2026 Australian Contact Centre Industry Best Practice Report
Now in its seventh edition, the 2026 Contact Centre Best Practice Report is Australia's most in-depth study of the contact centre industry, compiled by Smaart Recruitment.
This year's edition draws on over 800 responses from more than 250 contact centres, across six distinct role types — senior leaders, team leaders, frontline agents, workforce managers, knowledge managers, and those working in HR and recruitment. As always, the data comes from Australian onshore contact centres only.
The defining shift: AI now gets two full chapters — one for automation, one for self-service — and a brand-new Observability chapter arrives. As the report puts it, artificial intelligence is no longer a future consideration; it's a present reality, felt differently depending on how each organisation chose to implement it.
ACXPA again contributed the Contact Centre Mystery Shopping chapter — the one section of the report built not on self-reported data, but on real customer interactions.
This article is our summary of the key findings. The full 184-page report is produced and owned by Smaart Recruitment and is available from them at contactcentrebestpractice.com.au.
800+ responses
The broadest cross-section yet — six role types, not just leaders and agents.
AI gets two chapters
Automation and self-service split apart, reflecting an industry in active transition.
The threshold moment
For the first time, a clear majority of leaders expect human contact volume to fall.
Contributing authors and companies
A big shout-out to James Witcombe of Smaart Recruitment, who authored the report and has again done a brilliant job — supported by industry experts who wrote each chapter summary.
ACXPA has contributed to every edition of this report since 2020. This year our CEO Justin Tippett again contributed the Contact Centre Mystery Shopping chapter — bringing independent, externally-measured customer experience data to a report otherwise built on self-reported inputs.
The report was made possible with support from:
Executive Summary: Progress and Pressure, Side by Side
Seven editions in, and the industry continues to surprise. As report author James Witcombe puts it, each year the data finds a way to complicate the simple narrative — and 2026 is no different.
The 2026 story in one line
"This is an industry that is genuinely improving in some areas that have resisted improvement for years, while facing new pressures it has not fully confronted yet."
Attrition is down. Onboarding retention is at a seven-year best. AI is no longer experimental for the majority. And yet engagement is softening, absenteeism has crept back up, and the gap between what senior leaders believe about their frontline and what that workforce actually experiences remains wider than it should be.
The standout findings, in the report's own words:
- Attrition has fallen to 25%, and the onboarding retention behind it is the strongest recorded in seven years. Salary remains the top reason agents leave (49%), though that's down from 57% in 2025 — while career development and the desire to pursue a different path are both growing. The industry needs to do more than pay competitively; it needs to invest in where people go next.
- Absenteeism has ticked back up to 12%, reversing the previous year's improvement. It remains below the 2023 peak of 13.4%, but the direction of travel is one to watch.
- Work from home sits at 52%, continuing a slow decline from the pandemic peak. Full flexibility has dropped to just 11% — its lowest recorded level — while "no flexibility" has risen to 13%.
- AI is no longer a future consideration. The majority of contact centres now use it in some form. But at the frontline, the challenge is sentiment, not capability: only 21% of agents are excited about AI, with 55% neutral to negative. The technology is largely making their jobs easier — the communication and change management around it is not keeping up.
- Team Leaders carry significant operational responsibility with limited support, and the data on leadership development, time allocation and career aspiration deserves serious attention.
- Knowledge Management has firmly established itself as a core priority — 95% of senior leaders rate it important or very important, and 72% expect its importance to increase.
AI for Automation
The first of two dedicated AI chapters paints a picture of an industry in genuine transition — but one where ambition and execution remain some distance apart.
Across pre-call, during-call and post-call categories, the majority of contact centres are yet to deploy most of the available technologies. Where adoption has taken hold, it has concentrated around high-visibility, lower-complexity use cases.
What's holding automation back
Customer experience concerns (31%) and unclear ROI (30%) sit closely behind — pointing to an industry that isn't short of ambition, but is navigating a genuinely difficult implementation environment. Asked separately which internal capabilities are holding them back, leaders pointed to technical implementation skills (55%), process design (44%), governance and compliance (43%) and change management (42%). Even where budget exists, many contact centres face structural and capability hurdles before automation becomes viable.
The barriers also feed each other: a shortage of technical specialists slows the design work needed to make automation viable, which then creates uncertainty around ROI. Breaking that cycle requires deliberate investment across people, process and technology — not just procurement of the next available tool.
