Why Manual Scaling is Too Expensive — And a Waste of Time

The average agent salary in the U.S. last year was $42,760. Meanwhile, contact centers dedicate between 50 to 70% of agents to Tier 1 support even though AI agents can handle 90% of all Tier 1 requests for around thirty cents per conversation. If you have 50 agents, you’re wasting around $2 million per year. Why?

Why do you need half or more of your staff handling the least complex, highest volume, lowest value interactions that annoy customers and burn out agents? Because you’re still trying to scale manually. Because you still have the “We can train anyone” mindset. Because you are focused on problem solving and not creating customer value.

And it’s simply unsustainable. You can’t afford it, human agents won’t deal with it for very long (see attrition rate), customers hate it and it pushes you to track and value the wrong things.

But I love my KPIs

The mistaken assumption that you can scale manually is defining your KPIs, keeping them focused on cost and efficiency. The top five metrics most commonly measured as shown by ICMI’s 2024 State of the Contact Center are:

1. Abandonment rate
2. Average Handle Time
3. Quality
4. Average Speed of Answer
5. Agent Productivity

Abandonment rate is almost entirely a problem of the manual mindset. An AI agent can instantly answer interactions on every channel. AHT says nothing about quality or value, only cost. Quality I won’t complain about. Average Speed of Answer and Agent Productivity are again efficiency and cost metrics unrelated to customer value and satisfaction. Many people continue to mistake cost and efficiency metrics with quality. A twenty-minute phone call that solves a customer problem and even adds an upsell is a good thing. A three-minute call an agent rushes through to hit their AHT metrics so they get that bonus (or keep their job) is not.

Yes, cost and efficiency will always be factors to watch. Absolutely. But they have no causal relationship with happy customers and customer value and I’d be shocked if you could even find a useful correlation.

Here comes the tough love

Humans respond to incentives. Take a simple board game like Monopoly. Based on the rules, people behave a certain way or within a certain range of behavior to achieve the goal (winning). Change those rules, for example that you can build houses by having only two of a given color set instead of three, and you’ll see dramatic shifts in how players act individually and interact. Your contact center is no different.

When agents are micromanaged and hassled about AHT for example, you get situations like this:

“One of the places I worked valued handling time above all else. You were better off not helping people and getting them off the phone. You were better off going ‘our connection is bad’ and hanging up. The people that fixed people’s problems got the most pushback. The ‘best person’ there took the most calls, but fixed nothing. His callers had to call back, but his numbers looked good on a spreadsheet.”

While it may not be this bad everywhere, it’s an example of how incentives drive behavior and can directly work contrary to your goals.

My point is this:

• You continue to believe in hiring, training and retention.
• Scaling manually doesn’t work, which means cost and efficiency are paramount.
• The idea you can scale manually and hire/train anyone heavily influences your KPIs.
• Your KPIs drive agent behavior, CX, AX and overall outcomes.
• They are all bad, but you keep repeating the same and expecting different results.

You need to fix the core problem, not rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic!

If you want to level up your contact center and make life better for yourself, your agents and your customers, it’s time to enter the discomfort zone and reevaluate some unspoken assumptions that are setting you up for failure.

AI is not the solution to everything; neither is automation. But thoughtfully deployed AI and automation via AI agents will address cost and efficiency concerns, dramatically relieve agents, improve everyone’s experience, create a functional contact center and enable a sustainable strategy that will let you focus on how to get better — instead of how to fail less.