“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” asked Alice. “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” replied the Cheshire Cat.
This classic moment from Alice in Wonderland perfectly sums up what’s happening in most contact centers today. Companies pour millions into customer operations, tracking every possible metric, building fancy dashboards – but somehow they never quite get where they want to go. Sound familiar?
The Busy Work Wonderland
Pop into any contact center ops meeting and you’ll see the same old story: teams obsessing over metrics that miss the point entirely. Average handle time. First call resolution. Agent utilization. Sure, these numbers look important on a spreadsheet, but here’s what nobody’s asking: Why the heck are customers calling us in the first place?
It’s exactly what the Cheshire Cat was getting at – if you don’t know where you’re headed, any metric will do. Companies get so caught up in measuring their wandering, they forget to ask if they’re even on the right path.
And now? Everyone’s jumping on the AI agent bandwagon, but they’re making the same mistakes all over again. They’re building these agents based on hunches and half-baked data. Basically, they’re programming their shiny new AI to walk in the same circles their human agents have been walking for years – just faster.
Here’s the kicker: we’re using space-age tech to automate stone-age thinking. Companies build chatbots that annoy instead of assist, voice agents that make people want to throw their phones – all because nobody’s asking the real question: What are our customers actually trying to do here?
We decided to go down a different rabbit hole. Instead of guessing what customers want, we build agents that learn from every single customer conversation. Every “I’ve explained this three times already,” every “Oh, that actually helped!” – it all feeds into an evolving intelligence that gets smarter with each interaction.
This isn’t about robots replacing humans – it’s about bottling up the collective wisdom from thousands of real conversations. When our AI agents help your customers, they’re not reading from some script a consultant wrote. They’re using what actually works, constantly learning from what your customers really need, not just what you think they need.
Finding Your North Star
After nearly two decades in this space, I’ve noticed something about companies that nail customer experience: they don’t just solve problems faster – they eliminate the need for customers to have those problems at all. They’ve figured out their destination, as the Cheshire Cat would say.
These companies analyze every conversation (not just a random 1% sample like most do) to find out what’s really driving people to call. They discover that confusing bills cause 60% of their calls, so they fix their billing. They realize customers can’t find the password reset, so they redesign their app. Every conversation becomes intel on what needs fixing.
From Walking in Circles to Getting Somewhere
The magic happens when companies stop asking “How can we answer calls better?” and start asking “Why are people calling at all?” That shift from treating symptoms to curing the disease separates the companies that just manage problems from those that actually solve them.
Sure, AI can now spot patterns across millions of conversations that no human could ever catch. But tech is just the tool. The real breakthrough comes from taking the Cheshire Cat’s advice: figure out where you want to go first.
Your Destination Is Waiting
If your contact center exists to help customers with problems they couldn’t solve elsewhere, then your real goal should be making sure they never need to call. Every pattern you spot, every root cause you find should push you toward that future where everything “just works.”
Stop measuring how efficiently you’re wandering. Start measuring how many customers never need to start the journey.
Because unlike Alice, you don’t need to walk forever to get somewhere. You just need to know where “somewhere” is – and that somewhere is a world where your customer experience is so smooth, so intuitive, so problem-free that your contact center becomes what it should be: a safety net reinforced by what data confirms works.
The Cheshire Cat would definitely approve. After all, the best journey is the one your customers never have to take.