Where automation is working: post-call documentation leads on impact at 25%, reflecting the adoption of automatic call summarisation. The time saved is immediate, measurable and felt directly by frontline agents — making it an accessible entry point for organisations beginning their automation journey.
From the chapter author
"You can't automate a broken process or fuel a genius tool with garbage data. Until your data, processes, and tech are aligned, you aren't building a future, you're just exposing your existing mistakes at an accelerated pace." — Adrienne Merlo, Customer Driven
AI for Self-Service
The self-service chapter tells the story of an industry that has broadly embraced the concept but is still working through the execution.
Just over half of contact centres are currently using AI for self-service — 38% report it is delivering as expected, while a further 14% are using it but haven't yet seen the results they anticipated. The remaining half are either open to exploring it or building towards it. Notably, 98% of organisations expect their self-service to grow.
The infrastructure exists and the ambition is there — but the complexity ceiling across much of the industry remains low. Raising that ceiling will be one of the defining self-service challenges of the next few years.
The gaps that matter
- The handover to a human is the friction point. Only 13% of contact centres achieve a genuinely smooth transition from self-service to a live agent — the moment where a good experience is most often destroyed.
- Conversational AI is badly underdeployed on the channels customers already use. SMS and mobile app are widely used as self-service channels, yet conversational AI has barely penetrated either. Social media messaging tells the same story — just 3% currently use conversational AI within it, despite 15% actively experimenting.
- The gap between channel availability and conversational AI deployment is one of the more actionable opportunities in the entire report.
Key Performance Metrics
Customer feedback now sits at the top of the importance rankings by a considerable margin — an encouraging sign that the industry is orienting its measurement framework around the customer rather than purely around efficiency.
How important is each metric to your team?
| Metric | Very important | Important |
|---|---|---|
| Customer feedback (NPS, CSAT etc.) | 63% | 18% |
| Average speed of answer | 46% | 35% |
| Abandonment rate | 46% | 35% |
| First interaction resolution | 43% | 28% |
| Average handling time | 35% | 23% |
| After call work | 32% | 35% |
| Grade of service | 30% | 31% |
| Sales or conversions | 24% | 16% |
| Shrinkage | 23% | 31% |
| Customer churn rate | 15% | 10% |
Shrinkage is a quiet standout: a high proportion rate it important or very important, suggesting it's understood as an operational lever even if it doesn't feature prominently in external-facing conversations about performance.
Customer Experience
Customer experience remains the metric the industry most consistently says it cares about — with customer feedback (NPS, CSAT and similar) rated "very important" by 63% of contact centres, well clear of any operational metric.
The challenge running through the 2026 data is the distance between that stated priority and the infrastructure required to act on it. As the Observability chapter makes plain, most organisations still cannot reliably distinguish a technology failure from a performance issue — which makes genuinely improving the experience a matter of guesswork rather than diagnosis.
Observability (new for 2026)
A brand-new chapter for 2026 — and one of the most uncomfortable reads in the report.
"You can't fix what you can't see"
The data tells a consistent and candid story: the Australian contact centre industry is largely operating in reactive mode when it comes to understanding the technical and experiential conditions that drive customer and agent outcomes. The industry knows what good CX observability looks like — it just hasn't built the infrastructure, processes or organisational alignment to achieve it at scale.
Only 27% of contact centres have the observability capability the chapter sets as the baseline.
The human cost is often invisible precisely because it's so consistent. When agents operate in degraded technical environments without alerts or support, they absorb the friction silently — managing poor audio, slow systems and dropped calls while simultaneously trying to deliver a quality customer experience.
And when leaders cannot distinguish between a technology failure and a performance issue, agents risk being coached for outcomes that were never within their control. That is not a hypothetical: it is a direct consequence of not being able to see what's actually happening.
Remote & Flexible Working
Work from home has edged down to 52% of the contact centre workforce on any given day — continuing a gradual decline from the pandemic peak of 76% in 2022.
Work from home, 2022–2026
| Year | % of workforce working from home on any given day |
|---|---|
| 2022 | 76% |
| 2023 | 57% |
| 2024 | 55% |
| 2025 | 54% |
| 2026 | 52% |
The movement is modest — just two percentage points on last year — and the trend since 2023 has been a slow, incremental reduction rather than a dramatic return-to-office shift. More than half the contact centre workforce is still working remotely on any given day, which, set against major corporations and government departments pushing hard for in-office attendance, makes the industry's commitment to remote work genuinely notable.
