Did AI Make The Human Job Harder?

One of the most repeated promises around AI is that it will take away the repetitive work and leave humans to focus on the things they’re better at: empathy, judgement, problem-solving and complex conversations.

That sounds like an obvious improvement. But in a contact centre, removing the simple interactions can also change the shape of the human job in ways we’re only beginning to understand.

When I spoke to contact centre expert Mike Aoki from Reflective Keynotes Inc. he described a role that increasingly requires more emotional maturity, stronger judgement and a higher level of skill than the traditional entry-level contact centre job. In his view, that has implications for everything from recruitment and training to support and even pay.

What Happens When The Easy Work Disappears?

The argument for automation is usually straightforward: let AI deal with routine questions and processes, while people concentrate on the interactions where human skills really matter. But those routine interactions were also part of the working day. A straightforward booking, password reset or account question might not have been particularly interesting, but it sat alongside the complaints, emotionally charged conversations and genuinely complicated problems.

As more of that straightforward work moves to AI, the balance of the human job can start to change. Agents may find themselves handling a much greater concentration of interactions that require judgement, empathy, negotiation or de-escalation, with fewer of the simpler conversations in between. That doesn’t make automation a bad thing, but it does raise an interesting question about whether higher-value work necessarily means a better working day.

A Different Kind Of Contact Centre Role

The expectations placed on agents have already shifted. Contact centres have traditionally provided entry-level roles where people could join with good communication skills, learn the systems and develop on the job, whereas the role now can require considerably more emotional intelligence and maturity from the outset.

During our conversation, Mike gave the example of asking a young person, who may barely use the telephone socially, to spend their working day dealing with angry customers. His point wasn’t really about age or any particular generation, but about the mismatch that can emerge when the complexity of a role changes without everything around it changing too.

If agents are increasingly expected to handle the interactions that AI can’t, then recruitment, onboarding and training may all need to reflect that. Compensation may need to be part of that conversation too. Asking someone to do a more demanding job requiring a higher level of skill, without reconsidering how that role is supported or rewarded, creates a fairly obvious mismatch.

Burnout Doesn’t Show Up Overnight

One of the more interesting parts of our conversation was why concerns about burnout and retention may only now be becoming more visible. Changes in the nature of the work don’t necessarily show up immediately in attrition figures. Dissatisfaction builds over time, and it may be months before someone decides to look elsewhere and eventually leaves.

At the same time, retaining agents may not always have felt like the biggest priority. For several years, AI was frequently positioned as a way of dramatically reducing the number of humans required in customer service. If organisations expected to need far fewer agents, there was perhaps less urgency around keeping the people already doing those jobs.

That calculation changes if AI doesn’t replace anything like the number of people once predicted. Instead, organisations may find that AI results in people handling a greater volume of difficult or complex work.

That creates a different retention challenge. The people organisations need to keep may also be doing a more demanding job, with the interactions left for humans often requiring greater judgement, empathy and problem-solving. Supporting and retaining experienced agents therefore becomes more important at precisely the point when doing so may be getting harder.

Designing The Whole Working Day

None of this means organisations should keep routine work with humans simply to give agents an easy call every now and then. AI removing administration, reducing after-call work and handling straightforward customer requests could make a genuine difference to people’s jobs, particularly when it takes away work that adds very little value.

But there is a difference between looking at individual tasks and looking at the working day those changes create:

• Automating five frustrating processes might make someone’s job considerably better.
• Automating every straightforward customer interaction could have the opposite effect, leaving them to move from one emotionally difficult or complicated conversation to another.

That’s why the idea that AI will simply “free humans to focus on higher-value work” deserves a little more scrutiny. The work left behind may well require more of the things humans are particularly good at, but those things also require effort, experience and emotional energy.

As we decide which parts of the contact centre agent’s job AI can take away, we may need to pay just as much attention to the job we’re creating with everything that’s left.