ASA - Average Speed of Answer

John Pearson never planned a career in contact centres. What started as a temporary role back in 1996 became something much bigger — a career built around communication, leadership, culture and helping people. In this episode of  Average Speed of Answer , Barry and John explore how contact centres have changed over the years, from scripted calls and physical call guides to hybrid working, AI and p...

Scott Williams has spent over 15 years in customer service and contact centres, but this conversation goes far beyond headsets and handling calls. In this episode of  Average Speed of Answer , Barry and Scott explore the reality of contact centre life — from first-day nerves and learning to communicate without face-to-face interaction, to building lifelong friendships, finding genuine work-life ba...

In this episode of  Average Speed of Answer , I'm joined by Rami Lenzbergaite for an honest conversation about growth, resilience, leadership, and the reality of working in customer service. Rami shares her journey from joining a contact centre part-time while at university, to becoming a team leader, moving into compliance, and transitioning into a completely new industry. Along the way, she...

Barry chats with Lauren Baker about her journey from call handler to team leader. Lauren shares what it’s really like working in a fast-paced outsourced contact centre, supporting agents through challenging calls, building trust across remote and office teams, and keeping things simple when the pressure is on. A brilliant conversation about confidence, communication, chaos, and the human side of c...

In this episode, Barry Cooper sits down with Harry Donaghy, a contact centre advisor who went straight from sixth form into an apprenticeship — and never looked back. Harry shares how he stumbled into the world of customer service while actually keeping an eye on a bigger prize: a career in foreign exchange and finance. From his first quiet day on the corporate desk to being thrown into the deep e...

In the first guest episode of Average Speed of Answer — the podcast for the people behind the headsets — host Barry Cooper sits down with George Papureanu, a Team Leader at a UK-based contact centre who went from his very first call (and a complete mind blank) to managing a top-performing team in just 12 months. George shares an honest, behind-the-scenes look at what it's really like to work in a...

The contact centre industry measures everything, but too often, it doesn’t hear the people behind the numbers. In this first episode, I share why this podcast exists and the vision behind it: creating a platform where real voices, experiences, and perspectives from inside the industry are finally heard. If you’re part of it, this is your space. If you want to understand what’s really going on behi...