Brian Nichols, Level365 | Host, CX Without the BS

Average handle time. CSAT. NPS. Calls per hour. Every contact center has a scoreboard, and most teams chase it hard.

So here's the uncomfortable question. What if the numbers you celebrate are the ones bleeding you dry?

I took that question to Justin Jones on CX Without the BS. Justin has spent about 20 years around contact centers. He started on the phones as an agent, went on to sell contact center software, and now runs SoniqCX, a BPO he describes as "focused on turning cost centers into revenue centers."

His rallying cry is blunt: death to KPIs.

Is that a gimmick, or is he onto something? Let's dig in.

Listen to the full episode: Why KPIs Are Killing Your Business

Why KPIs Fail in the Contact Center

Justin's argument starts with mindset. He says "contact centers run with a scarcity mindset," and calls the result "efficiency that chases poverty."

Here's how that plays out. A company spends serious money to win a customer. Then the service team gets measured on how fast it can get that customer off the phone, with a smile, onto the next call.

Justin put it this way: "You're paying hundreds and hundreds or 1000s of dollars to acquire customers and then rewarding how quickly you can get them to go away."

Then he went after the plaque on the wall. In his words, "the Employee of the Month could be, you know, honestly, losing you more money than you realize, because it's what's happening after the conversation."

That last part is the whole point. Most KPIs stop when the call ends. The revenue impact shows up later, if anybody bothers to look.

Average Handle Time Turns People Into Robots

Justin admits average handle time is the metric he gets the most pushback on, and he doesn't want to throw it out completely. It helps you understand cost.

His problem is what happens when you manage people by it alone: "when you start to measure average handle time and penalize your team members, just purely based on average handle time, you drive behaviors that turn them into robots."

He's lived it. His early days as an agent were the same greeting and the same goodbye, on repeat, all day.

I said it on the show and I'll say it again here. There is no warm and fuzzy meter. You can't put a number on a customer feeling heard. But you can track what that customer does next.

From KPIs to Key Revenue Indicators

Justin's alternative is a framework he calls key revenue indicators, or KRIs. The idea is simple: measure outcomes, not activity.

His suggested experiment is one any contact center leader could run. Take a cohort of customers who contact you in one month, change nothing, and track their lifetime value afterward. Then run the next month's cohort under a revenue-focused approach and compare.

His framing for every interaction: "you are either increasing lifetime value or decreasing it."

He also made a point about the first 90 days. Most businesses wait for the next problem before they talk to a new customer again. Justin's advice is to get ahead of it and "give them something more than they expected in that first 90 days."

He used Chick-fil-A as the example. Every time you say thank you, the answer is "it's my pleasure." Justin's take: "something so silly, but it becomes a brand."

Pay Your Service Team Like Your Sales Team

This is where I jumped in, because I've seen it work on the sales side.

When I ran SDR teams, they didn't get paid on dials, emails, or LinkedIn requests. They got paid on appointments booked, on how many of those appointments actually showed, and then a bonus when the deal closed. Quality over quantity, with real dollars attached.

Justin argues the same thing belongs in customer service. His team's line is that "revenue lives in every interaction," and he means it literally.

He told a story from when he ran sales and then picked up the service team too. He started putting dollar signs behind the activity and paying agents for it. The result, in his words: "Started spiffing the agents at that company, and lifetime value went up. Agent retention went up. They were making more money. We were keeping more customers."

His summary: "It's not science, man."

The AI Warning Nobody Wants to Hear

Here's where the conversation got sharper.

If you hand AI a contact center optimized for the wrong metrics, it will get very good at the wrong things, very fast. Justin didn't hedge: "I will guarantee you that you are going to see people optimize themselves out of business."

He's not anti-AI. He thinks AI has a real place in the contact center. But he expects a correction: "people are going to automate themselves into nightmares, and customers are going to get stuck in AI hell."

His fix is to keep humans on the conversations that matter and "automate the low to no value stuff."

He was just as honest about his own industry. On the BPO business model: "We want you to survive, not succeed." The math is simple. In his words, "more calls equals more staff equals more money." His pitch to clients flips that: "we want you to have less calls, but more meaningful ones."

So, Do We Kill KPIs?

Not quite. And to be fair, neither does Justin.

His best line of the episode: "KPIs are a guide, not a god."

Here's my take. Picture a team celebrating a drop in handle time from six minutes and 42 seconds to six minutes and 37 seconds. Great. Did those customers ever come back? If nobody can answer that, the number is decoration.

I spend my days at Level365 working with technology advisors and the businesses they serve on phone systems and contact center. The tools can measure almost anything now. The harder question is what you tell them to measure.

Before your next contract or your next AI project, ask:

• What happens to a customer's value after they call us, and are we tracking it?
• Do our agents get rewarded for outcomes, or only for speed?
• Which calls are low to no value, and could they be fixed upstream or automated?
• If AI scaled our current metrics tomorrow, would we be happy with the result?

If those answers make you squirm, Justin's "death to KPIs" message might be the wake-up call you need.

Listen to the Full Episode

Is your scoreboard helping your contact center grow, or quietly holding it back? Justin Jones makes his case, I add my two cents, and you can decide.

Listen to Justin Jones on CX Without the BS

Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and send it to the one person on your team who still lives and dies by average handle time.

-Brian