Article written by Tom Johnston MBA, Senior Vice President & Executive Coach
From Scripts to Sentience: Call Center Confessions
Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.
Most of us attribute this witty response to Mark Twain, who – as few people know – was working a side job as a call center agent at the time. He was, of course, talking about the role of the agent; he was a clever man Mark, and he had heard these wet blanket rumors many times before posting this quip.
A little flashback in time
I remember working in my first call center when I was at university. Escaping out of the lecture theatre, I would rush down to the offices above Glasgow’s most famous women’s store, 40 Hip Plus (yes, that was the shop’s name), to pass a couple of hours in a little booth waiting for Morag, my ferocious supervisor, to walk the floor ripping up telephone directories and handing us four pages at a time.
Our job was to pick up the telephone (we had one each with its own number) and manually call everyone from top to bottom, ticking off each name we had called, desperately trying to make appointments for our double-glazing agents to go door knock and sell the new concept of two layers of glass in your windows. Two glass panes were a new import from Scandinavia and the-must-have for everyone who had just bought their Glasgow council house. Sometimes, just to spice things up, we would go from bottom to top, but that was about as innovative as the industry was at the time, and Morag was not keen on change. It was a decent stress-free job for chatty students and paid for Friday nights out.
We never heard anyone use terms like AHT, Conversion Rates, DPH, and the very mention of List Penetration would have all the men on the floor laughing, whilst the nice Catholic girls blushed. They would have gone to HR if such a department had existed.
The first warning signs came about a year into the job.
Some workmates started to report weird experiences with calls getting answered by a machine, and there was nobody to talk with. Morag started to panic; for all we knew her only talent seemed to be the ability to tear telephone directories apart with her bare hands.
Caller-tracing tools did not exist in the early days, so these machines were the perfect distraction to Morag checking if we had finished our list. Some of my more mischievous colleagues would amuse us by secretly leaving naughty messages: “Hello, this is Doctor McMufty from the Special Clinic; I just wanted to confirm your appointment for tomorrow.”
But we were nervous too. Those cunning machines were stealing our jobs: no more warm houses with two layers of glass in the windows. We could not imagine the poor salesmen having to go back to walking door-to-door selling their overpriced windows again.
Despite these new-fangled machines, the company kept adding more agents, and soon we doubled in size from a year ago. I heard Morag telling her boss that even with these machines making it more difficult to reach “the homeowner,” the cost per appointment made by a phone agent was 75% less than an appointment by the field marketing team. After a few weeks, Morag did not seem worried anymore, so we continued as usual and she perfected ripping phone books apart.
By the third year, I arrived for work having spent the summer grape-picking in France whilst signing on for unemployment benefits; do not get mad at me, that was allowed in those days.
Walking onto the newly painted floor we didn’t recognize the old place. The phones had disappeared and there were what looked like TV screens and a DJ’s headphones in our booths. And Morag was waiting for us: it was the first time I had seen her not ripping up telephone directories, and she was power dressing in the trouser suit from the downstairs shop window. Someone was on the up: earning lots of money and starting to climb the slippery slope to management.
Manager Morag told us we would be working on a new system that would be calling the customers automatically, no more manual dialing. It would also, in full killjoy mode, screen out our beloved answering machines and connect us directly to a homeowner, making us much more efficient – a thought that terrified every student in the room. We did not do efficient back then.
She also told us that we would have targets, and that she had cut our hourly pay in half, but not to worry, we could earn £0.25 for every appointment made. Uproar: we used to make one or two appointments during a 4-hour shift, so this was a deep cut. But Morag did not blink; the innovative technology would connect us to twenty people an hour and, if we were any good, our bonus payments would be over £1.00 an hour. That was a lot of money in the 80s. Enough, she reminded us, to shop at same clothes shop she was now using for work suits: 40 Hip Plus. Well, thank you Morag, but no thanks Morag. Kim Wilde was the only IT Girl we knew in the 80’s, and she didn’t go to 40 Hip Plus.
But, a pint of beer was only £0.45, so we were excited early adopters who could now afford to get drunk outside the Uni Bar. Down in the smoking room we all agreed this could not last long. The telephone directory was not that thick, and as we would get through it so quickly, we would be lucky to have a job by the end of term.
By the time I left almost a year later, our little center had grown from 25 disheveled students to 200+ agents in what was being called smart casual business attire. Some people had been given full time jobs, and half the men had started to wear ties. Yes, ties, and they were not even from middle-class schools. Ties indeed.
The women, who had previously thought the retail shop floor was their glass ceiling, were now managing big teams, talking about workforce management, planning for redundancy (it had a new meaning unrelated to job losses) list penetration (without the giggles), KPIs, abandon rates, and something called ROI. It was all too commercial and serious for a young man with lofty globetrotting ambitions having completed his studies in modern languages and humanities. One thing was clear; I would never set foot in such a place again.
