The contact center as a strategic tool: balancing customer expectations and business goals

Daria Kerymova starts with two sets of expectations. Customers want speed, simplicity, empathy and predictability, and she treats predictability as the key one: the rating of an experience is born where what a person expected meets what they actually received. A business expects something else from its contact center: manageability, predictability, cost efficiency, LTV growth and risk control. Balancing the two, she argues, is not an either-or choice but a matter of sound management.

The central idea of the talk is that there are no neutral interactions between a contact center and a customer: every contact either raises LTV or lowers it. A contact center that only manages a budget for salaries, telephony and licenses will always remain a cost center. Once agents can see who they are talking to, whether the customer is in a likely churn segment and whether a cross-sell or upsell offer makes sense right now, the contact center starts bringing money in. She calls it the eyes and ears of the brand and the first line of defense against reputational, financial and legal risks. For that, agents need a figurative red button so that a signal about a failure reaches the business and gets acted on.

Next come three groups of metrics. Operational ones (SL, first contact resolution, abandoned call rate, average handling time) show how the contact center works. Customer ones (CSAT or CSI, NPS) show what customers think of it. Financial ones (cost to serve, LTV, churn rate and post-contact conversion) show whether the contact center takes money from the budget or brings it in. Post-contact conversion, in her experience, is the one tracked least often. A single metric says little; the meaning appears when they are analyzed together.

The strongest part of the recording covers the conflicts: speed versus quality, savings versus empathy, scripts versus flexibility, automation versus people, KPIs versus real experience. Her illustration is a national retailer that told its contact center to cut average handling time and raise SL. After four months SL was up by half and cost per contact was down 18%. After six months first contact resolution had fallen by 11%, repeat contacts had almost doubled, post-contact conversion and segment LTV had dropped and churn had grown. After a year it turned out there were 5,500 extra contacts every month, and the cost of handling them had grown by 420 thousand a month.

For metrics to work, a contact center needs a foundation: a CRM with the full customer picture, modern telephony that picks up tone and prompts the agent, and integrated systems instead of switching between five windows during a call. Daria calls herself an ambassador of the process approach: it shows which processes a single failure affects, while AI adds predictive models. Together they let a team move from reaction to the proactivity customers increasingly expect. Not long ago everyone talked about one-click experiences; now, she says, even one click feels like too much, and customers are ready to pay for a business to take care of things in advance.

In the Q&A she explains that there is no template for the red button: it is a trigger for unusual requests, for example two similar cases from different cities, raised manually or through AI analysis. She separates quality control of conversations from control of processes, shares that her team is reviewing agent incentives for the first time to get them out of the KPI tunnel, and advises starting financial metrics with the simple ones.