Contact center evolution: A roadmap to customer experience maturity

Customer support isn’t a single touchpoint in the customer journey—it’s an integral part of every interaction a customer has with your brand, from their initial product discovery to their ongoing usage. So, as organizations strive to improve their customer experience (CX), they must also focus on improving their support function. 

Delivering seamless, omnichannel support is inherently complex. To ensure a smooth experience, assisted and unassisted channels must work together seamlessly, allowing for effortless transitions. Whether it’s call centers, live agent chats, FAQs, or AI-powered chatbots, each channel should provide meaningful value on its own while also making it easy for customers to escalate to higher-tier support when needed.

Organizations often face challenges when trying to decide where to start. Additionally, support can be expensive, forcing them to make tough choices about which types of assistance and tools they can afford to invest in. Even choosing the best metrics to measure success is a tricky question to answer. 

The key to knowing where to begin is understanding the maturity level of your current support functions. Once you understand where you stand, it becomes much simpler to see the next logical step. For instance, a company that hasn’t yet developed a robust knowledge base and self-serve options probably shouldn’t begin with live agent chat support.

The benefits of investing in your support and contact center

Support is deeply intertwined with every customer touchpoint, so improving support via a more mature model provides many benefits. Stronger support throughout the customer journey translates to improved customer acquisition, increased customer retention—it’s much cheaper to retain a current customer than it is to replace them—and to a higher NPS score. 

More mature support also provides a seamless, higher-quality CX. For instance, very mature support models operate on an omnichannel model, which enables customers to begin their support journey with a chatbot, later move to a live agent chat, and, if needed, to live phone support without ever having to repeat themselves. Information and context about their case is automatically passed on to the next channel. 

And though moving up the support maturity ladder will require additional investments, the more mature the support, the more efficient it becomes. For instance, visible, high-quality self-service enables customers to quickly resolve issues independently, reducing the load on expensive call centers. Additionally, these self-serve options provide deflection opportunities for live agents, enabling them to successfully resolve more cases in less time.

Understanding support and the modern customer experience

To understand how support intersects with the modern customer experience, we’ll use the LBGUPS (Learn-Buy-Get-Use-Pay-Support) framework, which is a common model for the customer’s journey with your product. While robust support is critical to improving CX, a strong, well-planned process and approach can reduce the need for support at every stage. 

Learn

At this stage, the buyer is just becoming aware of the product, so all marketing messages need a clear call to action. Support at this stage should be positioned as a sales function to help overcome objections and answer questions prospects may have. 

Buy

Customers should be able to purchase goods and services online, and eligibility, discounts, and packages should be designed into the purchasing process. Multiple payment methods should be available, and data capture should be simple and transparent for the customer. If a point of friction is hit during the buying process, access to customer support ensures purchase completion.

Get

The “Get” stage of the customer journey involves the customer receiving, installing, or onboarding to the product or service purchased. Customers need clear communication about the status of their orders. For example, telecommunications companies need to ensure that self-installation and activation guides are clear and well-tested. Sales and fulfillment functions should be deeply connected, with each informed about the other’s activities. In cases where there are questions about order status, shipment, or activation, customers should have easy access to quick answers.

Use

Being proactive can make all the difference when it comes to customer support at this stage. If you’re providing a digital service, invest in the infrastructure (website, service, network, etc.) to ensure stability. Again, to draw an example from the telecommunications industry, when service outages occur, it’s essential to proactively inform customers with estimates of when service will be restored. Also, changing service, including canceling service, should be a simple, painless process—making it cumbersome to cancel results in terrible reviews and negative word of mouth, which will damage the company’s reputation. 

The importance of understanding your organization’s support maturity level

There are many different stages of maturity, and they build on one another, which is why it’s so important to understand where your organization stands. You can’t implement omnichannel without key self-service channels established. Also, not every company needs to have the highest level of maturity for support. Support is costly, and if customers are well served by a knowledge base and chat support, that may be sufficient for your business. Generally speaking, however, the more complex the product, the more mature customer support should be. 

