ICMI Women of Impact Q&A with Finalist Kaylene Eckels

That moment helped shape Kaylene’s career and the leader she would become. In this ICMI Women of Impact finalist Q&A, Kaylene shares what Glenna taught her, why women need more than mentorship to advance and the recent leadership wake-up call that changed how her team approaches new-hire success. Check it out:

Q: Who is a woman who changed the trajectory of your career?

KE: Glenna Jensen. She was my first leader in the contact center world—and the person who scared me half to death for the first six months of my career. By the time she hired me, she was a 30-year veteran at Dun & Bradstreet. She had forgotten more about the business than I imagined I could ever learn. She was direct, confident and moved fast enough that keeping up with her felt like its own job skill.

My interview was a sales pitch. She handed me a pen and told me to sell it to her. I did what I was trained to do: rapport, discovery, a solution covering features and benefits, and objection handling. I felt good about it. She just looked at me and said, “And?”

I fumbled. She told me exactly what I’d missed and made me start over. I nailed it the second time, but the real lesson had nothing to do with the pen. She wasn’t testing what I knew. She was testing whether I could be taught—and how quickly I could adapt. I still use that trick in interviews today. Knowledge is a snapshot. Teachability is a success multiplier and predicts whether someone will grow with you.

The first time she sat beside me on a live call, she reached over, pulled the pen out of my hand mid-sentence and tossed it across the desk. No warning. Needless to say, my handle time improved immediately.

What she was really teaching me was to engage directly and think on my feet, because the customer on the other end of that call did not care that I was flustered. That lesson showed up later in every improved number I ever posted, but the bigger payoff was learning to make adjustments in real time, under pressure, without losing my composure.

Glenna became my biggest advocate and, in doing so, taught me how to be one for other people. When she retired, I stepped into her role. Those were big shoes to fill, but I was standing on the shoulders of someone who had already proven the model worked. I have spent every year since trying to be worthy of the confidence she placed in me.

Q: What’s one thing the contact center profession needs to do differently to support women?

KE: Build the advancement pathway on purpose instead of hoping it happens.

Our industry is disproportionately staffed by women on the front line and disproportionately led by men in senior operations roles. That gap doesn’t close by accident. It closes when leaders treat sponsorship as part of the job, not a side project.

That means intentional succession planning, naming the staffing and cultural realities that push women out—shrinkage driven by caregiving conflicts, shift structures that assume no one has competing obligations and outdated career paths—and solving for them.

Mentorship helps, but sponsorship is what actually moves someone into the next seat. The profession needs more women whose names get said in rooms they aren’t in.

Q: What’s a leadership lesson you had to learn the hard way?

KE: That I’m still learning.

Recently, we needed 25 new hires in a class. We got 14. Low show rate, attrition in training—the kind of miss that should have set off every alarm we had. Instead, I let it get explained away: scheduling conflicts, market conditions, the usual list.

My partner didn’t let me get away with it. She said what I should have caught myself: There was no clear owner for that result, an acceptance of mediocrity had crept in without anyone naming it, and there wasn’t enough hunger in the room to actually change something. She was right, and it stung more because someone else had to say it instead of me.

Once it was named, the executive team moved fast. We aligned with the client on a backfill class. We sent welcome text messages from our executive team to the incoming group before day one. We mailed a card and a small welcome gift to each person’s home.

Along the way, we learned that some of them didn’t have our address or know what to bring on their first day—small things nobody had bothered to fix because the old class had never been treated like it mattered enough to protect. We opened our online learning system so new hires could begin prep courses before they even walked in, with the completed work turning into prizes on arrival day.

That class is 36 strong. We are treating it like a fragile egg, watching every point where someone could drop off before we’ve earned their commitment.

The lesson wasn’t really about staffing ratios. It was that excusing a bad number is its own decision, and somebody has to have the courage to call it out and do something about it. It won’t fix itself.

Join Kaylene and the other Women of Impact Distinguished Finalists at ICMI Contact Center Expo, October 26–29 in Orlando. Save $500 on your conference pass with code IMPACT.