Martin takes a closer look at the near future of the contact centre — not the vague "AI will replace everyone" headlines, but a practical, role-by-role breakdown of how the industry might really change over the next decade.
After attending the National Contact Centre Awards in London, Martin reflects on how far the industry has come — and where it's heading. He walks through what a future 500-seat operation could look like, and what that means for every team: agents, team leaders, QA, training, WFM, and HR.
In this episode:
- Why transactional contacts will largely disappear — and what that leaves for human agents
- How the team leader role becomes more important, not less
- The evolution of QA from auditors to insight specialists
- Why training will shift towards emotional intelligence, resilience, and critical thinking
- The real risk of removing humans too aggressively — and why customers will punish it
- Why demand for exceptional team leaders will be higher than ever by 2035
Whether you're deep into AI adoption or still running on an Excel Frankenstack, this one's for you.
Share your thoughts — how do you see the contact centre changing?
[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to another episode of Get Out of Wrap. How are you all coping in this heatwave if you're in the UK or Europe? I am recording this directly from the surface of the sun, but today we're going to have a closer look at what the contact centre of the near future looks like.
[00:00:23] So earlier this week, Get Out of Wrap was a media partner and I attended the National Contact Centre Awards, which are always an amazing celebration in London, on the Thames at Old Billingsgate, near Tower Bridge and the ship there, which I can't remember the name of it, which I really should.
[00:00:46] But I think round about a thousand people all dressed to the nines. A great host, Jake Humphrey from the High Performance Podcast told a great opening story, was a lovely, lovely chap.
[00:01:00] And more importantly, the 33 awards there showed what an amazing industry we are, fuelled by amazing people in it. It was just a joyous celebration of the human spirit. But when we look ahead, I don't know about you, but you will always read plenty of thoughts, opinions and articles on what's going to happen.
[00:01:28] And I think these are far more prevalent now because we are at a time of astounding technological advances, specifically AI. And that is really exciting. It's exciting that our industry are considered to be at the vanguard of that. But I don't know about you, but few of these kind of opinion pieces or articles ever really describe the contact centre in any detail.
[00:01:58] You'll often hear either AI will replace everyone in five years or AI will never replace human agents. But you never get to hear about what will our teams look like? You know, where are QA, WFM, HR, training teams? And naturally, I would ask this, but what about team leaders? You know, how will their role change and what kind of teams will they be leading?
[00:02:27] For me, I think, you know, for what it's worth, I think you'd be naive if you think the number of humans working in contact centres won't decline. I think they will, but I don't believe there will be this huge collapse that some envisage. You know, because just having the technology we have available now doesn't mean it's adopted.
[00:02:49] Adoption happens when customers accept it, businesses trust it, regulators allow it, economics justify it, and operational leaders know how to deploy and use it. And right now, I think we are overwhelmed by the speed of improving technology and its coverage and marketing, whether that's on LinkedIn or at expos.
[00:03:16] It's arriving as well, I think, faster than customer behaviour. But what does this all mean for a contact centre 10 years from now?
[00:03:26] Because if you take a look at a, let's say, a 500-seat contact centre right now might have 25 leaders, team leaders, sorry, five or more QA analysts, five trainers, eight workforce planners, and five contact centre managers just in operations.
[00:03:48] I imagine in the future that might change to 150 human advisors, hundreds of AI agents, 10 team leaders, 10 AI support supervisors, five conversation analysts, three workforce planners, three trainers, and five AI optimization specialists.
[00:04:15] Sounds like I was singing the 12 days of Christmas there. But you can see there's still a number, near enough the same number of, no, maybe not, not the same number, but there's still plenty of humans in the loop there. So the contact centre won't disappear, it will just become a human and AI operation. So let's break that down a bit, shall we?
[00:04:43] If we look at agents, right now I think it's safe to say that many contacts that agents deal with will soon go. And as an agent myself back in the day, that's how I started in this industry, I think we've got to be really careful because some of the things I'm about to list were a lot of the inquiries I like to handle.
[00:05:06] But we're talking things like password resets, balance inquiries, delivery updates, you know, where's my order, appointment booking, account changes, transactional type stuff, a quick call, not emotive. There isn't much to do, but the customer wants some reassurance of an administrative change or a quick question answered that they couldn't answer themselves.
[00:05:32] I think it's safe to say that voice AI will soon become exceptionally good at these if it isn't there already. So that will leave vulnerable customers, complaints, retentions, complex technical support, higher value sales, emotional situations and escalations. You know, and this means that agents then become advisors, experts, problem solvers, negotiators and relationship managers.
[00:06:01] And I think it's critical that we should both recruit them and reward them as such. You know, we really do need to be looking at how we're going to structure that. What's the job role going to look like and what will we pay people? Critically, we need to work their schedules and breaks around this extra cognitive load and then map out what does career, what does their career look like?
[00:06:25] It doesn't necessarily have to be progression, but it should reflect the fact that the average skill level is going to rise significantly. When we come to team leaders, I am, of course, a bit biased here because of the team leader community, but I think the team leader role becomes more important as their role changes. The team leader in the near future will spend more time on coaching judgment.
