Nobody would build it this way on purpose
A client I worked with had spent millions of pounds on a contact centre platform. Serious money, properly signed off, the kind of purchase that gets its own board paper.
They were using about twenty per cent of it.
The telephony worked. Calls came in, calls got answered and recorded. Everything else the platform could do, which was a great deal, wasn’t being utilised. Not broken, not misconfigured. Just unused, because the person who had run the vendor selection had since left, and the reasoning behind the purchase had walked out with them. What remained was a very expensive phone system and a sense that there was more in there somewhere that the client and it’s customers could benefit from.
Nobody had done anything wrong. There was no bad decision to point at, no failure report to write up. There was just a gap between what the organisation had bought and what it understood itself to own, and the gap had quietly become permanent.
My job was to close it. We mapped the operational and technical architecture. This included every system, every piece of functionality, what it was doing today, what it could do and then set that against a channel strategy that described how work should actually flow through the operation and the associated agent and customer experiences. Once they could see the two side by side, the conversation started about what to switch on. The result - they began deploying the functionality they’d already paid for and extracting the value the platform promised.
I think about that engagement a lot, because it’s the clearest version of something I see nearly everywhere I work.
The setup stops looking like a choice
Most organisations have their people and their technology wired together in a way that nobody would design from scratch today.
That’s not a criticism of the people running them. It’s what happens over time. Someone buys a platform to solve a problem that mattered in 2019. A team gets restructured, and the process it owned gets absorbed by another team who inherited it without context. A channel gets added because a competitor added one. Each decision was reasonable when it was made. Nobody made them all at once, and nobody has looked at the whole thing since. And sometimes it’s unclear who has overall responsibility for it.
After a few years of this, the arrangement stops looking like a set of choices and starts looking like just how things are. That’s the moment it becomes expensive. Not because anything is visibly broken, but because it’s no longer up for discussion.
Two more versions of it, both current.
The work changed. The role didn’t.
Automation takes the easy contacts. That’s what it’s for, and it does it well.
Which means the work left behind is the hard stuff - the escalated, the complex, the emotionally heavy. The customer who has already tried three times. The case that doesn’t fit the decision tree. The conversation that needs judgement rather than a process.
The job just got materially more difficult. And in a lot of the operations I walk into, nothing else has moved. The role definition still describes the job as it was before. So does the hiring profile, the training, the QA framework and the pay band. Every one of them is calibrated to a version of the work that no longer exists.
The technology was deployed as a cost decision, evaluated as a cost decision, and reported on as a cost decision. Nobody asked what it would do to the shape of the work. So the people doing it were left holding a harder job with the same support, the same scripts, and the same scorecard.
Deflection rates go up. Attrition goes up too, and it gets attributed to the labour market.
Designing to the guidance rather than to the operation
The third one shows up across every regulated sector I’ve worked in: energy; financial services; telco.
People start their service design with the regulatory guidance. It’s an understandable instinct. The guidance is authoritative, it’s written down, and starting there feels like the responsible thing to do.
But it costs you twice. It caps the thinking at compliance, so nobody gets as far as asking what the operation could be. And it produces sameness because every competitor in the market is reading the same guidance and treating it as the design brief. If your starting point is identical to everyone else’s, you shouldn’t be surprised when your service is too.
I spent time at the FCA, so I’ll be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying design around the regulation, and I’m not saying treat it as optional. I’m saying change the order.
Design exactly how you want the operation to work. Then overlay the regulatory view and see where the gaps and risks actually are. Then decide, deliberately, whether to adapt the design, mitigate the risk, or accept it with your eyes open.
Same rules. Same obligations. A completely different set of options on the table and a service that doesn’t look and feel like everyone else’s.
Why this is hard to see from the inside
None of these are difficult problems once they’re visible. That’s the frustrating bit. The twenty per cent platform, the unchanged role definition, the compliance-first design - each is obvious the moment someone points at it.
The trouble is that visibility is the hard part, and it’s the part that insiders are structurally worst at. You cannot easily see the wiring of a system you have been living inside for four years. It has become the background. Everyone who might have questioned it has long since adapted to it, and the people who joined recently assumed there was a reason.
Someone who has watched the same patterns play out across a dozen different companies sees it faster. Not because they’re cleverer, and not because they know your business better, they don’t. Because they’ve seen this specific shape of wiring before, and they know what it usually costs.
That’s the real argument for bringing someone in for a defined window rather than trying to solve it from the inside. Not more hours. Not more headcount. A faster, sharper diagnosis, and then help making the change stick.
A question worth thinking through
If you reorganised your people and your technology from scratch tomorrow - the same budget, same headcount, same customers - would you build what you currently have?
If the honest answer is no, the gap between those two things is exactly where the opportunity is sitting.
Most organisations never ask the question. Not because the answer is uncomfortable, but because the current setup stopped looking like a choice a long time ago.