Customer Culture
September 10, 2025
What do you want from your CS Team?
By Stacey Smith - The Customer Practice
I’ve sat in more leadership meetings than I can count where the contact centre is the first thing under the microscope.
“Why is volume up?”
“Why are complaints increasing?”
“Why are costs higher than planned?”
And almost every time, the conclusion is the same: “We need to reduce the cost of the contact centre.”
It’s a familiar playbook. But it’s the wrong target. The problem isn’t your contact centre. The problem is the cost of failure across the business - and the lack of accountability for fixing it.
Customer service is the most visible part of a business when something breaks. They’re the ones answering the phones when customers are confused, disappointed, or let down.
But here’s the truth: nine times out of ten, they didn’t cause the issue. The cause sits further back - a product that didn’t meet expectations, a journey no one tested end to end, a comms campaign with unclear messaging, a returns process designed for the business instead of the customer.
Yet it’s the contact centre that’s left firefighting - with stretched teams, manual workarounds, and little ownership from the people upstream.
The real cost in most businesses doesn’t sit neatly in the CS budget. It sits in the 15% of contacts chasing late deliveries. The 22% correcting billing errors. The wasted hours spent on systems that don’t talk to each other. The duplicated work across siloed teams. The time leaders spend deflecting blame instead of owning root cause.
And who absorbs all of that? The contact centre. They pay the price in time, morale, and - unfairly - in perceived performance. But customer service can’t fix what it didn’t break.
If you’re still treating customer service as a cost line to squeeze, it’s time for a shift in thinking. The questions to ask aren’t about headcount or call duration. They’re about accountability.
Are teams across the business accountable for customer outcomes, or just their own outputs? Do you know where friction is really coming from? Have you built a culture where service insight shapes decisions - or one where it gets ignored until the fire’s too big?
And the big one: is customer experience truly everyone’s job, or is it still treated as the contact centre’s burden? Because culture, clarity, and commercial performance all start at the top.
The organisations that get this right move from blame to ownership. They make customer outcomes part of everyone’s KPIs. They close the loop on service feedback instead of letting it disappear into reports. They assign clear owners for every stage of the journey. They involve service leaders before decisions are made. And they get obsessed with fixing root causes, not symptoms.
Most importantly, they fund service like the strategic lever it is - not a cost to be contained.
So next time you’re in a leadership meeting and someone says, “We need to cut contact centre costs,” stop. Ask instead:
What’s driving those costs?
Where are we failing our customers?
Who owns that - and how do we fix it?
Because the cost of failure doesn’t live in your contact centre. It lives in every blind spot, every workaround, and every missed moment of accountability across the business.
If you want better outcomes for customers and for your business, start with accountability and bold leadership. Not blame.
Interested in how we can help you understand where customer failure is in your business? Lets Talk
