This is the seventh installment of The Contact Center Gap, a series featuring expert perspectives from people who have spent years inside contact center operations: running them, selling into them, supporting them, and watching what separates the ones that perform from the ones that plateau.
Contact center leaders tend to spend a lot of time inside their performance dashboards.
But the best leaders know what those dashboards will show even before they look.
Ian Chappell has spent over 20 years in the contact center space, starting as an agent and working through team leadership, workforce planning, and BPO consulting before joining Centrical as Director of Consulting. In his experience, the gap between operations that perform and those that plateau shows up in how managers spend their time long before it shows up in the numbers.
“The best operations aren’t really determined by the technology that they use,” Chappell says. “They have better habits for their managers, for their coaches. That tends to be the difference.”
Managers protect their coaching time.
The best operations keep one-to-ones and catch-ups with their people “even if there are 100 calls in the call queue,” Chappell says. Not because the call queue doesn’t matter, but because they understand that canceling a coaching session sends the wrong message to the team.
The managers who keep showing up for those coaching conversations tend to know their people.
“They see the value of having those regular check-ins, those conversations with their people, knowing their people as people, not just ‘this person performs well, this person doesn’t,’” Chappell says. “Understanding what makes them tick starts from that middle management layer.”
The other signal Chappell watches for is whether agents understand how and why they’re being measured.
“Agents on the frontline should be able to articulate what do they get measured on and why are they being measured on it,” Chappell says. “And then understanding that connection between, if you get this thing right, this is the outcome for the customer.”
When agents can make that connection, it means someone took the time to close the loop for them. Agents who can’t are usually working in environments with too many metrics, no clear prioritization, and managers too buried in admin to have that conversation.
Contact centers run on data. Chappell’s view is that most of them have more than enough of it.
“Every contact center or customer that we speak to is very data-rich,” he says. “They’re drowning in data, but it’s the insight and the action that are lacking.”
The problem emerges in how that data moves—or, more often, how it doesn’t.
One team compiles the results. An operations lead reviews them, a team leader passes them down, and by the time they reach the agent, half the following week is already gone. By then, the agent is already working through a new set of customer interactions; the feedback they receive has no context, and nothing changes.
“If I did something bad last week, can I fix it on Monday?” Chappell says. “Don’t tell me two weeks later that it needs fixing—because by then I could have taken another 150 calls on that topic and still been doing those things wrong.”
A dashboard that shows agent performance in real time is useful, but only part of the answer. The question is whether anyone acts on it.
How supervisors end up drowning in admin
The reason managers don’t coach as much as they should is usually structural, not personal.
Chappell describes a pattern that plays out across operations of every size:
- Work that belongs to other functions keeps landing on the team leader’s desk: projects, reporting tasks, cross-functional requests.
- Team leaders don’t handle customer contact, so they’re the ones available to take on this extra work.
- Because it’s hard to quantify what a team leader produces day to day, nothing stops that workload from growing.
“Supervisors are drowning in admin and work that takes them away from spending time with their teams,” Chappell says.
Manu Dwievedi of Etech Global Services—a contact center outsourcing and AI analytics provider—wrote in an article that supervisors spend as much as 40% of their time searching for coaching opportunities rather than actually delivering coaching.
As a result, managers who spend their days on admin have less time for coaching, less visibility into individual performance trends, and less capacity to notice when someone is struggling before it shows up in the numbers.
Chappell calls it the “busy fool syndrome”: doing 35 hours of work a week with no visible output. The hours are real, but the impact on the team’s performance isn’t.
A key tip: spend time on performance variance, not just performance averages.
According to Melissa Esposito, Centrical’s Senior Director of Customer Success, good managers manage their teams’ performance as a structured quartile model.
- Who’s in the top quartile, and what can everyone else learn from them?
- Who’s in the bottom quartile, and what do they specifically need?
The middle is often where the biggest untapped performance lives.
Top performers get recognition rather than a full coaching session, while the bottom quartile gets the most concentrated attention, since closing the gap there has the biggest impact on overall results.
The other requirement is a clear line between metrics and meaning. Chappell points to operations still running on the same scorecard they built 20 years ago, tracking metrics that no longer hold much meaning or impact. When agents understand why a metric matters and what it connects to downstream, they engage with it differently.
Good performance data needs a home that gets it to the right people at the right time.
Chappell describes the Centrical approach as building an experience around performance, rather than adding another reporting layer on top of existing ones. The goal is a platform that brings together coaching, learning, quality, and performance data so managers get what they need at a click, not after hours of prep.
“At a glance or at a click, give the people that need to see the actions that they need to take.”
Chappell describes one UK workshop where Centrical brought together a director of ops, the learning team lead, the quality manager, and someone from HR. None of them had been in the same room talking about performance before. By the end of the session, they were designing the platform together, without a signed contract. Getting people to see how they impact each other, Chappell says, is when the real change starts.
Before you go: What buyers want to know
Operations with strong management habits outperform technology-heavy ones with weak habits, regularly. The technology accelerates what’s already working. Without consistent coaching, clear metric ownership, and managers who have time for their people, a new platform will land in the same environment that created the problem.
Agents who can’t explain what they’re measured on or why, Chappell says. When frontline staff have no clear connection between their daily behaviors and the outcomes the business cares about, performance stays flat regardless of what the data shows.
Why do managers end up too busy to coach?
The work stack expands to fill the available time. Team leaders don’t handle customer contact, so they attract tasks from every direction. Without a deliberate effort to protect coaching time and remove low-value admin, the coaching that drives improvement gets squeezed out first.
A dashboard surfaces what happened. Performance management is the cycle of seeing something, doing something about it, and checking whether it worked. Most operations have the first part. The gap is almost always in the second and third.
About our experts
Ian Chappell is Director of Consulting, International at Centrical, leading presales consulting across EMEA and APAC. With over 20 years in contact centers and customer operations, he has worked across the frontline, workforce planning, BPO, and solution consulting, and is now one of Centrical’s specialists for the contact center and BPO space.
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