Notes from thirty years in contact centres
Everything Wyn Owen publishes, collected here. Most of it appears on LinkedIn first — this is the permanent copy, so nothing disappears down a feed.
How Contact Centre Technology Has Built Itself In Layers — And What Comes Next
Contact centre technology did not arrive all at once. It built itself in layers, each one resting on the one before, each one adding capability the previous layer made possible. Seeing the pattern is the clearest way to understand where the next capability will live — and why it does not require replacing anything underneath it.
Three Generations Of Contact Centre Routing — And The Waste That Only Becomes Visible When The Next One Arrives
Contact centre routing has been through three generations in my career. Each one solved the same fundamental problem — getting contacts to the right place — and each one looked efficient until its successor arrived and revealed how much it had been quietly wasting.
The Human Cost: What Better Routing Really Does For The People Inside Your Contact Centre
Every routing failure has a financial cost, and the earlier articles in this series have costed it carefully. But there is a second cost that never reaches a spreadsheet — the cost paid by the people who work in the operation.
The AI In Your Contact Centre Is Not The AI You Think It Is
Spend a week reading LinkedIn and you would conclude that AI in the contact centre means chatbots. It does not. There is a second kind of AI that has quietly run fraud detection, claims triage and logistics routing in adjacent industries for thirty years, and it has barely touched contact centre routing.
Why "We Need AI" Has Become the Most Expensive Sentence in Contact Centre Procurement
Procurement teams are being told they need AI in their contact centre, and translating that requirement into a multi-million-pound platform replacement. The gap between needing AI capability and needing a new platform is costing the industry a great deal in unnecessary spend.
The Compounding Effect of Better Routing — Why Year Three Looks Nothing Like Month One
Most contact centre technology investments produce a one-time improvement and then stay flat. Continuous learning produces something different — a small gain in month one that compounds month after month, and then year after year.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Why Contact Centre Problems Never Get Fixed
In 30 years of contact centre implementations I have seen the same pattern repeat itself more times than I can count. The problem gets found. The solution is obvious. And then something happens that has nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with who gets hurt if the answer becomes known.
How To Make The Business Case For Routing Investment When Your CFO Only Speaks Numbers
Contact centre leadership feel the routing problem every day. Finance will not fund a solution until it is expressed in their language — recovered cost, not improved metrics. Here is the translation.
Every Repeat Call Has a Price. Most Contact Centres Have Never Added It Up.
Most contact centres know their repeat call volume. Almost none have multiplied it by the unit cost and put the result on a single line. When you do, the number is large enough to change the conversation entirely.
Your Routing Configuration Hasn't Been Properly Reviewed in Years
Routing configurations are built once and rarely revisited. Five years is typical, ten is not unusual. The contact centre the configuration was built for no longer exists — but it is still routing every contact you handle today against a reality that stopped being true a long time ago.
Why Your FCR Metric Is Lying To You — And What It's Hiding
Most contact centres measure First Call Resolution. Very few use it to change anything. The metric has become a reporting obligation rather than a decision-making tool — and the gap between measuring FCR and acting on it costs more than most operations realise.
The Best Contact Centre Leaders I've Worked With All Had One Thing In Common
After 30 years implementing contact centre platforms across northern Europe, one pattern separates the operations that consistently improve from those that stay still. Poor management asks for the stat. Good management asks why.
What 30 Years of CCaaS Implementations Taught Me About Why Routing Keeps Failing
The routing problem is not a technology problem. It has always been a feedback problem. Every implementation I have done has had the same gap at its centre — and it is only recently that filling that gap has become technically straightforward.
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