7 Ways to Cut “Dead Wood” in the Contact Centre

Cutting dead wood isn’t about being ruthless – it’s about being responsible. It’s about creating a contact centre environment where outdated processes, ineffective coaching methods, and cultural blind spots are routinely identified and removed, so problems aren’t allowed to persist.

That’s why we asked our reader panel of contact centre leaders – featuring representatives from The Financial Times and NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) – for their success stories in identifying and ultimately eliminating the performance blockers holding back their teams.

1. Ask Your Agents “What Are the Top Three Things That Annoy You Most?”

Sometimes the best ideas start with a blunt question: “What are the top three things that annoy you most?”

That’s exactly what we did – and by listening to the people who live and breathe the processes every day, we’ve stripped out the dead wood without cutting corners.

After all, some of the best wins don’t come from dashboards. They come from conversations. Ask the right questions, listen hard, and empower people to fix what’s broken – that’s how you cut waste without cutting quality.

For advice to get you started on identifying and repairing your broken processes, read our article: How to Repair Your Broken Contact Centre Processes

2. Automate Internal Support Triage

Remember the old days of agents queuing at manager desks for help? Painful and slow!

We built an automated triage system that routes queries by urgency and topic. The result? Faster answers, less disruption, and managers get their time back.

3. Rethink Career Progression

Forget waiting for formal applications. Our “work experience-style” programme lets people shadow roles, build skills, and explore career paths before stepping up.

It’s low-cost, high-impact – and now an award-winning initiative that others are copying.

Contributed by: Dan Britton, Director of Operations, Citizen Services, NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA)

To find out what it takes to set out truly transparent and engaging career pathways, read our article: How to Define Career Paths in Your Contact Centre

4. Ask “What Role Should Each Channel Play in Our Customer Experience?”

For us, the best quick wins revealed themselves when we took a step back and asked: “What role should each channel play in our customer experience?”

The turning point came from developing a contact and channel strategy, a simple but powerful framework that defined which queries we wanted to handle in which channels.

This exercise (which took multiple versions) helped us see the hidden inefficiencies: customers using email for things better handled in chat, or agents spending time sorting queries that never should’ve arrived there in the first place.

A clear example was our email channel. Over time, we’d accumulated multiple inboxes, four regional ones for print customers and one for digital. This created duplication, confusion for customers, and unnecessary manual work for our teams.

By stepping back through the lens of our channel strategy, the solution was obvious: simplify!

We consolidated all customer-facing emails into a single address and applied straightforward routing rules in Salesforce to direct messages automatically by region, customer type, and subscription. Any outliers now go to an admin “safety net” for review.

This required no heavy technology investment, just thoughtful design and collaboration. The outcome? Fewer duplicate cases, less spam, faster routing, and a smoother customer experience.

Our lesson: real efficiency comes from clarity. A well-defined channel strategy gives you a map, and once you have that, spotting and removing the “dead wood” becomes much easier.

Contributed by: Emma Newell, Head of Operations, Customer Care, The Financial Times

5. Digitalize Your Training Model

Gareth Brophy, Vice President of Customer Experience and Back Office Capabilities at The DDC Group — Gareth Brophy

We tackled a massive drain that often hides in plain sight: outdated, time-intensive training. In our operations, especially when scaling, training efficiency is absolutely crucial.

We recently worked with a large European retail client whose existing trainer-led model was consuming an astronomical amount of agent time – 11.5 hours per person for core soft skills and retention modules.

This was “dead wood” because it lacked scalability and consistency across multiple regions, tying up valuable internal resources for far too long.

We identified the problem through pure observation and time-tracking; the long training was preventing agents from performing quickly and efficiently, while wasting trainer capacity.

Our solution was a digital win: we shifted to a self-led e-learning platform with interactive modules focused on empathy and objection handling.

The result was genuinely transformative: we slashed the training time per agent by 8.5 hours, bringing the required training down to just 3 hours. Producing instant savings in salary and operational costs.

Additionally, we boosted service quality simultaneously. Knowledge retention soared to over 94%, and agent confidence levels jumped by 11%.

We didn’t just cut costs; we traded a slow, expensive process for a lean, high-performing one, proving that sometimes the biggest waste is the hidden inefficiency in how we equip our teams.

Contributed by: Gareth Brophy, Vice President of Customer Experience and Back Office Capabilities at The DDC Group

6. Ask “Who Actually Needs This?” to Weed Out Redundant Tasks

Dead wood usually appears silently. A report that no one reads but that someone still updates every morning. A tool purchased during a moment of urgency that no longer fits the current strategy.

An internal workflow with extra steps that lost their purpose but survive out of habit. Each isolated detail seems harmless, yet when multiplied across the entire operation it becomes a significant weight.

Identifying these inefficiencies does not require a complex transformation programme.

Often it begins with a simple question asked at the right moment:

Why do we still do this?
Who actually needs this information?
What value does this step deliver to the customer?

These questions expose waste that was in front of everyone but remained unnoticed.

When a team chooses to remove dead wood, results appear quickly. For example, stopping the production of reports that add no value gives the team more time to focus, and automating repetitive tasks frees people from mechanical duties and allows them to work on activities that generate real impact – such as analysis, improvement, and customer connection.

Contributed by: Jose Neto, Head of Customer Experience at EncantaCX

7. Challenge How and Why You Work With Other Departments

A few years ago, one of our strategic initiatives for the year was to take a hard look at our processes to find the bottlenecks and come up with ways to improve what we do.

We recognized that a lot of the transactional order entry work that we did was being manually reviewed by another department for accuracy.

We decided to challenge whether that made sense. Just because we always did it that way doesn’t mean it should stay that way.

We challenged the logic and assumptions made years ago when this process was implemented. We looked at the data to see if this was still needed and worked with our partners in other departments to come up with new processes and automate a major portion of the workload.

By challenging long-held beliefs and using data analysis, we were able to reduce the manual review workload by 75%.

This change was able to save around 800 labour hours per month. This enhancement freed up time to focus on higher-level work that the employees should be focusing on. It also allowed customer orders to ship faster, which really improved the customer experience.

As leaders, we need to be able to take a hard look at what we do and why to see if “the way we have always done it” still makes sense. Don’t be afraid to challenge assumptions and push the envelope!

Contributed by: Shmuel Saklad, Senior Manager, Customer Experience & B2B Contact Centre Operations, B&H Photo Video

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