Designing better tools for agents is one of the most overlooked levers for customer experience transformation.
UX in the contact center matters now more than ever. With rising customer expectations, increasing automation, and evolving work environments, the tools contact center agents use directly impact productivity, customer satisfaction, and business outcomes. In a world where experience is often the brand, empowering agents with intuitive, supportive technology can create a competitive advantage.
We’ve spent decades helping companies improve the user experience for complex enterprise systems from 5,000-seat operation in financial services to a seven-seat center for MLB season ticket holders. This article shares what we’ve learned from modernizing the agent experience across industries and channels, including voice, chat, social, and email.
We’ll cover:
- Why agent-facing UX is critical to business success
- How poor UI design disrupts KPIs like average handle time (AHT), error rates, and satisfaction
- Design strategies that support high-performing, motivated teams
Why the agent experience still matters in 2025
Despite the rise of automation and AI, contact centers haven’t disappeared; they’ve evolved. The most critical moments in the customer journey still involve a human touch: a failed payment, a sensitive health claim, a delayed travel plan. These are the moments when empathy matters most.
Yet too often, agents are asked to deliver exceptional experiences while juggling outdated tools, disconnected systems, and high performance targets. The result? Burnout, attrition, and missed opportunities for loyalty. One in three customers will leave a brand after a bad experience, making frontline tools more important than ever.
The real cost of poor agent UX
Contact centers are among the most data-rich environments in business. Our clients measure every second, from AHT and first-call resolution to customer sentiment and churn. However, they rarely measure the cost of clunky systems and unclear workflows.
Let’s look at a common scenario: A company wants to reduce AHT by 10% and invests in a new servicing application. But without UX research to understand the impact on workflows instead of expected ROI, performance dips, and training costs spike—all because the new system confuses agents, adds clicks, and increases errors. Or worse, the impact is untracked by KPIs and a more insidious outcome emerges: Reduced call resolution and more calls are driven back to the call center.
Design decisions can make or break the business case. We advise teams to model three stages:
Initial impact: how much performance drops right after rollout
Learning curve: how quickly agents return to baseline
Steady state: whether performance exceeds prior benchmarks long-term
Designing for the realities of contact center work
Designing tools for contact centers isn’t like designing a website or consumer app. Here’s what makes it different:
- High-volume, high-pressure: Agents handle thousands of interactions a week. Small inefficiencies at scale cost big—especially when industry sources estimate each call costs between $3-6.
- Split attention: Agents juggle multiple systems while responding in real time to emotional customers.
- Caller patterns: Efficient call handling often depends on how easily a representative can understand a caller’s history (e.g., this customer typically calls about billing). Does the design surface this context clearly to support faster, more effective conversations?
- Expert users: Agents become highly skilled quickly. Designs must support speed and nuance.
- Tool overload: Many agents navigate 5+ systems daily. Consistency and integration matter.
- Training investment: With high turnover, intuitive design helps reduce onboarding time and frustration.
How to design tools that empower agents
Our top recommendations for designing digital tools that boost performance and morale:
Start with field research. Sit side-by-side with agents. Observe workarounds. Interview managers. Context reveals what dashboards can’t.
Map motivation. Understand how agents are evaluated and how that drives behavior, then design to align with these motivators to support compliance and success.
Design for experts. Don’t oversimplify. Use dense, well-organized layouts to minimize clicks and maximize speed. Agents are truly experts after a month of handling scores of the same type of calls, so design with this in mind, and research can uncover the clues for success.
Support decision-making. Provide clear next steps, prioritize information visually, and reduce unnecessary confirmations.
Use real scenarios in usability testing. Prototype realistic tasks. Observe where agents get stuck, even if they say the tool is fine.
Avoid designing by anecdote. Pull from a broad, mixed-experience participant pool, and don’t let one superstar agent dictate your UI.
Co-design for long-term consistency. When integrating multiple systems, align structures and patterns across applications.
Don’t ignore edge cases. Rare but high-stakes interactions often define the customer relationship. Prioritize them.
The UX ripple effect: more than just tools
Redesigning agent interfaces often reveals underlying process issues. Be prepared for:
- Changes in training and documentation
- Shifts in team workflows
- Reframing metrics and expectations
These aren’t obstacles, they’re opportunities. We’ve seen clients use redesign efforts to boost morale, improve collaboration, and build cross-functional alignment.
The role of AI in agent support
AI tools are reshaping contact center work, but they’re not replacing agents. Instead, they’re co-pilots: summarizing calls, surfacing knowledge, and routing queries.
Today, many contact centers use AI-based technologies to enhance customer interactions. Done well, AI can boost performance while maintaining the empathy customers expect, something McKinsey notes is essential as AI becomes more integrated.
But simply adding AI isn’t enough. As CMSWire points out, 2025 might be the year AI dominates, but only if tools are designed around agent needs. That’s where UX comes in.
We’ve helped clients explore everything from chatbot comprehension to conversational UX and human-in-the-loop AI solutions. When these tools are tested with real agents and refined through user-centered design, they reduce cognitive load, build trust, and lead to better outcomes for customers and teams.
The key is designing AI to serve agents, not control them.
Why UX research is critical to transformation
Contact center agents are some of the most expert, efficient users in any industry. They deserve tools designed with their reality in mind.
UX researchers bring the skills to:
- Uncover real-world behavior through observation
- Map motivations and constraints across roles
- Test hypotheses and prototypes with rigorous methods
- Translate insights into designs that work
Human-centered design should also apply to internal tools, not just customer-facing apps. And we’ve seen firsthand how improving the employee experience improves the bottom line.
A few things to keep in mind
If you’re designing new systems for contact center teams, don’t just look at the surface. Think about:
As you dive in, remember: small improvements at scale can add up to millions in savings and stronger experiences for both customers and employees. With 71% of customers expecting personalized interactions and 1 in 3 leaving after a single bad one, the case for thoughtful UX has never been stronger.
We love talking about call centers, let’s chat! [email protected]