The six stages of support maturity. Where is your organization?

To effectively improve your support function you need to start by evaluating which maturity stage you’re currently operating in. Let’s dig in.

Stage 1: Avoidance

At this stage, companies have little more than a basic knowledge base. Synchronous channels such as live chat or a call center don’t exist at all, or they are hidden behind FAQs and other documents. While having a knowledge base is better than nothing, it is not likely to provide the level of support many customers require. And, it doesn’t create further sales opportunities—live agents can upsell customers to solve problems and add additional value.

Stage 2: Reactive

In stage 2, companies add basic phone and chat support, but there’s no tiering. All agents take all calls, from simple matters to complex problems, so they all need to be very knowledgeable, which is inefficient and expensive and can set agents up for failure. Support tools for agents are typically lacking, so while this level of maturity can provide sales opportunities, it’s much less effective without supporting tools and tiered levels of support.

Stage 3: Guided

At this level, companies embark on a tiered support model that triages common issues at a lower level. These lower-level issues are frequently deflected to the knowledge base or other self-serve options, while expensive, higher-tier agents can focus exclusively on complex problems, which reduces costs. Tools that provide guided actions can provide sales opportunities.

Stage 4: Omnichannel

Now, all the support channels mentioned above are integrated so that a conversation started at one point (chat via mobile device with a human) can be picked up effortlessly at another point (phone call to a contact center) without the customer having to start over from scratch. Data and customer context is shared across channels so agents and technologies can provide a high-quality, seamless support experience. Just as important, sales opportunities are retained and communicated across channels creating multiple touchpoints that can guide a customer towards further investment.

Stage 5: Anticipatory

Companies at this stage have extended beyond reactive support to address issues proactively; for example, an Internet provider’s service is interrupted in a few neighborhoods. Anticipatory support will immediately send communications to all customers in the affected area notifying them of the outage and providing an estimate of when service will be restored. These alerts will need to be automated, so organizations will not only need technology in place, but will also need to be able to identify issues and estimate resolution time quickly and accurately.

Stage 6: Intelligent

Here, a company is implementing AI in many different forms. AI-enabled support can listen to agents’ calls, suggest the next best action, provide call summaries, and detect the caller’s sentiment. On the other hand, AI-powered virtual agents can enable self-service for higher tier issues than would be possible with just a knowledge base or keyword-based chatbot. 

Finding the right metrics

Whatever maturity level you’re at when it comes to support, you’ll need to find the right metrics to measure quality, efficiency, and performance. Support professionals often misinterpret their performance by focusing on individual metrics in isolation. For example, while measurements like Net Promoter Score (NPS), average call time, and transfer rates are common KPIs for call centers, they can be misleading when viewed separately. For instance, longer calls might indicate thorough problem-solving rather than inefficiency, and NPS scores reflect overall company performance beyond just customer service.

Effective call center management requires a comprehensive approach: clearly defining what constitutes a “resolved” issue for each type of inquiry, optimizing self-service options while ensuring they’re not being used to avoid poor service, empowering front-line agents to handle complex problems without transfers, and implementing proactive communication strategies. Success metrics should be evaluated together, including customer satisfaction scores, agent utilization rates, cost per call, and repeat call rates. The focus should be on creating seamless experiences and preventing issues before they escalate.

To learn more about finding the right metrics for your organization, read our article, “Drive excellence in telecom call centers—establish KPIs that matter.”

Measure and scale your support function—improve your customer experience

Support is a critical component of the CX, and the more mature the model, the higher the impact on customer support and efficiency. Think Company has worked with dozens of well-known brands to help them level up their support maturity to increase customer satisfaction. Our experts can help you understand where your support function falls on the maturity scale and create an actionable plan to help mature it. After all, investing in support is an investment in your customers. 

If you’d like to work towards a more mature support function, get in touch.