Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast features a chat I had with Robert Bradshaw, the founder and president of WiserOwl, a consulting firm that measures what contact centre work actually costs. We talk about how contact centres measure activity with extraordinary precision but cost it using an average that erases all of that precision, what that means in practice, the impact of AI on all of that, what contact centre leaders should be doing instead, and how using actual cost data solves the two most important contact centre problems in the enterprise. It’s a fascinating discussion.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Why digital accessibility is no longer optional in an AI-first world – Interview with Jeff Coyle of Siteimprove – and is number 599 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Robert:

• The Precision Paradox: Current contact centre management tracks activity (talk time, handle time) with hyper-precision, yet costs these activities using crude averages. This practice erases operational nuance, effectively hiding the true cost drivers from leadership.
• Averages Obscure Modern Complexity: The “average cost per contact” metric was designed for single-channel environments. In today’s multi-channel, AI-integrated ecosystems, it creates a “blancmange” number that fails to differentiate the costs of bots, IVR, and human agents.
• Speaking the Language of Finance: C-suite executives and CFOs make decisions based on dollars, not volume or handle time. To earn a seat at the table, CX leaders must translate operational performance into financial evidence that the enterprise can trust.
• The “Bellwether” Blind Spot: While the contact centre is the organisation’s first early-warning system for product or service failure, it is often ignored because it lacks the ability to “price” these issues. Without cost fidelity, the contact centre remains the first to know but the last to be heard.
• Shift to Ground-Up Costing: The most effective strategy is to abandon top-down averaging in favour of ground-up measurement—costing every activity and contact individually—to gain clarity on what work actually costs.
• Justifying Strategic ROI: Granular cost data provides the necessary foundation to defend budgets, justify AI investments, and manage staffing math. It transforms CX leaders from cost-centre managers into strategic partners who can defend their operational spend with precision.
• Driving Operational Optimisation: Moving beyond averages uncovers hidden efficiencies; for example, one organisation used this data to consolidate brand interactions, resulting in a 30% reduction in call volume.
• Identifying “Invisible” Waste: Activity-based costing illuminates hidden financial leaks, such as paid capacity that fails to reach customers or ineffective routing that creates unnecessary, multi-touch journeys.
• Validating Intuition with Data: Financial precision often confirms the intuition of veteran leaders, validating performance assessments and showing exactly where resources should be focused to improve margins.
• An Engineering, Not Spreadsheet, Challenge: Achieving this level of visibility is a structural undertaking. It is a rigorous “construction” of costs across the entire operation, not a simple data manipulation exercise.
• Robert’s best advice: Find out what your work actually costs at the level you make decisions and not as an average. Every improvement you want to make for customers or for your people, it eventually needs a number that holds up. And once you can see where the money actually goes, the case for the right changes makes itself.
• Robert’s Punk CX brand: Toyota

About Robert

Robert Bradshaw is founder and president of WiserOwl, a consulting firm that measures what contact center work actually costs — activity by activity, from the ground up — the answer an average was never designed to produce. He brings 30-plus years across startups and Fortune 100 companies to the question now landing on contact center and CX leaders: what does the activity actually cost? His work has been featured in publications including Intelligent CIO North America and CustomerThink.

Robert Bradshaw is founder and president of WiserOwl, a consulting firm that measures what contact center work actually costs — activity by activity, from the ground up — the answer an average was never designed to produce. His work has appeared in Intelligent CIO North America and CustomerThink.

Find out more about the work Robert and his colleagues and partners do at WiserOwl and feel free to connect with Robert on LinkedIn here.

Image credit: Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash