In a World of AI, It's Time to Value Human Interaction as a Skill
My car broke down. So I did the obvious thing and called roadside assistance.
After wading through an unnecessarily long IVR menu — press 1 for this, 2 for that, despite the fact I was calling roadside assistance and the odds were reasonable that I required roadside assistance — I finally reached a real live human being.
What happened next was a make-or-break-my-day moment. And it made me realise something I've stayed quiet about for far too long.
1%
of surveyed agents describe their calls as mostly negative. For most, this job isn't hard because customers scream.
21%
of frontline agents are excited about the AI being rolled out around them.
550 seconds
to explain an invoice, absorb the complaint about the wait, and document the call.
ℹ️ About this article
A contributed opinion piece by Amy Gibson — a former call centre operator, trainer and manager. ACXPA publishes practitioner contributions to lift the standard of the conversation; the views are the author's. The industry data and editorial commentary throughout are ACXPA's, drawn from the Australian Contact Centre Best Practice Report.
When All You Need Is Some Understanding and Empathy
As a former call centre operator, trainer and manager who has handled her fair share of rude and arrogant people, I am easily the most forgiving customer any agent will ever get. I know first-hand what their day was probably like.
And yet.
The only lifeline I had to end my miserable day was a person on the other end of the phone who had all the understanding and empathy of a potato.
So let's pop the hood on the potato's day.
Nobody calls roadside assistance because they're thrilled about their car breaking down. Anyone on that line is navigating big emotions: they're stranded, they're late, they're stuck somewhere they don't want to be. Their only lifeline is the person on the other end of the phone.
Does that mean that person deserves respect?
Apparently not.
Does anyone care about their bad day? Nope. Why would they? They get paid to sit there and take it — or so the thinking goes. Meanwhile the person who turns up to do the actual rescue gets the thanks, the gratitude, and a shot at making someone's day.
The Invisible Worker
You will be remembered as a nuisance. A necessary evil. Or not remembered at all.
And every single day, you read another story about how AI is going to take over your role. Nobody even values you enough to consider that you might read that article — the one saying any decent software could replace you — and feel hurt, or afraid, or intimidated by it.
You are unseen.
You spend your day organising help for people who treat you like dirt. To the point where you learn that if you say "ma'am" through gritted teeth, you can quietly wind someone up while your supervisor hears nothing but politeness.
"I'll arrange that for you now… ma'am."
And why shouldn't you take a small, bitter pleasure in it? You're paid close to nothing, and nobody ever tells you that you're worthy of thanks. The only compliment you get all week is a sarcastic "thank you… you compassionate potato" from someone disgusted by your existence.
They don't know you. They won't remember your name. And when you go home tonight, you know that customer is complaining about you to anyone who'll listen.
What the Data Actually Says
That's Amy's experience of the job, and it's a familiar one. Here is where ACXPA's research both complicates it and, we'd argue, strengthens it.
For most agents, the job isn't hard because customers scream at you
In the Australian Contact Centre Best Practice Report, agents and leaders agreed on this: customer hostility is rare. Only 1% of survey respondents described their calls as mostly negative.
The bigger threats to long-term engagement were emotional fatigue and repetitive work — particularly in high-volume sectors.
That doesn't undermine the argument on this page. It sharpens it. Abuse is what makes the headlines, but for most agents it isn't the thing that grinds them down. What grinds them down is being timed to the second, recorded for coaching, held to a handle time that assumes nobody will ever be confused or upset, and told weekly that a machine is coming for the job.
⚠️ Read that 1% carefully
It's an average across everyone who responded to the survey, and an average hides the extremes. Plenty of roles and plenty of contact centres deal with a great deal of anger — some are dedicated complaints lines, where every single inbound contact is, by definition, from someone who is already unhappy. For those teams the proportion of hostile calls will be dramatically higher than 1%, and nothing here should be read as telling them their experience isn't real.
The point of the figure isn't that abuse doesn't happen. It's that across the industry as a whole, abuse is not the main reason this job is hard — and if you're a leader assuming that fixing abuse fixes engagement, the data says you'd be solving the wrong problem for most of your people.
Read the second figure again. Only one in five frontline agents is excited about the AI being deployed around them. Not hostile. Not resistant. Just not excited — because for most of them, nobody has explained what it means for their job, and the loudest message they've received about AI is the one Amy describes: that it's coming to replace them.
That is a communication failure, and it belongs to leadership, not to the frontline.
Now Think About Your Job
Respect for the contact centre employee is well overdue. If you're not sure why, hold your own working day up against theirs.
Can you take lunch whenever you want?
A contact centre employee can't. Lunch is scheduled at whatever time the forecast says is most efficient — and they can rarely take it with a friend, because those friends are covering the queue.
Is every conversation you have recorded?
"This call may be recorded for coaching purposes." Every call. Every day. Imagine every conversation you had at work being available for review.
