedback and develop interim solutions.
• Create clear communication templates for acknowledging issues: "We apologize for the inconvenience this issue is causing and are actively working on a permanent solution."

2. How are you preparing for the workforce of the future?

Combat talent shortages:

• Invest in recruiting the right people from the start.
• Develop comprehensive initial and refresher training programs.
• Create recognition initiatives that demonstrate employee value.
• Establish clear career progression pathways to higher-level positions.

Example initiative: Implement a "Center Stage Professional" program (weekly or monthly depending on center size) where you interview team members with interesting questions and share these profiles in common areas or on internal websites.

Balance metrics with judgment:

• Foster a continuous improvement mindset while trusting agents to use good judgment.
• Recognize that sometimes exceeding time metrics for individual interactions may be necessary to properly resolve customer issues.
• Consider adjusting wait time expectations during peak periods to allow for more thorough and reassuring customer conversations.

3. How can you work across the business to resolve root causes of high-volume service inquiries?

Promote cross-functional collaboration:

• Address the challenge of providing consistent service across multiple channels through organizational alignment.
• Create awareness of issues that drive unnecessary customer contacts.
• Maintain transparency about known issues by updating self-service resources.
• Solicit solutions from different organizational perspectives and share broadly.

Streamline customer interactions:

• Make customer journeys more seamless to help agents efficiently identify issues.
• Establish clear processes for escalating new issues to the appropriate service and technical teams for resolution.

4. What is your plan to meet customers where they are while reducing service costs?

Prevent transfer frustration:

• Recognize the customer burden of multiple transfers and implement processes to minimize this experience.
• Establish a baseline level of support that customers can expect regardless of channel or entry point.

Develop knowledge curators:

• Train agents to maintain specialized knowledge areas while understanding the broader service and product ecosystem.
• Prepare agents with standard solutions and the flexibility to develop custom approaches for unique situations.

Practical tip: Use existing technology, such as IVRs and standardized agent scripts, to promote complementary products, services, and resources at appropriate moments in the customer journey.

5. Where does it make sense to start with GenAI?

Strategic implementation:

• Invest in AI solutions that learn from customer behaviors and scale with business growth, budget permitting.
• Recognize that many modern systems already incorporate basic AI capabilities.
• Map your customer journey to identify support areas (tiers 0, 1, and potentially 2) where AI can effectively handle standard inquiries.

Quality assurance enhancement:

• Consider implementing AI for quality monitoring to overcome sampling limitations.
• Most quality teams can only review 1-3% of interactions, which may not provide a representative sample.
• AI can work alongside human reviewers to increase efficiency and provide deeper insights into knowledge gaps and improvement opportunities.

Resource constraints can feel like a balancing act, forcing managers to develop "one-armed customer experience champions" — agents who deliver exceptional service despite significant constraints.

While it is undoubtedly easier to excel with "both arms free" — full resources, strategic leaders can still make substantial improvements by focusing on areas that require minimal financial investment. By systematically addressing communication excellence, employee development, cross-functional collaboration and thoughtful technology implementation, organizations can position themselves for success until broader investments become possible.