SERIES 2 EPISODE 4

Every organization encounters moments when demand exceeds its ability to respond with the timeliness and care customers expect. Some spikes are difficult to anticipate; others arrive right on schedule. 

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Retail has the holidays—heavily marketed, entirely predictable—yet staffing plans sometimes suggest surprise when customers actually show up. Banks and grocery stores have years of data showing when customers will arrive, and still customers find themselves waiting while service lanes remain closed. Contact centers have their own versions: open enrollment, billing cycles, product changes, outages, and communications that generate more questions than answers. 

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When an organization repeatedly accepts a predictable gap between demand and capacity, that gap becomes a business decision. It may look reasonable on a financial ledger; from the customer’s perspective, it can feel presumptuous. It presumes customers will wait, loyalty requires no reciprocity, and the brand promise can be deferred without consequence. 

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We cannot lose sight of the costs that fall outside the staffing budget. Customers absorb them through lost time, uncertainty, and unresolved needs. Employees absorb them through sustained pressure and difficult conversations. When demand exceeds capacity, leaders must be clear about how those costs will be distributed. That is where triage becomes an important mechanism in a leader’s playbook. 

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Someone is already deciding who waits 

Triage is the process of identifying needs, assessing the consequences of delay, and directing finite resources accordingly. In a contact center, that might mean distinguishing a routine account question from a coverage problem preventing someone from obtaining care. In banking, it might mean distinguishing a balance inquiry from suspected fraud that has left a customer unable to access essential funds. Both customers deserve service, though the consequences of waiting differ. Customer experience requires prioritization with humanity, including an understanding of when different needs warrant different responses. 

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Even without a formal triage process, an organization has rules determining who receives attention first. Arrival order, the loudest complaint, or access to an executive may decide. An overwhelmed employee may have to make the decision alone. The question is whether those rules reflect deliberate leadership choices. 

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Research on service systems shows why triage requires care: assessing a customer’s needs takes time and can introduce classification errors. Its usefulness depends on operating conditions and differences among customer needs (Sun et al., 2022). The practical implication is to design a process that directs service efficiently while accounting for the time required to assess each need. Triage helps an organization use available capacity intentionally while leaders address the underlying gap. 

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In my experience, effective triage reveals how well an organization understands its own service system. Mature leadership connects that understanding to three responsibilities: seeing the system, setting priorities, and protecting judgment. 

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1. See the system—and identify what cannot safely wait 

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A queue tells us that work is accumulating, but understanding its causes and consequences requires a closer look. Is demand increasing because more customers need service, cases are becoming more complex, or unresolved problems are generating repeat contacts? 

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Today’s backlog may be delayed feedback from earlier decisions: a confusing notice, deferred training, an unreliable technology release, or staffing assumptions that left no room for variation. Understanding these factors helps leaders identify which needs require immediate attention and where corrective action can reduce demand. 

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Consider an enrollment surge accompanied by an eligibility error. Adding everyone to the same queue may leave members facing immediate barriers to care waiting behind routine questions. A deliberate response would identify affected members, route them to people authorized to resolve the problem, and assign an owner to correct the error generating the calls. The work has two tracks: protect customers from immediate consequences and remove the source of avoidable demand. 

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Waiting itself can also affect service. In a live-chat contact center study, Ilk and Shang (2022) found that waiting during service slowed customer responses, with stronger effects later in the interaction. That finding challenges the assumption that pressure can always be resolved by asking employees to move faster. For leaders, it reinforces the importance of examining how waiting affects the entire interaction. A useful triage process begins with understanding the work and the consequences of delay. 

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2. Set clear priorities—and own the trade-offs 

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“Use your judgment” leaves too much open to interpretation when employees are unsure which outcomes leadership expects them to protect. Before a spike, leaders should establish when the surge plan activates, which needs receive priority, what work can be deferred, and who can authorize exceptions. 

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For example, a health plan might activate its surge process when forecast demand exceeds available staffing or when the oldest unresolved cases approach a defined limit. Within applicable service and regulatory requirements, it could prioritize immediate barriers to care and time-sensitive coverage issues, offer scheduled callbacks for routine questions, and temporarily reassign trained staff from deferrable work. 

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Those decisions need owners, review points, and clear communication. Customers whose requests are deferred still need a credible path to resolution. The criteria also matter: prioritizing by urgency and potential harm expresses a different value judgment from prioritizing by revenue or customer status. 