Could you explain something complicated in 550 seconds?
That's a typical handle time. Around 100 of those seconds go to the customer explaining how long they waited to get through. Another 120 go to documenting the call afterwards. You have roughly 330 seconds left to explain an invoice to someone who is already angry.
Does someone time your breaks?
Down to the minute — and adherence to it is a metric you're measured on.
And on top of all that, they're expected to know everything. Every product, every policy, every exception — including the name and details of "that nice man I spoke to five years ago with an accent". Being asked every weird and wonderful question under the sun, and being expected to have the answer, is the job.
Human Interaction Is a Skill — It's Time We Treated It Like One
Here's what the good ones do, call after call.
They absorb someone else's worst day. They de-escalate a person who is furious about something the agent didn't cause and can't control. They find the answer, explain it clearly, and go out of their way to make that person feel better — using empathy and understanding that nobody trained them to fake, because it can't be faked.
Then they hang up and do it again. And again.
Why do they do it? Who do they do it for?
You. They do it for you.
The point
Every conversation about AI in this industry is a conversation about which human skills are worth paying for. If empathy, judgement and de-escalation under pressure are the things machines can't do — and right now they demonstrably can't — then those are the most valuable skills on the floor, not the cheapest.
You cannot simultaneously argue that human connection is what differentiates your brand and that the people providing it are entry-level, interchangeable and easily replaced.
It's time we valued these people. They provide a service that nobody who hasn't done the job will ever fully understand. It is hard, and it is thankless.
And they do it every day. For you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will AI replace contact centre agents?
Not for the work that actually matters. AI is genuinely good at retrieving information and completing simple transactions, and it is absorbing that work quickly. What it cannot yet do is handle a person who is upset, confused, and dealing with a problem that doesn't fit the script. As routine contacts move to self-service, the calls that reach a human get harder, not easier — which means the human skill required goes up, not down. The realistic risk to agents isn't replacement; it's being asked to handle a more demanding mix of work without the pay, training or authority to match.
Are contact centre agents really abused by customers?
It happens, and where it does it should never be tolerated. But across the industry it isn't the defining feature of the job that many assume: in ACXPA's research, agents and leaders agreed that hostility is rare, with only 1% of survey respondents describing their calls as mostly negative. The more corrosive problems are emotional fatigue and repetitive work — the cumulative weight of being timed, recorded and measured while absorbing other people's frustration all day.
That 1% is an average, and averages hide the extremes. Some roles and some contact centres — dedicated complaints lines most obviously, where every contact is from someone already unhappy — will sit far above it. If that's your team, the figure isn't describing your reality, and your priority genuinely is a clear, enforced line on abuse.
Why is customer service work still treated as low-skilled?
Largely because it's been measured as though it were. When performance is judged on handle time and adherence rather than on resolution and the quality of the interaction, the work looks like a throughput problem — and throughput problems get paid accordingly. The skills actually involved (rapid comprehension, emotional regulation, de-escalation, explaining complexity simply) are difficult, transferable and in short supply. They just aren't in the scorecard.
What can leaders actually do about this?
Three things with immediate effect. Tell your team the truth about your AI plans, because in the absence of information they will believe the headlines — only 21% of frontline agents are excited about the AI being deployed around them. Review whether your handle time target is compatible with the empathy you claim to want. And check what you pay: salary is still the number one reason people leave, cited by 49% of those who go.
How should customers behave on a call?
Assume the person answering did not cause your problem, has no power over the policy that created it, and is measured on how quickly they can get you off the phone by someone who has never met you. They are almost always the person most likely to help you. Treating them as an obstacle is both unpleasant and, practically speaking, counterproductive.
Where to Next
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Summary
The argument against valuing contact centre work has always rested on the idea that anyone could do it. Every advance in AI quietly proves the opposite: the tasks a machine can absorb turn out to be the easy ones, and what's left behind is the hard, human part — reading a person, defusing them, and explaining something complicated to someone who is upset and short of time.
The data backs it. Across the industry, hostility is rare — only 1% of surveyed agents describe their calls as mostly negative (though on a dedicated complaints line, that will look nothing like your day). So for most people this isn't a story about abuse. It's a story about a job that is timed, recorded, measured and underpaid, done by people who are told weekly that software is coming for them — and only 21% of whom are excited about it.
Human interaction is a skill. It's time we paid for it like one.
- About the Author
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An affiliative leader adept at fostering collaboration, building relationships, and driving team success. Experienced in Call Centre Design and Management as well as Learning and Development domains. Committed to excellence in the customer journey, cultivating a positive work environment, and nurturing learning.
I excel at fostering trust, motivation, and continuous learning. I strike a balance between my leadership focus and my passion for customer excellence frameworks, fostering both the growth and success of my teams.
With a commitment to creating exceptional customer experiences, I empower my team members to excel and continuously develop their skills
