“Oh, you work in IT so you would know…” that’s the line I often hear when my family gets together. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. Everything from “my laptop doesn’t work” to “don’t you agree that AI is taking all our jobs?”
Right now, it feels like every second article about contact centres leads with AI. It’s either AI will replace agents or AI will slash costs or solve forecasting forever and even AI will finally fix the customer experience.
My view? Focusing on the technology first is where many organisations go wrong.
Having spent more than 25 years in the contact centre technology space, working closely with contact centre leaders, WFM teams and frontline employees, one thing has become clear. The future of the contact centre will be shaped less by the tools we deploy and more by how deliberately we design the work around them.
Technology changes quickly. Workforce decisions, or better still people decisions, last much longer. That is why workforce strategy matters more than ever.
How the Shape of Contact Centre Work Is Changing
There is no denying that advancements in technology are reshaping contact centres.
Increased automation, the proliferation of digital channels and intelligent assistants are already influencing how work arrives, how it is handled, and who handles it. The simpler, one-and-done interactions are steadily being removed or streamlined, leaving behind work that is more complex, more emotionally charged, and far less predictable.
What remains for human agents is not less work as much as it is different work. That difference has significant implications for planning, scheduling, capability and wellbeing.
Why Workforce Management Is at the Centre of This Shift
Traditional Workforce Management models were built for stability. Predictable volumes, consistent handle times and relatively uniform work, made accurate planning possible.
That old world is disappearing. As interaction types diversify and complexity increases, many organisations are discovering that historical averages are no longer enough. Forecasts require context. Schedules require flexibility. Intra-day management now requires judgement more than formulas.
In this modern environment, WFM evolves from an operational function into a strategic one.
A Workforce No Longer Made Up of Humans Alone
What makes this environment fundamentally different is that the workforce itself has changed. For the first time, most contact centres are no longer designing for a single agent type. Today, a blended workforce is more than just a mix of inbound, outbound and perhaps some back-office tasks. It is also a mix of human agents and AI-driven agents, each handling very different types of work.
AI agents are typically responsible for high-volume, low-complexity interactions, transactional and rules-based requests, and always-on availability across digital channels. Human agents, by contrast, are handling the more complex, emotionally charged interactions and situations where judgement, empathy and experience matter.
This is not simply a technology shift. It is a structural change to the workforce itself. And yet many organisations are still applying workforce strategies designed for a human-only environment. I see this most often when teams are surprised that performance drops even though the technology is technically doing what it was designed to do.
Why Workforce Strategy Has to Be Different
In a blended human and AI contact centre, traditional assumptions start to break down.
Volume alone becomes a less useful planning input. Average Handle Time becomes less stable. Skills become deeper and more fragmented. Workload becomes harder to smooth out through scheduling alone. AI does not always remove variability; it often magnifies it. This is the point many organisations do not anticipate, and it is usually where the cracks start to show.
What is left for human agents is work that is more complex, less predictable in duration, and harder to standardise and train for. This is why workforce strategy cannot simply be an extension of what worked before.
In this environment, strategy needs to account for which work should be handled by AI and which must remain human. It must consider how demand patterns change once AI absorbs transactional volume, how to plan capacity for complexity rather than contact volumes, and how to protect human agents from sustained cognitive and emotional overload.
This is no longer about maximising utilisation. It is about designing for resilience.
From Planning People to Designing Systems of Work
Workforce Management today is no longer just about planning people. In practice, it has become about designing systems of work, and accepting that those systems are far more dynamic than they used to be.
That system now includes humans and AI working side by side, multiple hand-offs between automated and human interactions, and a greater need for real-time decisioning and judgement.
In this context, good workforce strategy accepts that forecasts will be less precise and plans accordingly. It builds flexibility into schedules rather than chasing perfect efficiency. It treats agent wellbeing as a leading indicator rather than a lagging one. It recognises that workforce decisions shape customer experience long before a customer ever makes contact.
Workforce Design and Employee Experience
One of the biggest risks in this new landscape is unintended pressure on employees. When change is driven purely by efficiency, agents can feel left with only the most demanding interactions, under constant measurement, and with less control over their work.
When workforce design is intentional, the opposite happens. Work can be structured to reduce cognitive load, support decision-making, and create clearer development pathways. This comes not just from implementing technology, but from the choices made about how people are supported to use it day to day.
Intelligent automation can materially improve the employee experience when it focuses on how work is managed, not just how work is done. By using real-time conditions to dynamically adjust schedules and create opportunities for micro-breaks, learning time, offline tasks or early finishes, automation helps reduce cognitive fatigue and gives agents a greater sense of control over their day.
But the real impact does not come from the tool alone. Without a clear workforce strategy that defines when and why this flexibility is applied, automation simply becomes another layer of control. When strategy and technology are aligned, automation becomes a powerful enabler of wellbeing, engagement and sustainable performance.
Customers Feel the Outcome, Not the Decisions
Customers do not see workforce models, schedules or planning assumptions. They feel the outcome. They notice effort, empathy, consistency and resolution. When workforce strategy aligns with how work actually arrives, customer experience improves naturally. When it does not, even the most advanced tools can feel clumsy.
The quality of customer experience is often a reflection of how well the workforce has been designed to handle reality, not best-case assumptions. For years, contact centres have optimised for efficiency.
What we are seeing now is a broader shift toward sustainability. Sustainable workloads, sustainable engagement, and sustainable customer outcomes. This does not mean ignoring cost or performance. It means recognising that burnout, attrition and poor experience are costs too.
The future contact centre will not be defined by a single platform or tool. In my time in this space, I have seen WFM tools evolve. Real-time modules and agent self-service tools are now standard and intelligent automation and virtual agents will soon be the same. The future will be shaped by leaders who design work thoughtfully, use Workforce Management as a strategic lever, and keep people at the centre of their decisions.
While the technology will no doubt continue to evolve, in my experience, workforce strategy is what ultimately determines whether that evolution actually works.
To know more, speak to the Call Design team.
Written by Nimesh Dhanak