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Leadership must be willing to explain the trade-offs it asks customers and employees to carry. Research modeling paid priority queues illustrates the fairness implications: faster service for one group can increase waiting for another and influence perceptions of unfairness (Liu et al., 2023). Leaders should examine who benefits from a priority rule and who absorbs its cost. Financial stewardship, customer vulnerability, accessibility, commitments, and the consequences of delay all belong in these decisions. 

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3. Protect judgment—and stand behind it 

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Customer circumstances can exceed what a routing rule anticipates. An inquiry that initially appears routine may reveal an urgent problem. A customer may struggle to explain what is wrong, or a digital option may be unusable for the person seeking help. Employees need permission—and a workable process—to revise the initial assessment. 

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That means clear escalation routes, access to decision-makers, and performance expectations that support the triage plan. If leadership asks employees to resolve complex, urgent needs, it must account for that work when interpreting productivity measures. 

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Protecting judgment means giving people authority, support, and accountability that fit the decisions they are being asked to make. For example, an employee who discovers that an account restriction has left a customer without access to essential funds should know how to obtain immediate review. Performance expectations should support the time required to follow that escalation through. 

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Research on psychological safety supports the importance of an environment where people can contribute information, raise concerns, and support organizational learning (Edmondson & Bransby, 2023). Applied here, employees must be able to say, “This customer needs a different response,” or “Our priority rule is missing something,” and receive a serious hearing. Leaders should use that feedback to adjust the plan and monitor deferred work so that every customer retains a path to resolution. 

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Beyond spikes: Toward more intelligent service design 

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After the spike, leaders need to examine how the system performed. Who waited longest? Which needs were misclassified? Did callbacks happen when promised? Did employees have the authority they needed? What must change before the next surge? 

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When temporary surge measures become routine, leaders need to revisit capacity, demand, or both. Each spike provides information that can improve forecasts, routing, training, and the decisions that generate customer demand. Using that information is how organizations develop a more intelligent service design. 

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Peak seasons will return, and unexpected disruptions will happen. Customers can understand that an organization is under strain. They still need evidence that someone has considered what the delay means for them. That evidence lives in the priorities leaders set, the resources they release, and the decisions they stand behind. 

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When volume spikes, the queue becomes a visible expression of leadership’s priorities. Design the response so customers can recognize the values you promised, then use what you learn to prepare for the next surge. 

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Introducing the Contact Center Strategy Starter Plan 

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I’m developing a practical Contact Center Strategy Starter Plan for leaders of nonprofit and member-owned organizations who want to examine their service operations through a more strategic lens. It offers a starting point for understanding the work customers bring and the resources available to serve them. 

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The plan includes three working tools: 

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1. Service Inventory: Identify the work customers bring to your organization and the complexity of those interactions. 

2. Resource Mapping: Examine how people, channels, technology, and external partners support that work. 

3. AI Opportunity Assessment: Begin identifying where automation, augmentation, or human judgment may create greater value. 

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A one-page strategy model brings these observations together to support a more informed leadership conversation. This introductory, self-guided resource helps leaders organize their observations and identify questions for further assessment and planning. 

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The Starter Plan will be available November 1, 2026. If you’re ready to look beyond the queue and better understand the system behind your customer experience, I invite you to register your interest and share the service decision your organization is working through. 

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Continue the conversation through the Change That Binds podcast. Visit changethatbinds.com for more on leadership, trust, and the systems that shape customer experience. 

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References 

Edmondson, A. C., & Bransby, D. P. (2023). Psychological safety comes of age: Observed themes in an established literature. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 10, 55–78. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-120920-055217 

Ilk, N., & Shang, G. (2022). The impact of waiting on customer-instigated service time: Field evidence from a live-chat contact center. Journal of Operations Management, 68(5), 487–514. https://doi.org/10.1002/joom.1199 

Liu, J., Zhou, Y.-P., & Chen, J. (2023). Customer segmentation and ex ante fairness: A queueing perspective. Production and Operations Management, 32(10), 3246–3265. https://doi.org/10.1111/poms.14033 

Sun, Z., Argon, N. T., & Ziya, S. (2022). When to triage in service systems with hidden customer class identities? Production and Operations Management, 31(1), 172–193. https://doi.org/10.1111/poms.13494