The number that should worry leaders
Full flexibility has dropped to just 11% — its lowest recorded level — while "no flexibility" has risen to 13%. As return-to-office pressure builds, contact centres that remove remote work options without addressing the retention consequences may find the cost appearing in their attrition data sooner than expected.
Absenteeism & Attrition
The headline is genuinely good news: frontline agent attrition has fallen to 25% in 2026, down from 29% in 2025 — its best result in recent years — and the onboarding retention figures behind it are the strongest recorded in seven years.
Absenteeism
Absenteeism has edged back up to 12.0%, reversing the previous year's encouraging drop. It remains below the 13.4% peak of 2023, but the uptick is a reminder that improvement here is not guaranteed. Peak absenteeism sits at 22.6% — a slight improvement on 23.7% — though a peak of nearly one in four agents absent on any given day remains a serious operational challenge.
The size-band data is mixed. Smaller centres saw the sharpest increase, with the 0–50 group rising from 9.2% to 11.7% after previously being the standout performer. Mid-sized centres remained relatively stable, while the 300–500 seat band recorded the most significant improvement, dropping from 14.4% to 11.0%. The 500–1,000 group reported the lowest average of any cohort at 8.9%.
Attrition — and why people still leave
Salary remains the top reason frontline agents leave, cited by 49% — though that has fallen from 57% in 2025. More telling is what's rising: career development and the desire to pursue a different path are both growing as drivers.
The lesson
The industry needs to do more than pay competitively. It needs to invest in where people go next. Retention is improving — but frontline agents are still leaving for the same reasons.
Knowledge Management
Knowledge management has firmly established itself as a core operational priority — and 2026 makes clear that the platform choice is defining the outcome.
Users of a purpose-built knowledge management system report dramatically higher satisfaction and significantly stronger AI capability than those relying on general knowledge tools (SharePoint, documents, folders).
With AI now embedded in the knowledge function for the majority of contact centres, getting the governance foundations right is no longer optional — an AI answering customers from a poorly-governed knowledge base is a liability, not an asset.
The Team Leader
The team leader is one of the most pivotal roles in any contact centre, and the 2026 data paints a picture of a cohort confident in the human core of the job, but increasingly stretched by the structural demands around it.
Asked to rank the importance of their duties, team leaders placed coaching and development first, leadership second, and checking in with team members third. The problem is the gap between what they value and what they get to do.
Meetings consume a disproportionate share of the day. Personnel issues, escalations and coordination draw further time and energy away from the coaching that team leaders themselves rank as most important.
Combine that with team leaders who receive training ad hoc, rarely or never — and 53% of contact centres having no structured development program at all — and the pattern is clear: team leaders are being asked to perform a broad, complex role without the consistent investment in their skills that would make it easier to do well.
AI is adding complexity, not removing it
- 43% report needing to develop new skills in AI oversight and data interpretation.
- 33% are now managing agent anxiety about job security.
- The positive impacts — more coaching time, better performance data — are present, but have not yet translated into a meaningful shift in coaching quality or focus at scale.
The good news worth protecting
Despite all of this, team leaders remain committed: 68% plan to stay and grow within their current contact centre, and only 3% intend to leave the industry entirely. That loyalty is an asset. The investment required to retain and properly equip this cohort is modest compared with the cost of losing them.
Frontline Agents
The frontline chapter surfaces the single most important disconnect in the 2026 report.
The AI sentiment gap
The majority of contact centres are using AI, and the technology is largely making agents' jobs easier. Yet only 21% of frontline agents are excited about AI advancements in their role — with 55% sitting in neutral to negative territory.
The challenge at the frontline is sentiment, not capability. The communication and change management around AI is not keeping up with the technology itself.
Agent-facing AI adoption remains patchy. Real-time agent assist / co-pilot is the most actively engaged technology in this category at 21% currently using, with AI-backed knowledge management next at 16%. Real-time sentiment analysis sits at 18%, while automated language translation (3%) and live knowledge base updates (8%) remain rare.
The gap between "the tools help" and "agents feel good about the tools" is a change management problem, not a technology problem — and it is entirely fixable.
Contact Centre Recruitment
The recruitment chapter tells the story of a function simultaneously under significant pressure and on the cusp of meaningful change. The headline finding is stark.
Hiring volumes have halved in two years
Average frontline agent hiring volumes have fallen from 457 per contact centre in 2024 to 223 in 2026 — a decline of more than 50% across two years.