[00:06:50] You know, AI can tell you what's happened, but TLs will need to help everyone understand why. Building resilience. As the interactions agents handle become more difficult, then emotional resilience becomes critical and team leaders will bear the brunt of this and be the people that can help build it, protect it and train their teams on it. Decision making.
[00:07:16] As the contact center handles more complex scenarios, these will require judgment. They'll also require judgment and relationship handling between humans, customers, AI, support, and team leaders will sit in the center of that. Nothing will change when it comes to human performance. There will still be a focus on motivation, confidence, and engagement.
[00:07:43] And you could see that growing, especially as advisors will be handling these more complex tasks. So I believe that team leaders will soon be managing AI agents as well as humans. And we're going to need to work hard and start now on helping team leaders develop this new leadership skill set. Next, an old favorite of mine, QA or Quality Assurance.
[00:08:10] You know, I spent five years in the world of QA, so I've watched with real interest how much QA has often been overlooked in a lot of these discussions about our future contact centers. There's some great companies out there right now leading the way, and a lot of them will be looking at diversifying. But we should definitely not overlook QA in this picture. I believe QA is going to massively change, and many will say they've already changed it.
[00:08:39] You know, somehow we landed on four calls monitored per agent per month, and that being fed back directly or indirectly as a standard measure. I think it's safe to say that that's had its day.
[00:08:56] You know, AI can now monitor 100% of interactions, transcribe and analyze every word, every sentiment change, identify compliance risk, auto-populate scorecards, suggest feedback. So a human QA specialist no longer has to determine, did Martin say that compliance statement, yes or no?
[00:09:20] Now, a human QA specialist becomes an expert analyst of both the agent and the customer journey. You know, some of the questions they might ask are, why are customers becoming frustrated at this stage of the journey? And that changes QA from a team of auditors to a team of insight specialists. And again, we should be equipping people with these skills and tools now.
[00:09:45] When you come to training, I think it's likely that, just based on some of the things I've already said, that training grows in importance in the future. Right now, training focuses on systems, processes, compliance and product knowledge. And also on that kind of induction journey, who the company is, who the customers are. And we know already that AI can coach most of these things and even coach them in real time.
[00:10:15] So I think training is going to shift to helping people improve emotional intelligence, resilience, critical thinking will be huge. Negotiation, problem solving, customer psychology and how to use the AI tools at our disposal. And again, a lot of these will be helping us who are involved in contact centers have better judgment.
[00:10:42] Workforce management, there's some wonderful superstars working in the world of WFM. Great professionals now using really, really good technology. But it's still going to be another key area that is already going through significant change. AI is making forecasting more accurate. It will predict demand, contact drivers, staffing requirements and to some extent, customer behavior.
[00:11:09] So perhaps, although maybe smaller, future WFM teams, I can imagine them being more strategic as less admin will mean they can do more sort of scenario planning. And I think when it comes to HR, having gone through everything we've gone through already, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out. HR is going to face new challenges as the workforce.
[00:11:36] And the relationships between the workforce and technology and the workforce and customers and what we're asking the workforce to do will go through huge changes. There's going to be less entry level jobs, more specialized roles, and they bring higher expectations, more technical skills and perhaps more change fatigue.
[00:11:56] So I can see that HR is going to focus more on helping employees navigate these technological changes and the impact of that increased cognitive load. But what about customers? Sometimes I read articles about the future and wonder if companies behind them have ever dealt with customers. Customers rarely do what businesses expect.
[00:12:21] We focused on self-service and sometimes burying contact numbers in a maze. And what happens? Millions of customers, us, still choose to call. Customers need reassurance, especially when it's urgent, emotive and complex. And I can't see that changing.
[00:12:40] And you could reasonably see it increasing, especially as trust and complexity increases, trust drops. More and more people might want to choose to call. So I do think we have a great opportunity in our industry. And as I mentioned, I think it's great we're at the tip of the spear when it comes to using this technology. But I also think there's a big risk.
[00:13:10] And that is organizations removing humans too aggressively. There's a temptation to realize advertised cost savings by removing people. But this tale has a sting. Because if we expect customers to follow blindly and compliantly and remove human experts to reassure them that those customers will leave and never return.
[00:13:32] I think those who will win in the future and both get the balance right between automation and humans and make sure those humans are trained, supported and happy. And of course, with a nod and a wink to the team leader community. If I was a betting man, I'd say that by 2035, the industry will have 30 to 50 percent fewer frontline agents than today.
[00:14:00] But the demand for exceptional team leaders and support teams will be higher than it ever has been. I would love to hear your thoughts, not just on what I've gone through, but also how do you envisage the contact center industry changing? Maybe, like I imagine, still a very large number of contact centers.
[00:14:23] You are a million miles away from some of the technology that you read about or people talk about or people are using. And that you're still very much in a low tech, Excel, Frankenstack kind of set up with your systems and they're inbuilt. But you're still delivering a great service. This might not be 10 years away. This might be 15 years away. But are you looking at AI? What do you think about it? I would love to hear what you think.
[00:14:55] I do hope you have a lovely rest of the week and I will see you soon. Thanks a lot. Thanks for listening.