According to ContactBabel’s 2025 UK Contact Centre Decision-Makers’ Guide, over 80% of customer complaints relate to issues that originate outside the contact centre, yet it’s the frontline who take the calls, absorb the stress, and handle the fallout.
Contact centres today are under constant pressure with tighter budgets, higher expectations, and customers who expect fast, frictionless resolutions every time. Yet despite huge investment in systems and training, many operations are still trapped in firefighting mode: reacting to problems instead of preventing them.
At the heart of this problem are service failures, the everyday breakdowns in processes, systems, or communication that cause frustration for both customers and employees. Missed callbacks, billing confusion, delayed follow-ups, inconsistent information between channels, they all add up.
Each one of those failures creates failure demand: avoidable work generated when customers have to get back in touch because something wasn’t done right the first time. It’s the difference between doing the job once and doing it twice and the cost is enormous.
According to the UK Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI, 2025), service failures cost UK businesses more than £7.3 billion every month. And analysis from ContactBabel (2025) suggests that more than 80% of this failure demand originates outside the contact centre, in broken processes, unclear communications, or product errors. Yet it’s the frontline that bears the brunt, absorbing the calls, stress, and reputational fallout.
Why this matters
Every unresolved issue isn’t just an operational inefficiency; it’s a moment of friction in the customer journey. Service failures corrode trust. Failure demand amplifies that impact by piling extra workload and stress on already stretched teams.
That’s why the fix can’t just be more data dashboards or new technology. You have to address the human and systemic factors that cause service failures in the first place and equip your people with the competence and confidence to spot, prevent, and resolve them early.
The way forward:
The organisations breaking the cycle are those that:
- Identify and fix service failures at the root
- Track and reduce failure demand by learning from recurring contact reasons.
- Build competence and confidence on the frontline so employees can “get it right first time.”
Because when your people are empowered and supported, you don’t just cut failure demand, you stop service failures before they start.
Our latest Purple Paper, Stop Firefighting, Start Fixing: Boost Competence and Cut Failure Demand, unpacks the root causes of avoidable work, what the data tells us about employee competence, and how leading organisations are tackling the issue head-on.
Click here to access the paper >
