The contact centre tells you more about your business than you think.

I learned something important about customer experience on my very first day working as a third-party debt collector.

A customer had a legitimate billing dispute. They weren't refusing to pay because they couldn't afford the bill. They were refusing because something had gone wrong in their relationship with the business.

By the time I got involved, the problem had already happened. Somewhere upstream, a promise had been broken, a process had failed, or the customer hadn't received what they expected. Collections was simply where the consequences showed up.

I saw variations of that problem again and again. Marketing promising something sales didn't understand. Sales promising something operations couldn't deliver. A delivery problem, a billing error, a confusing policy. Eventually, the customer picks up the phone or sends a message.

And the contact centre gets measured on what happens next.

In 2004, I was given the opportunity to build our first customer support program for Sprint. My mandate was to build a contact centre with 75 people and do a good job.

We set a simple purpose: be number one. Outperform the competition, earn the opportunity to grow, and create more opportunities for our people.

And it grew. In less than ten years, we became Sprint's largest provider of customer support, with approximately 4,000 employees across six countries.

As the operation expanded, my job changed. I delegated decisions to supervisors, managers, directors and vice presidents. I spent more and more time travelling between sites, helping leaders understand the business, make better decisions and develop their people.

Running an operation at that scale teaches you about cost, capacity, quality, sales, technology, customer retention and the realities of delivering against a contract. It also teaches you that none of those things works very well when people aren't aligned around the same purpose.

For decades, businesses have treated their contact centres primarily as expense centres. How do we reduce call volumes? Lower average handling time? Automate more interactions? Spend less?

I've managed those measures. They matter. But if reducing contacts becomes the objective, we can miss the larger opportunity.

Every conversation is a chance to learn something about a customer, fix a relationship, prevent someone from leaving, uncover a need or help them get more value from what they already buy. We shouldn't waste that opportunity.

The goal isn't call deflection for its own sake. It's making each interaction worth more to the customer and the business, while removing the avoidable friction that caused unnecessary contacts in the first place.

Sometimes the best answer is automation. Sometimes it's a better process, a clearer promise, more knowledgeable employees or a conversation with a real person. The right answer depends on the business and what its customers actually need.

And now that AI can automate so much more, the fundamentals matter even more. If your processes are broken and your knowledge is unreliable, automation can scale your problems faster.

The opportunity isn't simply to handle fewer contacts. It's to create more value from every customer relationship.

When I left iQor, I considered buying a business. I studied acquisitions, business valuations and what makes a company valuable enough that someone else would want to own it.

I realized the thing I knew best was how to build and run a business, develop leaders and create better outcomes for customers. I'd spent years treating the operations I led as businesses in their own right: responsible for the people, the performance, the financial results and the ability to keep succeeding without depending on me.

Those ideas came together in the 3P framework: People, Product and Profit. Help people grow and improve. Deliver products, services and experiences customers value. Create the profit that sustains the business and allows it to grow.

I started 3P Solutions to apply what I've learned to other organizations. Today, the consulting business is deliberately focused on CX and contact centre operations, where my experience is deepest and where the opportunity to uncover wider business value is so often overlooked.

My ambition is to build a consulting firm with a practical, repeatable methodology that other talented CX practitioners can learn, use and improve. That's how we can help more businesses than I could ever help on my own.