AI shakes up the call center industry, but some tasks are still better
left to the humans
[September 08, 2025] By
KEN SWEET
NEW YORK (AP) — Armen Kirakosian remembers the frustrations of his first
job as a call center agent nearly 10 years ago: the aggravated
customers, the constant searching through menus for information and the
notes he had to physically write for each call he handled.
Thanks to artificial intelligence, the 29-year-old from Athens, Greece,
is no longer writing notes or clicking on countless menus. He often has
full customer profiles in front of him when a person calls in and may
already know what problem the customer has before even saying “hello.”
He can spend more time actually serving the customer.
“A.I. has taken (the) robot out of us,” Kirakosian said.
Roughly 3 million Americans work in call center jobs, and millions more
work in call centers around the world, answering billions of inquiries a
year about everything from broken iPhones to orders for shoes.
Kirakosian works for TTEC, a company that provides third party customer
service lines in 22 countries to companies in industries such as autos
and banking that need extra capacity or have outsourced their call
center operations.
Answering these calls can be thankless work. Roughly half of all
customer service agents leave the job after a year, according to
McKinsey, with stress and monotonous work being among the reasons
employees quit.
Much of what these agents deal with is referred to in the industry as
“break/fix,” which means something is broken — or wrong or confusing —
and the customer expects the person on the phone to fix the problem.
Now, it’s a question of who will be tasked with the fix: a human, a
computer, or a human augmented by a computer.
Already, AI agents have taken over more routine call center tasks. Some
jobs have been lost and there have been dire forecasts about the future
job market for these individuals, ranging from modest single-percentage
point losses, to as many as half of all call center jobs going away in
the next decade. The drop likely won't match the more dire predictions,
however, because it's become evident that the industry will still need
humans, perhaps with even higher levels of learning and training, as
some customer service issues become increasingly harder to solve.
Some finance companies have already experimented with going in heavily
with AI for their customer service issues.
Klarna, the Swedish buy now, pay later company, replaced 700 of their
roughly 3,000 customer service agents with chatbots and AI in 2024. The
results were mixed. While the company did save money, Klarna found there
was still a need for higher skilled human agents in certain
circumstances, such as complicated issues related to identity theft.
Earlier this year, Klarna hired seven internal freelancers to handle
these issues.
Earlier this year, Klarna hired a handful of customer service employees
back to the firm, acknowledging there were certain issues that AI
couldn’t handle as well as a real person, like identity theft.
“Our vision of an AI-first contact center, where AI agents handle the
majority of conversations and fewer, better trained and better paid
human agents support only the most complex tasks, is quickly becoming a
reality,” said Gadi Shamia of Replicant, an AI-software company that
trains chatbots to sound more human, in an interview with consultants at
McKinsey.
[to top of second column] |
Armen Kirakosian, Global Senior Manager, Learning & Development TTEC
poses in Athens, Greece, Thursday, Aug. 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Thanassis
Stavrakis)
The call center customer's experience, while improved, is still far from
perfect.
The initial customer service call has long been handled through
interactive voice response systems, known in the industry as IVR.
Customers interact with IVR when they're told “press one for sales,
press two for support, press five for billing.” These crude systems got
an update in the 2010s, when customers could prompt the system by saying
“sales” or “support” or simple phrases like “I’d like to pay a bill”
instead of navigating through a labyrinthian set of menu options.
But customers have little patience for these menus, leading them to
“zero out,” which is call center slang for when a customer hits the zero
button on their their keypad in hopes of reaching a human. It’s also not
uncommon that after a customer “zeros out” they will be put on hold and
transferred because they did not end up in the right place for their
request.
Aware of Americans' collective impatience with IVR, Democratic Sen.
Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Republican Jim Justice of West Virginia
have introduced the “Keep Call Centers in America Act,” which would
require clear ways to reach a human agent, and provide incentives to
companies that keep call center jobs in the U.S.
Companies are trying to roll out telephone systems that broadly
understand customer service requests and predict where to send a
customer without navigating a menu. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is
coming out with its “ChatGPT Agent” service for users that’s able to
understand phrases like “I need to find a hotel for a wedding next year,
please give me options for clothing and gifts.”
Bank of America says it has had increasing success in integrating such
features into “Erica,” its chatbot that debuted in 2018. When Erica
cannot handle a request, the agent transfers the customer directly to
the right department. Erica is now also predictive and analytical, and
knows for instance that a customer may repeatedly have a low balance and
may need better help budgeting or may have multiple subscriptions to the
same service.
Bank of America said this month that Erica has been used 3 billion times
since its creation and is increasingly taking on a higher case load of
customer service requests. The chatbot's moniker comes from the last
five letters of the company's name.
James Bednar, vice president of product and innovation at TTEC, has
spent much of his career trying to make customer service calls less
painful for the caller as well as the company. He said these tools could
eventually kill off IVR for good, ending the need for anyone to “zero
out.”
“We're getting to the point where AI will get you to the right person
for your problem without you having to route through those menus,”
Bednar said.
All contents © copyright 2025 Associated Press. All rights reserved |
