Recently, I walked into the meeting with a contact center director. She was concerned that the company’s senior level leaders would see all the wrong things in the numbers. And at first glance, they sure didn’t look good. Average handle time was up. Cost per contact was up. Contacts handled per agent were down. First-contact resolution was down.
But she and her contact center team had been working hard on improvements. And those numbers were tangible evidence of success.
The contact center team was working with colleagues across the broader organization to understand why customers needed help in the first place, and to prevent unnecessary contacts before they happened. Processes improved. Communications became clearer. Self-service and AI-powered tools handled more straightforward, predictable needs.
What remained was the work that truly required a person: complex problems, unusual circumstances, emotionally charged situations, and issues demanding judgment and collaboration. Those interactions took longer and were harder to resolve. And since they were getting relatively fewer contacts, cost per contact went up.
Yet, overall costs were going down. Customer retention improved. Word of mouth became more positive. The organization was winning in all the right ways.
Transformational leadership requires understanding the difference between running the contact center efficiently and truly helping the organization succeed. Often, those goals reinforce traditional measures. But sometimes, they challenge them.
Transformational leadership requires understanding the difference between running the contact center efficiently and truly helping the organization succeed.
With some explanation of the dynamics in play, the leaders in that room could see the operation wasn’t failing. Quite the opposite. The nature of its work was changing because it was succeeding. The organization was succeeding!
Look Beyond the Dashboard
Service level, handle time, first-contact resolution, quality and cost remain important measures. But no single metric tells the whole story.
As AI and self-service handle more of the routine work, the contacts left for people become harder and longer almost by design. If handle time rises because easy work has been automated away, is that necessarily a problem? If total costs decline and customers achieve better outcomes, which result matters most?
The objective isn’t to dismiss operational measures. It’s to connect them to customer and business outcomes, and to recognize that the meaning of familiar measures can change as the work changes.
Go Upstream
Many of the problems contact centers handle are not created in the contact center. A confusing invoice, a broken digital process, a product issue, an unclear policy or a missed delivery can generate hundreds or thousands of interactions. Employees handle the consequences, but the cause may sit in finance, technology, operations, product or marketing.
Preventing an unnecessary contact is far more valuable than handling it efficiently.
Transformational leaders don’t simply ask, “How can we handle these contacts better?” They ask, “Why are these contacts happening?”
Leaders who act on those insights build relationships across departments, identify recurring sources of demand, and track whether the fixes work. They help the organization see the contact center not merely as a place where demand is managed, but as a source of insight on where the customer experience is running into trouble. Preventing an unnecessary contact is far more valuable than handling it efficiently.
Prepare People for What Remains
As routine work moves to self-service and AI, the work reaching employees increasingly involves exceptions: customers who have already tried several options, emotionally charged situations and problems requiring context, judgment or collaboration.
A billing dispute tangled up with a service outage and a missed refund isn’t something AI can necessarily hand off cleanly. It needs a person who can understand competing facts, make a decision, and take responsibility for the outcome.
These interactions require more from employees, not less. Leaders today are having to rethink hiring, training, coaching and empowerment. AI can help by providing real-time guidance, surfacing relevant history and clearing away busywork. But technology doesn’t replace the deeper work of developing judgment, confidence and the authority to act when a situation doesn’t fit a script.
Build the Capacity to Change
Perhaps the biggest misconception about transformation is that it has a finish line. Strong contact centers don’t transform once and return to normal. They build a repeatable rhythm of listening, learning, improving and adapting.
That doesn’t mean chasing every trend. Transformational leaders provide stability by keeping purpose and priorities clear even as customer expectations and technologies evolve. They create an environment where their teams are comfortable identifying problems, challenging assumptions, testing ideas and making improvements.
Transformational leaders leave behind a contact center that is better at becoming better.
Transformational leadership isn’t about launching a “transformation initiative.” It’s about seeing the contact center in the context of the larger organization, and being willing to change what success looks like as circumstances and capabilities change.
Transformational leaders don’t simply leave behind a better contact center. They leave behind a contact center that is better at becoming better.