The tech industry has a name for what happens when you pull engineers out of headquarters and embed them directly with customers: Forward Deployed Engineers. Companies like Intercom, Crescendo, Anthropic, and Parloa have built entire business models around the idea that the people who build solutions need to be in the room where problems actually happen. Not reviewing dashboards from a distance. Not waiting for a quarterly report. Present, accountable, and in the mix.
Contact centers have needed a version of this for years - but for leaders rather than engineers!
Most executive engagement in contact centers operates at a distance. Leaders set targets, review results, attend quarterly business reviews, and occasionally walk the floor (if there is one). The intentions are good. But the structure keeps senior leadership positioned as observers of performance rather than participants in it.
Gallup’s data tells us that only 21% of U.S. employees strongly agree they trust organizational leadership. That number didn’t arrive overnight. It accumulated through thousands of small moments where people on the frontline looked up and saw, uh …nothing. Or worse, saw leaders who were engaged with data about them but never engaged with them.
Forward Deployed Engineers solved a similar problem in tech. The gap between building and using created blind spots that no amount of remote monitoring could fix. It - meaning awareness, understanding, impact, and even trust - is all about proximity.
TouchPoint One’s A-GAME Leagues gamification platform was built on a straightforward premise: if you want leaders to be connected to frontline performance, give them a structured reason to show up every day. The Xtreme league puts senior and executive leaders into a fantasy sports-style competition where they draft teams from frontline agents, track daily performance, make strategic decisions, and compete against their peers. For senior and exectuive leaders, Gamification is no longer a spectator sport. It’s a critical aspect of deployment.
The mechanics create what happens naturally when Forward Deployed Engineers sit with customers — direct observation, faster feedback loops, and mutual accountability that doesn’t require a policy memo to enforce. When a VP is watching her drafted agent’s daily scores because they affect her standings, that VP is going to send a note of encouragement, ask about obstacles, and actually learn what’s happening on the ground. Not because it’s expected or required, but because the game makes what‘s routinely managed broadly collaborative, connected, and yeap - fun. 😁
A-GAME Leagues runs full seasons consisting of multi-week, round-robin tournaments, playoffs, and championships. That’s deep deployment. But not every organization or leader is always ready for a full tour of duty. That’s why TouchPoint One developed Frontline Draw, a new gamification solution that operates on a one-week cycle.
Frontline Draw uses a poker metaphor, but like Leagues, is adaptable to nearly any theme or variation. Executives are dealt a five-card hand, with each card tied to a frontline agent. When an agent’s performance (based on a configurable KPI or combination of metrics) improves, the executive earns the option to draw a new card or keep what they have. When performance dips, the card burns and is automatically replaced. By Friday, hands are ranked using standard poker rules, and the best hand wins the pot.
The daily cycle — Reveal, Decide, Huddle, creates the same forward deployment effect as the Leagues experience, compressed into a single week. Every morning, leaders check which agents gave them options and which triggered burns. They send broadcast “Huddle” messages to the whole team or personal “Kudos” and “Rally” notes to individual agents. Agents see exactly which executive’s hand they’re part of and what their daily performance target needs to be to help the team.
It’s a lighter-weight deployment, but the core mechanism is identical: leaders have a daily, structured reason to engage directly with the people doing the work.
The results from organizations using A-GAME Leagues and Xtreme speak directly to this. At Aucera , a ResultsCX company, 84% of employees rated senior leader connection as highest importance, and 72% reported that A-GAME Leagues boosted their motivation. Performance across all KPIs improved by 41%, attrition dropped 36.5%, and customer satisfaction rose from 88% to 93%. These aren’t engagement survey platitudes, but verified operational outcomes tied to leaders being present in a structured, recurring way.
Research published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications confirms the mechanism. Servant leadership drives performance when leaders have direct engagement channels with their workforce. The study found that direct participation changes how employees perceive leadership entirely. A-GAME Leagues and Frontline Draw are those concrete, repeatable channels built into the daily rhythm of operations.
Forward Deployed Engineers work because proximity creates understanding, understanding creates responsiveness, and responsiveness creates trust. The same chain holds in contact centers. When senior leaders are deployed forward, through a weekly poker game, a season-long league, or any structured mechanism that ties their attention to frontline performance, the distance between “leadership” and “the work” collapses.
The tools are different. The principle is the same. And in an industry where trust between leaders and employees is at historic lows, forward deployed leadership isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the infrastructure that makes everything else, i.e., AI, automation, quality programs, retention strategies, company culture, etc. actually work.
Monday feels like a good day to ask how we as leaders are showing up today. Not in meetings about the frontline — but rather, with the frontline. That's the whole idea. Hope this one gets you thinking. Have a great week! 😁
-Greg
Ready to deploy your leadership forward? Learn how A-GAME Leagues and Frontline Draw can create structured, daily connections between your senior leaders and frontline teams. Contact TouchPoint One to schedule a demo.
