Rapid growth is exciting. It stretches your leadership, tests your systems, and challenges your patience. But it also gives you a rare opportunity: to set the tone early. The culture you build now will shape everything that follows.
When a contact centre scales quickly, what matters most down the line becomes what you establish in the beginning. The way you hire, measure, coach, and partner across departments will build either a strong foundation or a shaky one.
That’s why we asked CX Operations and Strategy Consultant Pier Ragone for his first-hand experience of navigating expansion – and to share his best lessons to keep front of mind as your contact centre grows.
1. Hire for Emotional Agility
In rapid growth, you are not just hiring people. You are building the foundation of your culture. The people you choose will shape how your centre reacts under pressure and how well it adapts to change.
Figure out how to test for genuineness, trust, and adaptability. Hire people who can operate in ambiguity and stay grounded.
“Emotional agility”, as Susan David describes it, is the ability to stay curious and self-aware when the ground shifts. That is what you need – people who can manage ambiguity with calm confidence.
Next Steps:
- Ask candidates to share a time they had to learn something quickly or adapt midstream.
- Listen for curiosity, openness, and reflection. (These are the qualities that hold your culture steady when the pace accelerates.)
For tips and advice for improving your job adverts, read our article: Are Your Job Ads Holding Back Your Contact Centre Recruitment?
2. Keep Metrics Simple and Clear
Growth creates complexity fast. Your job is to simplify.
Measure only what you can coach and what truly matters. Three things are usually enough:
- Productivity – How many customer interactions a person can handle effectively in a set period
- Quality – Whether the experience left the customer informed and supported
- Reliability – Whether the person contributed the hours they were scheduled for
That is often all you really need during a heavy growth period. When the centre stabilizes, you can add more. In the interim, simplicity keeps everyone focused on doing the work well.
Next Steps:
- Pick three clear metrics and make them visible
- Make sure every leader knows how to coach toward each one
- Use them to guide recognition and feedback, not punishment
- When someone asks for more reports or data, ask whether it will change behaviour. If not, keep it off the dashboard
If you want to check your KPIs are right for your contact centre, read our article: How to Complete an Audit on Your Current KPIs.
3. Aim for Connection, Not Perfect Compliance
When you are expanding quickly, every customer interaction becomes part of your story. The experience your agents create today defines how people will see your organization tomorrow.
Metrics matter, but they are not the whole picture. Your entire team needs to be clear on the kind of impact you want to have on your customers.
Do you want them to feel educated, reassured, valued, or inspired? That clarity becomes the filter for every decision and every conversation.
When your contact centre is reaching more people with your brand every day, every conversation is a fresh chance to create a brand advocate. This is your opportunity to make thousands of amazing first impressions. Aim for connection, not perfect compliance.
Next Steps:
- Define the impact you want to have on your customers and make sure everyone on your team can describe it in their own words
- Reinforce it in meetings, coaching sessions, and messages
- Share examples of conversations where that impact was achieved and talk about how it happened (The more you connect daily work to customer impact, the more your team will deliver it naturally)
4. Build Strong Partnerships Across the Organization
No contact centre grows successfully on its own. The best ones form strong partnerships across the organization early. Finance, HR, and IT are not support functions. They are part of your leadership network!
Finance needs to understand what breaks, because your team hears it first. HR needs to know that you are not just filling seats but developing people who can lead elsewhere in the company. IT needs to understand that when technology fails, morale follows.
If these partners do not see your value yet, show them. Share insights that help them see patterns before they become problems. Make them part of your success story.
Growth is smoother when everyone understands that customer service is not a cost, it is part of your strategy. Bain calls it Experience-Led Growth.
Gartner calls it the Experience Operating Model. Whatever you call it, make sure it is built into how your business operates.
Next Steps:
- Meet with your HR, Finance, and IT leads regularly
- Share what your team is seeing and ask for their perspective
- Frame issues in terms that matter to them – money, risk, efficiency, retention. (When they realize you help them achieve their goals, they will help you achieve yours)
5. Reward the Behaviours You Want to See Repeated
Culture builds fast during growth, and whatever gets recognized will multiply. When everything is moving quickly, the behaviours you celebrate will quietly define what “good” looks like.
Set the tone early. If you want collaboration, call it out when you see it. If you want empathy, tell that story in your next team meeting.
Positive reinforcement does more than make people feel appreciated. It shapes habits, language, and team identity.
This is especially important in remote or hybrid environments where people cannot see great behaviour modelled every day. You need to show it, name it, and repeat it.
Next Steps:
- Create visible moments of recognition in every team meeting
- Highlight specific actions, not general praise
- Use your communication channels to share short stories about who showed care, stepped up, or lifted others. (The more you connect recognition to the impact it had, the faster those values become part of how the team operates)
6. Invest in Technology That Scales With You
Growth exposes gaps fast! The systems that served you well at four teams might start cracking once you have 20. What once felt streamlined can suddenly slow everything down.
So treat technology as a partner, not a project. Build in phases, use pilots, and adopt in waves instead of trying to flip a switch overnight. Involve frontline voices early, not just to test usability, but to uncover the workflows that actually need to change.
As new tools like AI evolve, remember that technology should enhance human work, not replace it. Flexibility matters more than perfection.
The goal is not to replicate your old processes on a shinier platform. It is to adapt intelligently, preserving what works while learning from what your new tools reveal.
When technology and people grow together, the result is more than just efficiency. It is readiness!
Next Steps:
- Test in small waves and gather feedback before scaling
- Include agents and team leaders in discovery, so the design fits the real workflow
- Choose partners who understand that “go live” is not the finish line – It is the start of optimization
- Keep change management front and centre. Tech only works when people believe in it
If you are looking for advice on deciding what your next tech investment should be, read our article: What Tech Should You Buy Next? Here’s How to Choose
Shape the Kind of Company People Want to Stay With
Ultimately, growth is not just about numbers and managing expansion, it’s about shaping the kind of company people want to stay with.
After all, the contact centre is often the first place customers meet your brand and the truest reflection of what your organization values. Build it with intention!
Written by: Pier Ragone, Principal Consultant, CX Operations & Strategy
For more information on improving your contact centre operations, read these articles next:
- How to Foster Strong Relationships Across Multiple Sites
- What It Really Takes to Run a Sustainable Contact Centre
- How to Write a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)
Author: Pier Ragone
Reviewed by: Jo Robinson
Published On: 2nd Feb 2026
Read more about - Call Centre Management, Employee Engagement, Employee Experience (EX), Management Strategies, Metrics, Pier Ragone, Recruitment and HR, Reward and Recognition, Service Strategy, Technology Enablement Strategy, Top Story
