AI in Contact Center Outsourcing: Time Saver or Gimmick?

LinkedIn and other platforms where BPOs may bragvertise is filled with a lot of buzz and industry jargon about AI, and how great it is. But really, what's in it for every day Americans? What's in it for contact centers?

What is AI?

Let's oversimplify it. AI is a manner of analytical computing that is designed to have human-like prompts and either a chat-like response, or an "agentic" response which will go out and "do a thing."

AI's are generally the package of different tools achieved to interpret a prompt or intent, into what the system will computationally determine is what you are looking for.

Important to note, that AI's can "hallucinate" or give the wrong response. It will still answer, even if it doesn't have knowledge of a topic, in most cases.... and will answer wrong. Beware of this.

Where are we today?

Customer Viewpoint

If you have been around for any length of time, you will have called a contact center. Sometimes, you have a great experience. Others, you end up waiting on hold, getting to an ill-equipped or already aggravated person on the other end of the line, often in another country with only a baseline understanding of your native language.

On the balance, calling in or reaching to most medium-to-large sized businesses is a chore for the past 20 years. Contact centers, from a customer perspective, has not changed in any meaningful way.

What has changed, is the (IVR) interactive voice prompts, with AI and speech recognition. IVR's often seek to deflect calls to less expensive chat agents, or call you back to avoid paying cloud VoIP providers for the time on hold. We have only become more skilled at not communicating, and cutting cost.

How BPO sees itself:

The BPO industry believes it is making breakthroughs, with every post, always something high tech and positive in tone.

Don't trust me! Verify for yourself. Look over at LinkedIn or the business websites of notable names in the BPO world, such as TTEC (formerly TeleTech), Concentrix (formerly Convergys, Stream, and a few others), Wipro, TelePerformance, Sutherland, and Everest Group.

Let's pick on a post. This one came from a gentleman who was at one time my manager at a previous employer.
https://www.everestgrp.com/workforce-management-is-being-reimagined-for-a-human-and-ai-world-blog/
Quite a lot of buzz in there, but note the statement "Bots handle a growing share of interactions." There it is, that's the end-game. Resource management, and reducing overall workload to increase profit margin. That's it. Less human hands, less cost. That is further reinforced further down, talking about "cost efficiency with control," and "autonomous orchestration."

What the post gets right is the need for human oversight of AI, as the norm. The problem becomes when the finance teams start pushing pressure to trained Workforce Management Specialists, who may or may not be SWPP or certified.

How BPO employees experience has changed:

Incremental. I did a cursory search, and BPO employees seem to talk about the same things.

The same operational formula that was in place in 2006 is still there today in 2025. It's almost all metrics, and all gunning for handling the most transactions (calls/people) in the shortest period, for the cheapest amount spent.

The only time a discussion about issue resolution comes up is when preventing repeat callers (less calls, less spend), and maintaining survey metrics (CSAT/Net Promoter, or other method).

To do this, there is a balance with the number of people you would staff for the call arrival pattern, how much time you would allow them to be off the phone/idle (Phone Occupancy), and how much time they could take on-clock breaks.

This is also where some companies got themselves in trouble cutting corners, repeatedly. Incidents do happen, where supervisors or management wind up expecting off-the-clock mandatory work activities, for hourly employees. That's generally not legal in the US, but it would involve system startups, waiting for updates to be installed on a workstation before shift (which would count against your attendance metrics too), or other tasks. This might also include restroom breaks - where you're expected to go on the BPO's prescribed schedule.

AI's Role in Workforce Management: Silver Lining?

AI can be an excellent use of technology to help the employee experience (EX), and in turn help the customer experience (CX).

I can think of a multitude of ways that AI can make life better for employees in a BPO, and that translates to a better experience.

• Contact Center Agent Feedback : Create a daily happy/unhappy index, juxtaposed against scheduling/staffing conditions.
  "If your employees don't love the company, how will the customer?"
  
  It's no secret that a high Phone Occupancy can cause burn-out and frustration with call center staff. That translates to survey scores, because customers experience the human side of people. This data can help to measure, in a simple way, the temperature of your overall operation, and identify if there's an anomaly in the works.
• Better management of staffing, for time off, forecasting call arrival more effectively.
  Picture this use case: Agent wants to know likelihood of approval for time off. The AI can present heat map over the calendar, based on current data, as to which days would be best to take off.
  
