Poor customer experience (CX) usually boils down to a few recurring problems, ones that frustrate customers and are consistently highlighted in industry research.
These pain points damage brand trust, increase costs, and undermine operational efficiency.
To find out more, we asked Pierce Buckley, CEO & Co-Founder at babelforce, to outline the three most common broken processes in CX and how contact centres can fix them.
Video: Call Centre Broken Processes: The Broken Processes in CX We All Hate (And How to Solve Them)
Watch the video below to hear Pierce explain common broken processes in CX and how contact centres can solve them:
With thanks to Pierce Buckley, CEO & Co-Founder at babelforce, for contributing to this video.
This video was originally published in our article ‘Key Signs of Broken Processes (and How to Fix Them)’
Three CX Failures That Customers Hate
To understand how to improve CX, it helps to first acknowledge where it most often breaks down:
“The three most common problems are the ones we all hate and that come up all the time in the research: not having a short and sweet interaction to solve problems automatically, making people wait too long, and if you do get through to an agent because you need a person to help you, that they don’t have the information, or the capability, to solve your problem quickly and easily the first time.”
1. No Quick Fix for Simple Problems
Customers want to resolve routine queries quickly. When there’s no short and simple route, like a smooth self-service option, they’re forced into longer journeys.
2. Long Wait Times
Whether it’s being stuck in a queue or delayed across channels, slow service is a major source of frustration.
3. Agents Who Can’t Help
When customers finally reach a person, they expect a resolution. If the agent lacks the tools or information to help, it turns a bad experience into a worse one.
How to Fix Them
Start With Committed Leadership
These problems won’t be fixed without leadership that understands their impact and is prepared to do something about them. That includes both CX leadership and general management.
“First of all, you need CX management, and management in general, that care and that have the wherewithal to do something about it. Let’s assume that’s there.”
Align Business Needs, Usability, and Tech
You need to bring together the business rules, usability requirements, process needs, and technical constraints, including AI and automation. All of these elements must work together for any change to be effective.
“Secondly, what you need is the capability to combine the usability constraints, the business logic, business requirements, business process requirements, and the technical constraints.
That includes the AI and automation integration, everything, usability constraints, the business logic, and the technical constraints.”
Integrate Data With Customer Journeys
Fixing broken CX means integrating customer journeys with back-end systems and data flows. That’s the only way to make sure automation works, agents are properly equipped, and customers get the right experience.
“Now you could just throw software engineering at the problem, and start projects right, because to solve those three problems I talked about you have to integrate data flows with customer experience journeys.
And either you’re going to do that by creating new software, and maintaining it, and managing it, or you’re going to need something else.”
Use No-Code Tools for Speed and Agility
Traditional development is slow. To move at the pace modern CX demands, no-code platforms let operations teams build and test solutions themselves, often without involving developers at all. This makes it possible to launch and improve journeys in weeks, not months.
“If you’re going to be agile enough to deal with those in today’s world, you’re going to actually release things in weeks and not take months, or years, to do something.
Then the only way to do it is to move most of this process engineering capability and mapping it into software, moving most of it into no-code.
And no-code means not a few settings somewhere, but actually being able to do all of that data processing and combine it together with the customer experience side of things, to get the usability that you need.”
Empower the People Closest to the Process
Those who work directly with the processes, usually operations and frontline staff, should be the ones shaping improvements. No-code tools make this possible, reducing the need to translate ideas into specs and increasing speed to impact.
“Nowadays it’s possible to solve those big problems by taking a no-code approach, and 95% of what you’re going to create is going to be created by the people close to the processes.
So by the operations frontline folks, who don’t need to translate what they have in their head into a spec for developers, instead they just go and AB test what they want to do.”
If you are looking for more great insights from the experts, check out these next:
- A Better Path to Higher Customer Satisfaction
- How AI Empowers Agents for Better CX
- How to Spot and Solve Common Customer Issues
- 7 Quick Wins to Boost CSAT Scores
Author: Robyn Coppell
Reviewed by: Xander Freeman
Published On: 12th Sep 2025 - Last modified: 25th Sep 2025
Read more about - Video, babelforce, Customer Experience (CX), Pierce Buckley, Videos
