I did not step into customer service leadership because call queues excited me. I took my first leadership role because I genuinely wanted to make things better for the people calling in, and for the teams trying to help them.
I stayed because someone handed me a call report.
Early in my career, I took a job as a Member Service Manager at a regional credit union. On my very first day, my new boss delivered the news: our call abandon rate was 35%. Let me say that again – 35%. Over a third of the people who called us for help gave up before anyone even answered.
This was more than two decades ago. There were no chatbots, no mobile apps, and barely a functional website. If you could not reach someone by phone, your only option was to visit a branch. And if you could not do that? You simply went without help.
I spent my first day observing. It did not take long to find the problem: the team had no structured break or lunch schedules. People stepped away whenever they wanted, leaving phones ringing and callers frustrated enough to hang up.
The fix seemed obvious. But as anyone who has led a team knows, obvious and easy are not the same thing. I set out to find a solution.
I found Mary, the person everyone on the team looked up to, and asked for her read on things. When I shared what I had observed, she nodded and said, “That is easy to fix. If you create a schedule, I can help you sell it.”
So we did.
But the thing that changed everything was not the schedule. It was the report.
In those days, call data arrived on paper, by hand, a day after the calls occurred. And even in that format, a stack of pages delivered to my desk each morning, it was extraordinary. Call arrival patterns. Staffing levels. Abandoned call percentages. Average speed of answer. Wrap-up times. All the numbers I never knew I needed until they were in front of me.
I built our first structured schedule from that report. Mary championed it to the team. And we watched, week by week, as the abandonment rate came down. Calls got shorter. We started cross-selling effectively. Turnover dropped. Not because of a strategy deck or a leadership initiative, but because we looked at what was actually happening and adjusted.
That paper report did not just fix a broken system. It handed me a compass I have carried ever since.
I have led a lot of teams since then, across several industries. The problems are never exactly the same. But the approach rarely changes: find out what is actually happening, find the person the team already trusts, and build something together that the data can tell you whether it worked.
I started The Unpolished Leader because I kept looking for writing that reflected that version of the work —the version that happens between the org chart and the floor, between the strategy and the reality—and I mostly couldn’t find it. So here we are.
More stories to come.