Industry Spotlight
This resource explores three often-overlooked challenges in contact centers - silent attrition, missed accountability, and forecasting illusions - and offers expert insights on how to address them before they impact performance and customer experience.
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We asked dozens of CX professionals:
“What’s a contact center problem most leaders never see coming?”
While responses varied, three themes consistently rose to the top.
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By far the most common surprise was attrition - not just employees leaving, but the hidden warning signs that come first. Leaders tend to focus on turnover rates, but disengagement, burnout, and “quiet quitting” show up long before the data does.
“Agents don’t quit overnight. They disengage first… silent disengagement erodes customer experience quality long before it shows in the numbers.” - Danielle Latham
“Employee attrition builds from culture, management, and engagement issues that are harder to track but hit hardest once turnover spikes.” - Sean Minter
Attrition was mentioned in over 50% of different responses, making it the most cited blind spot.
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Several experts flagged that when things “look fine” on paper, accountability often slips. Leaders stop pushing on coaching or holding teams responsible, and over time small gaps grow into major performance declines.
“We let performance slide because metrics looked okay. By the time results dip, months of accountability have been skipped.” - Alejandro Castro
Others tied this to ineffective coaching and lack of consistent routines - when managers assume things are being done, but never verify.
“Leaders assume something is handled just because they said it should be… without routines and mechanisms, priorities fade and problems resurface.” - Shannon Hodges
This theme - accountability gaps - came through in 35% of responses.
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Workforce management came up as a classic trap: forecasts that look great in planning, but fall apart in reality due to no-shows, long breaks, shift swaps, and unexpected call lengths. The downstream effect is agent burnout, last-minute overtime, and ultimately, attrition.
“Forecasting looks great on paper, but in reality, adherence is disastrous… by the holidays, performance tanks and leadership panics.” - Brett Newbold
Though only cited once explicitly, this response resonated as a unique, under-discussed pain point - a hidden problem with big seasonal consequences.
“I think one of the biggest contact center problems most leaders never see coming is that silent attrition. Where engagement goes down before the person ever leaves. And I think why it’s sneaky is because agents don’t quit overnight. They disengage first. They may still hit their goals, but their energy, their empathy, their attitude drops off. Leaders focus usually on turnover rate, but by the time that spikes, the morale problem has been festering for months. And then there’s that kind of like slowly quitting. So the silent disengagement leads to a slow erosion of customer experience quality long before it shows in the data. So it’s like the leak in the roof, you don’t notice until the ceilings caves in. And then by then fixing costs far more than training, recruitment and brand reputation. So that’s what I think that silent attrition.”
“I believe that one of the things that a lot of contact leadership really misses, even though they’ve seen it over and over again, is WFM type. The forecasting looks great on paper, looks absolutely amazing. Everyone’s happy. You don’t have to have another class. But in reality, adherence is terrible, disastrous when people see that occupancy is 85%. When in reality you have long lunches, long breaks. No call, no shows, call outs, shift swaps, after call work, long calls that go over, those aren’t accounted for a lot of the time, or they are managed to a budgeted number. Instead of looking at it strategically, a lot of contact center leadership looks at it very tactfully, a day-to-day thing, when in reality the issue that you were facing today should have been an issue six months ago. Based on data analysis, with it being 85%, really it could be 95 to 98% of agents are just drowning, right? They can offer the incentives, get overtime, do all that, the agents continue to burn out, and then attrition starts happening within three to six months. And by that time, your performance is gonna suffer because you’re having to overburden the new hire classes to bring on new people. And this usually, if it happens in the predictable pattern that it does, that is usually around the end of summer where you get your classes bleed into the holidays. And if you’re a retail client, worst time to do it. A lot of companies around the holidays, Christmas and that get completely blindsided. Leadership panics. Everyone panics. So it really, it’s the WFM illusion that the forecasting on paper looks great, but they are not assuming all stream.”
“One problem many contact center leaders don’t see coming, and my point of view is performance issues hiding in plain sight. When an account is doing fine, leaders sometimes stop holding agents, team leaders, and even their own managers truly accountable. Over time, a small gaps build up. We let on the performance slide because metrics look okay. Then when results dip and things change, their reaction is to micromanage, only to realize that we’ve skipped key performance management steps for months. By then, you’re trying to fix problems that could have been prevented with consistent accountability from the start.”
“The biggest problem, probably most contact centers don’t have visibility to, could surprise them would be something like employee attrition. ‘Cause employee attrition can be caused for many reasons, and a lot of things that drive employee attrition are very people related, management related, culture and engagement related. Which build up over time and are harder to track and understand within a contact center. So having better ability to understand how good your management team is, how well engaged employees are, especially at the frontline team leader and agent level. And especially in a remote work environment, how do you make them feel like they’re part of a group and a team is something that’s difficult and it’s a soft item that’s many times hard to measure. And that’s why it’s probably the number one thing that probably surprises people if they start seeing increase in attrition and being able to get an understanding what drives it.”
“So a contact center problem that I think most leaders never see coming or that when they finally experience it, they realize, it’s frustrating because maybe they should have, are the ones where they assume that because they told someone they should be doing something, that they’re doing it. Because contact center business gets busy. Oftentimes operators are fighting the most recent issue and with time you forget about the things that you know, were an issue a while back or you said, Hey, you know what, we should just every week do X or we should every month do Y. And one way I’ve learned to not, it’s not that those don’t still happen to me, but I try to minimize the number of times that happens, is by having what I call an operational mechanism or operational mechanics. And so it is a routine of maybe every Monday morning checking specific reports and looking at that as a routine, setting aside 30 minutes to look at that. It’s a team meeting once a week and having specific things on the agenda that you cover every time because that’s how you make sure you don’t miss checking those things or validating that it is still important in the business. It wasn’t something that became not important because we don’t talk about it anymore. So anyway, I think for me, when I think about a contact center problem, most leaders never see coming, it’s that one, that they didn’t see it coming because they assumed it was being taken care of or cared for, and it faded over time. Or because the staff rotated and the new people didn’t know..”
Across all responses, one truth stands out: the biggest contact center shocks don’t come from customer demand - they come from within. Attrition (silent or overt), accountability gaps, and WFM illusions are the “invisible problems” that quietly grow until they hit leaders hard.
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