Gopher Sport Shares 3 Ways to Improve Your Contact Center

In the contact center world, maintaining high service levels while keeping team members engaged is no small feat.

But Gopher Sport cracked the code, achieving a 97% first contact resolution rate and 71st percentile Gallup engagement scores while answering 90% of calls within 15 seconds. Their secret? A combination of structured career pathing, smart training methodology and a focus on team-driven engagement.

At ICMI Contact Center Expo, Sarah Gibart, Chelsey Johnson and Beth Gauthier-Jenkin (who won our Lifetime Achievement award) shared how this 70-year-old company created a contact center model that’s both scalable and sustainable. With just 30 team members handling 1,500 contacts daily across multiple channels (even mail), the team was awarded the ICMI Global Best Small Contact Center in 2018 and 2024.

If you’d like your contact center to follow in their footsteps, let’s take a look at how they achieved so much success:

Listen to What Employees Say

First, they measure what matters most to agents. By using employee engagement survey questions from Gallup, team members are asked a range of questions, to make sure they have the right tools to do their jobs and to feel like their opinions count.

But it’s really important to act on that feedback.

“You can’t ask questions just for the sake of asking,” says Gibart, Senior Effortless Experience Manager. “If you’re surveying people and not acting on the insights they share with you, you won’t gain their trust. You want to initiate change and address concerns quickly. Even the smallest changes from team feedback can trigger changes.”

The most recent Gallup outcome for the team and company was in the 71^st percentile for engagement.

“We’re pretty proud of that because this job is hard,” says Gauthier-Jenkin, Vice President, Customer Experience and Human Resources. “We do everything we can to help our team members walk through the door and feel as great as they can.”

Update Your Training Methodology

A few years ago, the team introduced a new training methodology. Rather than overwhelming new hires with every possible scenario that could happen with a customer, they focus on “simple to complex” learning tied to cognitive load theory.

“We start with the most basic, common tasks that a team member could do in our team and we slowly start to layer on,” Johnson says. “If five to seven processes handle 90% of situations, that’s what gets taught initially. The remaining 10% — exceptions and nuances — are reserved for just-in-time learning when they actually occur.”

This approach requires building critical thinking skills. Team members learn to recognize patterns and spot exceptions. The language itself reinforces this: processes handling unusual situations start with the word “exception.” When something doesn’t match the pattern they’ve learned, that’s when the real-time training comes in.

“As a trainer, sometimes when people say, ‘I wasn’t trained in that, I was never trained in that,’ that feels like a negative trigger,” Gibart says. “But for us, we’re like, ‘You’re right. You weren’t trained in that because it was an exception. Now, we’re going to train you in how to handle that’.” 

Develop a Career Path for Agents

Gopher Sport has a five-level career path structure for employees. What started as a solution to operational challenges — needing more cross-trained team members — became “a transformational recruiting tool,” says Johnson, Training and Quality Manager.

An agent progresses from Customer Advocate through Expert levels to Coordinator roles, with clear prerequisites at each stage.

“We don’t progress people on the promise that they might be able to do the work,” Johnson says. “Team members must show mastery through specific ‘degrees’ — completing tasks accurately a set number of times — before advancing.”

Gopher Sport is transparent with how this model works. Candidates see the entire career path during interviews. Each level requires meeting performance objectives 85% of the time (90% at higher levels), completing specific certifications and demonstrating core values alignment. Time requirements ensure proper development because you can’t get to the top of the career path sooner than four years.

Each progression brings a 3-5% pay increase. This isn’t a merit increase, but a progression increase based on demonstrated capability. And progression through the career path doesn’t mean that agents leave foundational work behind.

“As you move through the career path, you don’t graduate out of the work in the other path,” Gauthier-Jenkin says. “Even coordinators and supervisors spend time in frontline work daily. There’s no cap on how many people can advance. If we had 30 coordinators, that would be my dream.”