You are Niamh Devlin, Group People Director of Liffey Connect Group in Dublin. Your largest client has just put its account on service watch, the board has granted you a one-off €1.8 million fund, and before a single euro moves you must decide whose working lives that money reaches first.
The situation
Liffey Connect runs outsourced contact-centre, field-service and back-office work for utilities, insurers and public bodies: 2,100 people in Dublin, Cork, Galway and Leeds, €145 million of revenue and an 8% operating margin (€11.6 million). Payroll is about 62% of cost, and clients pay on service levels.
On Monday 12 January 2026 two documents arrived together. Shannon Mutual, an insurer worth €32 million a year (22% of revenue and some 310 roles), put the account on formal service watch: satisfaction on its dedicated team has fallen from 84% to 71% in two quarters, and that team is leaving at 41% a year against a sector benchmark near 25%. Its supplier board decides on renewal in 150 days and has written “workforce stability and engagement” into the conditions. The group engagement survey, meanwhile, came back at 58 out of 100, against 74 eighteen months earlier.
Group voluntary attrition runs at 34% a year. Finance prices each frontline leaver at €9,500, so the annual bill is about €6.8 million. The board approved the fund you asked for, but two of its seven members voted against, and a further €600,000 a year will be released only against evidence that the first tranche worked. Two more accounts, 28% of revenue between them, renew within twelve months.
The survey can be cut many ways. The four sites sit within five points of one another; teams under the weakest quartile of managers score 44 and those under the strongest score 73. The insurer team is on the lowest pay band and has absorbed 14% more contacts with no extra headcount. And the fall shows up at every site and in every tenure band.