Improved retention explains part of it, with attrition falling to 25%. But as AI and self-service absorb a broader range of interaction types, structural demand for frontline agents may continue to contract.
- Recruiters are managing an average of 23 open vacancies each, with some carrying as many as 60.
- 43% of talent acquisition teams have no recruiters dedicated specifically to contact centre roles. Generalist recruiters filling specialist roles in a high-complexity environment is a structural inefficiency that shows up in quality, speed and candidate experience.
- Top concerns: hiring high-quality candidates at scale (48%), workload and insufficient team headcount (43%), salaries not being competitive (39%), and maintaining motivation when repeatedly recruiting for the same position (26%).
- Notably, high-volume of applications (26%) is now a bigger problem than low volume (9%) — the challenge has shifted from finding candidates to filtering them.
Mystery Shopping: The ACXPA Call Centre Rankings
This chapter of the report is contributed by ACXPA.
While the majority of the 2026 report is based on self-reported inputs, this section presents results based on real customer interactions.
The Australian Call Centre Rankings are derived from monthly mystery shopping of live calls — primarily new business and general enquiry interactions — capturing how contact centres perform in real conditions. Each interaction is assessed against the Australian Contact Centre CX Standards, incorporating more than 80 measurable elements across accessibility, interaction quality and operational execution.
Three core measures are reported:
- Overall CX Score — the combined impact of accessibility and interaction quality across the full interaction.
- Accessibility Score — how easily customers can reach a live agent, including navigation, wait times and connection barriers.
- Agent Mastery Score — the effectiveness of the interaction: how well agents listen, understand and respond to customer needs.
What the 2026 report found
- Accessibility went backwards. The industry average fell from 67.2% in 2024 to 65.8% in 2025 — a reversal that highlights the tension between efficiency and customer access as more organisations lean on automation and self-service to manage demand.
- Banks remain the hardest sector to reach, dropping sharply to 38.9% and reinforcing long-standing barriers for customers trying to reach a human. Councils and Education also declined, while Car Insurance partially recovered to 60.7%.
- Internet providers continue to lead the industry on accessibility.
- Call answering improved, with the industry average rising from 89.3% to 90.9% — better alignment between demand and resourcing, though significant gaps remain.
- Interaction quality is flat. Overall Agent Mastery declined slightly, with interaction quality across the industry largely unchanged.
The leaderboards below show the current rankings.
Explore the Rankings
The ACXPA Call Centre Rankings are updated monthly — the independent counterweight to self-reported data.
Senior Leader Forecast: The Threshold Moment
The Senior Leader Forecast offers the clearest window into where the industry believes it is heading — and in 2026 the view is one of measured but meaningful transformation.
The short-term headcount picture is largely unchanged from last year, with the industry broadly split between growth, stability and modest reduction over the next 12 months. The real story lies in the longer-term outlook.
The most resounding finding in the report
A clear majority of leaders expect the volume of customer contacts requiring a human agent to decrease over the next three years.
This is structurally important. For decades, contact volume and headcount have moved in lockstep. The growing conviction that self-service and AI will absorb a meaningful share of what was previously human work signals that the industry has crossed a genuine threshold in its thinking.
It is no longer a question of whether automation will reduce the volume of human contact. The future contact centre will be an integration of humans empowered by AI.
Just under half of leaders expect frontline agent headcount to decrease over the next three years — a figure that has actually moderated from last year's 56%, with more leaders now in the "remained the same" camp. The dramatic workforce reductions that AI rhetoric has long promised are not yet materialising at speed, but the direction of travel remains.
The skills leaders say their teams will need
The workforce capability data is telling:
- Digital and AI tool proficiency
- Empathy and emotional intelligence
- Advanced problem-solving
As routine contacts migrate to automated channels, the interactions that reach a human will be more complex, more emotionally charged and higher-stakes. As the report concludes: the future agent is not simply someone who can use AI tools — they are someone who can do what AI cannot. Build genuine human connection through empathy. Navigate ambiguity. Solve problems that have no documented answer.
Where the money is going
Investment priorities over the next three years are split almost evenly between customer experience and cost efficiency, with revenue generation trailing well behind. That reflects an industry still oriented around service and operational performance rather than commercial outcomes — though a growing minority are beginning to reframe the contact centre as a revenue-generating asset rather than a cost centre. If that shift accelerates, it would be one of the industry's more significant strategic repositionings.
