51% of Contact Centre Leaders Struggle With Development

A new poll from Elephants Don’t Forget finds 51% of contact centre leaders struggle with continuous people development.

In a webinar attended by 150 contact centre leaders, 51% identified continuous people development as their biggest challenge, compared with 33% who selected measuring customer outcomes alongside efficiency and 3% who chose enabling AI to handle routine work.

The findings come as contact centres continue to invest in training, quality assurance, coaching and AI, while facing challenges in making these initiatives work together over time.

Elephants Don’t Forget’s data, based on more than 200 million employee knowledge interventions, found that the average competence score of a trained frontline employee is 54%.

Ben Scales, Head of Sales at Elephants Don’t Forget, said:

“AI is understandably taking up a huge amount of attention in contact centres, but technology alone doesn’t solve the performance challenge.

“People still make the decisions that ultimately reach customers. If employees don’t retain the knowledge they need, or leaders only develop capability periodically, organizations risk putting increasingly sophisticated technology around an underlying competence problem.

“The opportunity is to bring the two together: use AI where it genuinely removes effort, while continuously developing the knowledge and judgement people need to make good decisions.”

The discussion also examined how AI applications such as automated QA, summarization, pattern identification and real-time guidance can reduce cognitive load, while employees still need the knowledge to assess AI recommendations and apply human judgement.

A further focus was the difference between completing training and retaining knowledge. Scales added:

“Completion rates tell leaders that training happened. They don’t necessarily tell them whether somebody can still recall and apply that knowledge when a customer needs them to.

“As contact centres become more AI-enabled, visibility of employee competence becomes more important, not less. Leaders need to understand what their people genuinely know, where the gaps are and whether improving that capability is translating into better operational and customer outcomes.”

The findings highlight the importance of looking beyond training completion to understand whether employees can retain and apply knowledge during real customer interactions.

Author: Hannah Swankie

Reviewed by: Megan Jones