Every time a customer has a genuinely terrible contact centre experience — an hour on hold, an agent who doesn’t understand their problem, a promise that’s never followed through — they update their expectations downward. Not just for that company, but for contact centre service in general.
This has implications that extend beyond individual brand reputation. The contact centre industry as a whole suffers when enough individual operators deliver poor enough experiences. Customers develop a reflexive resistance to calling that makes it harder for everyone — even the operators who are doing the job well.
The Race to the Bottom
Some of the worst contact centre experiences are the result of deliberate cost-cutting decisions: understaffing to minimise wages, minimal training to reduce onboarding costs, rigid scripts that prevent agents from actually helping customers, offshore operations optimised for cost rather than quality.
These decisions make short-term financial sense for the individual operator. The costs are shared — by the customers who have bad experiences, by the industry’s reputation, and by competitors who are doing the job well but competing against operators whose cost base is artificially low.
The Industry’s Responsibility
Contact centre operators have a collective responsibility to maintain standards. This doesn’t mean every operator needs to invest at the same level — but it does mean that organisations choosing to compete primarily on cost need to be honest about what they’re actually delivering.
At Telnet, we compete on quality. We win clients by demonstrating that better customer experiences deliver better business outcomes — lower churn, higher NPS, fewer repeat contacts. Our cost structure reflects genuine investment in people, technology, and processes.
We can’t control what other operators do. But we can refuse to participate in a race to the bottom, and we can make the business case clearly to clients who are considering the alternatives.
