Creating a Culture for Contact Centre Innovation

Published 08/07/25 under:

Striving to create the best possible CX and EX is essential if brands are to stay competitive and keep ever-more demanding customers happy.

So, how do you enable innovation to flourish in a contact centre setting? In this blog, we look at different models, common characteristics and top tips for creating an upbeat culture and increasing success.

Laying solid foundations

Contact centre innovation is a well-defined, multi-stage process that transforms ideas into valuable outcomes. That process only thrives when leadership consistently support long-term experimentation, not just short-term results. People must feel safe to speak up, challenge norms and fail. They should also be incentivised and empowered to act as change champions. And their efforts need to be captured as part of a structured ongoing improvement programme.

Being clear on strategy

If your organisation is already at this stage of innovation maturity, that’s amazing. If not, here are some practical steps you should consider.

The most obvious is where to start. Common areas to target include:

Figure 1. Targeting contact centre innovation

A good model will include a healthy mix of all elements – as opposed to one that’s biased around just one or two that delivers limited or sub-optimal results.

The second is understanding the nature of innovation. It can be planned (transformative) or spontaneous (adjacent or incremental). Similarly, ideas and inspiration can come from many sources – advisors, customer feedback, data analytics, industry benchmark reports, external partners and so on. Other good practices include arranging for senior leadership and marketing teams to sit with advisors to experience the reality of customer service first-hand.

Try to pursue all avenues. The aim is to spark a wide range of initiatives that can be fed into an innovation framework by adopting core principles like:

• Voice of the customer (VoC) – Incorporating direct feedback from VoC programmes to inform and prioritise change management strategy.
• Crowdsourcing – Online or face-to-face events, like CX or EX hackathons, where employees, customers and external experts come together to rapidly identify solutions.
• Design thinking – Problem-solving and rapid solution prototyping anchored around human-centred design (customers and employees).
• Iterative learning – Continuous refinements based on results from repeated tasks and experiments.
• Agile innovation – Short sprints and continuous feedback loops, smoothly progressing good ideas (and saving cost and effort by eliminating bad ones sooner).

Another point, and one that’s often overlooked, is to recognise how diverse personas contribute to problem-solving. Look to combine different thinking styles such as creative minds, goal-setters, pragmatists and analysts within your project teams. Each will bring unique qualities and have a valuable part to play in creating a positive culture for your agents.

Managing opportunities effectively

Having a structured approach (see Figure 2) to innovation – and communicating those goals across the organisation – ensures that creative ideas are not only generated, but also thoroughly evaluated, developed and implemented.

Figure 2. Ensuring a structured management approach

Innovation doesn’t mean the occasional breakthrough – it’s about building a repeatable process and following a proven path that increases the chances of success. A structured approach helps you to do that. For example, by prioritising ideas based on their strategic value and feasibility, before contact centre and CX leaders commit significant resources. Likewise, it avoids spreading teams too thinly across unproven concepts.

Equally importantly, a structured approach sets the right cultural tone. It signals that innovation is a deliberate, sponsored activity that’s taken seriously by leadership. One that invites employees to contribute and collaborate, knowing there’s a platform for turning their ideas into reality.

Top ten tips

Here are more practical ways for contact centre and CX leaders to spark fresh ideas, overcome barriers and build a culture that encourages experimentation, learning and bold new thinking:

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The longest standing Genesys Cloud partner in EMEA, Kerv has successfully deployed Genesys Cloud to over 25,000 agents in 100+ customers. Drawing on our unrivalled technical support, managed services and customer success practice, we obsessively ensure Kerv customers always get the greatest benefit from their Genesys technology.

To learn more about creating a culture for contact centre innovation, please get in touch or attend one of our events.