Before anyone buys an AI tool, it is worth being precise about the problem. Most of the strain in a modern contact centre does not come from the conversations themselves — it comes from everything wrapped around them.
Ask a contact centre leader what their people struggle with and you will usually hear about volume. Ask the agents themselves and you hear something different: the looking up, the switching, the re-typing, the summarising, the wondering whether the note they just wrote will be read by anyone. The conversation is rarely the hard part. The work around the conversation is.
This is the first of three connected articles from Geomant on how AI can be deployed into customer contact in a way that actually helps. We are starting deliberately with the problem, because most disappointing AI deployments we are asked to rescue were solutions attached to a problem nobody had described properly.
Less repetitive work, more attention to the customer
Agents spend a large share of the working day on repetitive actions: retrieving customer data, moving between applications, writing summaries, registering contact reasons, and entering the same information more than once. Each action looks trivial on its own. Together they can consume most of a shift — particularly when the person is also under time pressure and handling emotionally demanding conversations with little influence over how they work.
The answer is not to ask people to work faster. It is to remove actions that should never have been theirs to perform. What is left is the work where a human genuinely makes the difference: listening, asking the right question, thinking alongside the customer and resolving the issue.
When does repetitive work become a problem?
Repetition is not automatically harmful. Some recurring activity gives structure and predictability to a shift. It turns damaging when people must repeat simple actions constantly while having little freedom to adjust the process or decide anything for themselves. It is that specific combination — high demands with low autonomy — that does the damage.
Research by TNO and CBS found that 16 percent of Dutch employees in 2024 faced both high job demands and low autonomy, and 42 percent reported little freedom over how, where or when their work was done. Those figures cover the whole working population rather than customer contact specifically, but they make the point: room to regulate your own work matters. The World Health Organization takes a similar line on burnout — it is not caused by a single task, but by chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, showing up as exhaustion, mental distance from the job and a reduced sense of effectiveness.
Repetition turns into overload when it combines with
Production and time pressure
Targets that leave no recovery time between interactions, so saved seconds are immediately spent.
No influence over the process
People can see what is broken but have no route to change it.
Emotionally heavy conversations
Difficult contacts stacked back to back with administration in between.
Systems that do not support the task
Multiple applications, duplicate entry, and knowledge that is hard to find under pressure.
Limited variety and development
The same narrow task set, with little visible path to something more.
A lack of appreciation and support
Effort that goes unrecognised, and supervisors with no time to coach.
The hidden workload between customer conversations
Workload in a contact centre is usually measured by the number of calls, emails and chats handled. Yet a significant part of the effort sits immediately before, during and after each contact — and the customer never sees any of it.
- Collecting the right customer data
- Retrieving the history of previous contacts
- Combining information from different systems
- Consulting procedures and knowledge articles
- Checking and validating data
- Summarising the conversation
- Updating the case or file
- Starting follow-up actions
- Handing information to another department
A straightforward customer question can therefore still demand considerable mental effort — not because the question is complex, but because the agent has to knit together systems, processes and departments that were never designed to meet.
Customer contact is emotional work too
Alongside the administrative load sits an emotional one. An agent must stay friendly, calm and professional even when the customer is angry, distressed or unreasonable. The gap between what someone feels and what they must project is known as emotional dissonance, and studies of call centre agents link greater dissonance to lower job satisfaction and a stronger intention to leave. Autonomy and support from a manager pull in the opposite direction.
Technology cannot remove that emotional weight. What good design can do is make sure nobody has to fight a clumsy system in the minutes surrounding a difficult conversation. That is a modest claim — and it is exactly why it tends to hold up in practice.
Why this matters before you choose a tool
If the problem is described as "we handle too many contacts", you will buy deflection. If it is described as "our people spend forty percent of every interaction assembling context that already exists in our systems", you will buy something quite different — and you will be able to prove whether it worked.