  Picture this use case: Agent requests time off. Has plenty of time. AI examines the staffing and finds that there isn't a significant impact, or it sees a request for some additional work hours elsewhere. It goes ahead and approves it.
  
  In both of the use cases, the agent doesn't have to ask anyone for permission, except if the AI doesn't see an opening. That's when ethical use of AI kicks in. Someone has to approve those one time a year family vacations, scheduled months in advance.
• Safety. AI's can help with safety.
  This is a sore spot for me. Contact centers, especially working from home, have very little focus on safety, in cases of a disaster. There is an on-paper plan, but there is never a practice drill or training. This is due to razor thin margin/cost controls.
  
  When people are working from home, the weather is their last thought usually, because they have a headset on, focused in. They will never hear a weather alert radio or siren. AI can take data from their location, and be used to interrupt the call, hand off to another viable agent, allowing the agent to get to shelter.
  
  In-the-office? Smoothy direct the agent to a visual map of where to take shelter in the building.
  
  What about the customer? Well... you have their address probably in a database. Tell the customer, they are in a tornado warning, and they will appreciate that heads up.
  
  It isn't just tornadoes, but other weather events can be deadly.
  
  While we are at it, the AI should mark the agent's Workforce Management schedule with an approved EVAC code for certain weather warning events. This provides document for management and HR purposes.
  
  My experience has been, if you are a BPO employee at home, and you leave the phone for a tornado actually on the ground, you might just end up getting a call from HR threatening your job.
• Hiring Plan Analysis
  Someone has to be on-boarded as people leave, retire, or otherwise evolve into greater things. Figure out your shrinkage, forecasts, and build your hiring/staffing plan. Enhance the data with already known data, to feed into analytical techniques. This isn't new stuff. This is baseline.
  
  Further enhance that with employee experience events. What is an event? It could be complaints filed, a change in benefits, seasonality, or other unusual event that may cause attrition or shrinkage.
• Real-Time Anomaly Analysis and Agentic Reaction
  What if you could respond to an impending spike of shrinkage associated to an event? There are so many reaction plans this could cover.
  
  An AI can be used to immediately respond to a disaster, or anomaly. In at-home contact centers, there's usually a team of part-time "jumpers," who will switch work roles or log in to handle a call spike.
  
  Not enough jumper agents? Offer a call back with the same person, on the schedule.
  
  The AI can make that call, if it sees a warning polygon over a particular area. If it's a hurricane, there's more time. If it's urgent, the AI can tell the customer the agent had to evacuate for safety.
  
  This might include other events, like a safety/workplace danger event, to control call routing altogether. It might include if a network path or endpoint goes down, route to your working centers, and bring in jumpers or offer overtime (if the calculated ROI is there).
  
  Not enough time to write notes? Automatically place an AI speech recognition driven summary in the account notes (with an AI tag so that if something doesn't seem right, a human review can correct it). This will remind the agent or next person what happened, and that the agent didn't just cold hung up on the customer.

Conclusion

Yes, AI can work for Workforce Management. It may only have an incremental impact, unless the aim is to further cost cut.

However, for it to matter to customers, you have to improve the employee experience overall, and change the way BPO treats employees fundamentally. This isn't going to be easy.

There is one phrase that comes to mind, from an investor call I listened to. Churn-and-burn. This is a common pattern - to get a contract, and let people go, although a position is hired as full time permanent. At the end of a contract, sometimes there's an opening for unethical behavior to save a dollar, and the result of that is in the employee's mind, the company brand is tarnished forever.

Eventually, in a geographic area, if the BPO doesn't stay on top of the experience factor for employees, they begin to get a reputation for being a terrible company to work with. All the LinkedIn and advertising cheerleaders can't change that.

No matter the brand, BPO call center agents have some of the shortest work tenure of all employment options. Once we're no longer in the Operations side (agent, supervisor, manager, etc), and into the Workforce or IT side of BPO, it gets better. However, your core is your agents.

BPO executives:
The contact center agent experience trickles down to the customer experience.

What can we do, to make it better for our own employees, using AI, instead of creating more fear that they will be replaced by AI in cost cuts?

If contact center agents are the profit drivers, BPO must enable the client to make a larger sales impact or customer loyalty impact. Having more customers will often drive more contact center interactions, and in turn more profit for the BPO. This is a powerful value proposition.

As procedures improve, allow attrition and promotion cycles to naturally right-size the agent population. This is a support lifecycle, not just a series of transactions.