---
title: "A job opening doesn’t fill the gap"
url: "https://pegamento.nl/en/contact-center/a-job-opening-doesnt-fill-the-gap/"
lang: "en"
type: "post"
description: "When the customer service department gets too busy, the first instinct is almost always the same. A job opening is posted, someone is hired, and six months later, the queue is full again. This happens so often that it’s worth"
last_modified: "2026-10-05T07:21:18+00:00"
categories: [Contact Center]
translations:
  nl: "https://pegamento.nl/contactcenter/een-vacature-dicht-het-gat-niet/"
---

# A job opening doesn’t fill the gap

When the customer service department gets too busy, the first instinct is almost always the same. A job opening is posted, someone is hired, and six months later, the queue is full again. This happens so often that it’s worth taking a closer look to see where the problem actually lies.

Anyone who works in customer service is familiar with staff turnover. People come and go, and it never stops. Every departure means recruiting again, training again, and another period during which someone isn’t yet independent enough to handle the difficult conversations. During that period, the pressure falls on the people who were already there—and that’s exactly the group you wanted to relieve.

If you ask people why they’re leaving, you’ll get the same answers over and over. They work with systems where everything takes just a little too long, they have to handle peaks in demand that were foreseeable months in advance, and they spend all day on the phone with customers who are angry about something they themselves can’t do anything about. That last part is the most draining.

### **The work that shouldn’t have to be done**

A significant portion of the calls to a customer service department comes from people who have called about the same issue before. They called because they didn’t understand a letter, got stuck filling out a form, or received an answer the first time that wasn’t helpful. That traffic is factored into staffing levels as if it were part of the job. After all, someone has to handle it. Gartner shows just how often people get stuck. But only 14 percent of customer inquiries are resolved entirely through self-service. For very simple questions, that figure is still only 36 percent.

If you remove some of that, the workload decreases without adding anyone to the team. Moreover, the work that remains is more interesting in terms of content, and that makes a difference in staff turnover. These two factors reinforce each other, and that is precisely why recruitment alone yields so few results.

To those on the outside, a customer service department looks like a function that grows in tandem with revenue. More customers, more volume, more people. Eventually, the system gets bogged down, and then a solution is sought—usually under time pressure. The conversation you should have internally sooner rather than later is about which portion of your traffic is avoidable and what it would cost to resolve it. You can build a business case around that, and it’s often easier to get approved than an additional full-time employee.