Looking further ahead, 38% of leaders believe their contact centre will fundamentally shift from a reactive to a proactive service model within three years. The majority don't believe that timeframe is achievable — and given what this same report shows about measurement maturity, data readiness and observability, that scepticism looks well-founded. The foundations for proactive service are still being built.
Salaries & Bonuses
The 2026 data provides one of the most comprehensive pictures of contact centre remuneration available to the industry — from frontline agents through to general managers.
💰 Looking for the latest salary data?
The figures below are from the 2026 report and reflect that point in time. For the most current benchmarks across every contact centre role, see our Australian Call Centre Salaries page — always kept up to date.
Frontline agents (2026)
The frontline picture is one of modest but consistent improvement, continuing a multi-year upward trend. Interestingly, fewer agents are getting a bonus, but those who do are getting more.
By industry, the Public Sector and Superannuation continue to offer the strongest base salaries for frontline agents, while BPO remains the lowest-paying segment of the market by a considerable margin.
Team Leaders (2026)
| Role | Average base | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Customer Service Team Leader | $97,000 | 64% of roles pay above $90,000 |
| Helpdesk / Technical Team Leader | $96,700 | Closely aligned with Customer Service |
| Inbound Sales Team Leader | ~$90,000 | More generous bonus structures |
| Outbound Sales Team Leader | ~$90,000 | Avg bonus $17,800; 86% receive one |
Outbound Sales Team Leaders have the highest bonus participation rate of any team leader category at 86%, reflecting the commission-linked nature of sales environments.
Workforce Management & specialists (2026)
| Role | Average base | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Workforce Planning Manager | $146,900 | Range $105,000–$190,000 |
| Workforce Lead | $137,500 | — |
| Knowledge Manager | $130,000 | Very wide range |
| Forecaster | $108,800 | Meaningful range |
| Workforce Planner | $104,800 | Meaningful range |
| Scheduler | $96,200 | — |
| Knowledge Management Consultant / Specialist | $95,000 | Very wide range |
Senior leadership (2026)
| Role | Average base | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| General Manager | $267,000 | 80% receive a bonus averaging $43,750 |
| Head of Contact Centre/s | $190,182 | Range $100,000–$350,000 |
| Contact Centre Manager | ~$136,000–$138,000 | Clustered with Customer Service Manager |
| Customer Service Manager | ~$136,000–$138,000 | Clustered with Contact Centre Manager |
The warning in the salary data
Job titles in contact centres are not a reliable indicator of seniority or remuneration. Head of Contact Centre/s — one of the most common senior titles, with the largest sample in the dataset — ranges from $100,000 to $350,000 + super. That spread illustrates just how differently the same role is scoped across organisations.
Across all levels, the theme is incremental improvement in base salaries against a backdrop of cost-of-living pressure that keeps remuneration one of the most sensitive topics in the industry. Bonus participation varies significantly by role and level, and for many roles remains far from universal.
All salaries + super. Source: Smaart Recruitment 2026 Contact Centre Best Practice Report. For current benchmarks, see Australian Call Centre Salaries.
Conclusion: Move Deliberately, Not Just Fast
The seventh edition captures an industry changing faster than at any point in its history. The pace of technology change is accelerating. Frontline agent expectations are evolving. The definition of the contact centre itself is being rewritten by AI, self-service and automation.
The report's closing warning
"Against that backdrop, the organisations that will continue to thrive are not necessarily those that move fastest — they are those that move most deliberately, maintaining a clear focus on their people even as they invest in their technology."
"The risk, as always, is that the urgency of transformation causes leaders to underinvest in the human foundations the industry runs on. Engagement is under pressure. Leadership development remains patchy. Recognition and purpose — the things that make people want to stay and grow — are still not universal. No AI implementation will compensate for getting those things wrong."
That's the tension the 2026 report leaves you with. Attrition is down and onboarding retention is at a seven-year best — genuine, hard-won progress. But absenteeism has crept back up, only 21% of frontline agents are excited about the AI being deployed around them, and more than half of contact centres still have no structured development program for the team leaders holding the whole thing together.
The technology question is largely settled. The people question is not.
Get the Full Report
This article is our summary of the key findings. The full 184-page 2026 report is produced and owned by Smaart Recruitment and is available from them at contactcentrebestpractice.com.au.
The data tells you what. These tell you what to do about it.
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