Data shows you what’s wrong. But it rarely tells you why.
Here’s what I found behind a 60% utilization rate.
I walked in expecting a people problem.
Agents weren’t answering phones fast enough.
The data was clear. The diagnosis seemed obvious.
But before I draw conclusions from data, I always do one thing first:
I go to the frontline and sit with the agents.
So I arrived at shift start, pulled up a chair, and watched an agent boot up her machine.
It took forever.
Slow boot. Slow resolution. Slow login to the phone system.
By the time she was ready to take her first call, several minutes had already passed.
I found the IT person immediately.
Turns out it was a bandwidth issue.
They’d already tried to get corporate to fix it. But corporate said no.
So I called the CFO directly and told him he needed to see this himself.
He got on a plane. Flew out. Spent two days on the floor.
He was appalled.
He took responsibility for the technology infrastructure and made sure every site in the company had what it needed to operate.
Within a few days, the utilization problem disappeared.
Because it was never a people problem.
It was a technology problem.
The lesson:
Never accept what the data suggests without going to see for yourself.
The frontline always knows what’s actually going on.
You just have to show up and ask.
I’m Mark Danielson, and I help healthcare leaders reduce support costs while improving patient satisfaction.
Follow me for practical insights on cutting contact center costs, improving service quality, and modernizing operations without the tradeoffs.
