What’s Happening with Contact Center Workload?

What’s happening with contact center workload? Is the work handled by agents declining as AI capabilities become more robust and prevalent? Are calls being supplanted by digital channels and self-service? These are important questions—the answers will impact your budgets, hiring, workforce plans, investments, really everything. 

Let’s get right to it.

Workloads are increasing 

Many industry experts are predicting that self-service and AI-fueled capabilities will reduce the workload requiring human agents. But for now surveys (e.g., from ICMI, McKinsey, and others) reveal that a sizeable majority of contact center leaders expect workloads to increase over at least the next couple of years.

Gen Z is calling

Along with questions of overall workload, many managers are wondering if their contact centers will handle calls in the future. The short answer: Yes. In fact, research is finding that Gen Z is in many cases more likely to call than millennials or Gen Xers. Yes, they start with self-service or chat, but they quickly move to phone if need be. A recent McKinsey survey of 3,500 consumers finds that all generations view phone support as among their most preferred ways to get help (source: “Where is Customer Care in 2024?,” March 12, 2024, McKinsey & Company).

In short, Gen Zers are calling. Boomers are using chat. And video is bringing face-to-face interactions back in areas such as health care, banking and retail. (Fifty years ago, call centers began us away from face to face, now they are bringing us back—an interesting full circle). All of this highlights the importance of handling any of these channels well and giving customers choices that make things easy for them.

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