Little did the younger me know.
The Agent’s Enduring Role
So, roll on more decades than would be decent for me to disclose, and the call center agent is still very much alive. From those nascent industry days employing a few hundred people across the UK, it is now a global industry employing almost eighteen million people, thanks in great part to the technological innovation that many soothsayers predicted would render the agent obsolete.
Let me remind younger (and not so young) readers about some predictions from the Contact Center Naysayers Society (not a real group, but perhaps it should be) and how they mis-read the resilience and necessity of the human factor in building relationships and improving customer experience:
- Interactive Voice Response (IVR): Hyped in the 1990s to replace agents with menu-driven automation, it faced backlash for frustrating users and drove demand for more live agents. This backlash grew the workforce as companies added hybrid models, boosting global jobs from thousands to millions.
- Offshore Outsourcing: Early 2000s predictions saw outsourcing to India and the Philippines as job-killers for Western agents, but it exploded the total market by slashing costs. Global employment surged to 10M+ by handling volumes that would be unaffordable onshore.
- Chatbots and Early AI: Wild promises to wipe out agents in the 2010s, yet poor handling of complex queries routed more cases to humans, increasing agent needs. AI augmentation now supports 65%+ of centers, sustaining 3.5M+ US jobs alone amid rising call volumes.
- Self-Service Portals: Much written about online FAQs and apps were forecasted in the 2000s to end phone support, but customers still preferred human touch for nuance, spurring omnichannel growth. This led to workforce expansion, with outsourcing markets hitting £280 billion.
- Cloud-Based Platforms: Cloud tech was expected to consolidate and reduce agent headcount post-2010, but it enabled remote work (60%+ predicted by 2030) and rapid scaling. Job numbers rose despite fewer physical sites, from 35K globally to under 20K facilities but more agents overall.
Dangers of IT-Driven Strategy
And so, hail the next assumed death knell for this amazing industry: Generative AI created by those pesky IT geeks designing away the role of the human agent. Again.
But not so fast.
Before we look at the realities, let’s touch on just a few of the commercial disasters that happen when organizations forget that few IT people understand operations or customer experience.
Ignoring the need to develop a customer centric strategy, that can be operationalized in the real world, at the expense of implementing an IT solution has cost many organizations more than their reputation. It has driven many to the brink of extinction. Never let market noise distract you: the role of systems management is to support organizational strategy, not create it.
Nobody quite knows who said it (it was not Peter Drucker) but it remains true that “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” and this, I think, underscores how even the best intended IT and Technical Solution are prone to inevitable failure because they rarely achieve cultural and operational buy-in.
There is a myriad of examples – without even touching on the UK Post Office IT lead scandal – but these three speak volumes:
HP-Compaq Merger Failure
The 2002 merger with Compaq was driven by IT-focused visions of unified systems without proper cultural or software integration planning. This caused employee mistrust, operational chaos, and billions in lost value as the companies could not synchronize their tech stacks effectively. The board had no strategic vision.
Innovation expert Clayton Christensen captured this type of pitfall, “Don’t add technology to old processes – rethink the process,” highlighting the need to overhaul operations first, not bolt on tech.
Cisco’s Market Misstep
In 2011, Cisco pursued a new video product targeting an unprepared market, prioritizing IT innovation over customer fit and core strengths. The flop led to over 6,500 layoffs and major financial hits, as the strategy ignored proven business alignment.
IT innovation and specialized skills are not a replacement for customer-centric strategy. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates echoed this when he said, “Automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”
TSB Bank’s Data Migration Disaster
The botched IT system migration from Lloyds in 2018 saw executives allow a rushed tech overhaul without adequate testing or business input. Customers faced account errors and outages, costing £330 million plus lasting reputation damage.
C3.ai CEO Thomas Siebel puts it bluntly, “Digital success depends more on leadership than on technology,” proving business guidance must lead IT, not follow it.
Customer-Centric Path Forward
So, as we face the reality of AI in the Contact Center industry we should listen with caution to those so flush with budget that they cannot stop themselves from buying not-ready technology. They are too often fooled by the snake oil salespeople into buying half-baked solutions in search of a problem to solve. And dare I say it skeptically, too many are perhaps really searching for an achievement to add to their Linked In profile.
We would be wise to listen to the warnings from people who know better.
Former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty warns us that, “a digital transformation without a data strategy is a house without a foundation,” reminding us that true progress demands holistic, customer-led strategy over isolated IT pushes.
And if there is one voice more than anything else that still calls us from the other side that we must listen to, it has to be the late great Steve Jobs, “You’ve got to start with customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.”
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