[doorhammer]

I'm curious, have you noticed an impact on agent morale with this?

Specifically: Do they spend more time actually taking calls now? I guess as long as you're not at the burnout point with utilization it's probably fine, but when I was still supporting call centers I can't count the number of projects I saw trying to push utilization up not realizing how real burnout is at call centers.

I assume that's not news to you, of course. At a certain utilization threshold we'd always start to see AHTs creep up as agents got burned out and consciously or not started trying to stay on good calls.

Guess it also partly depends on if you're in more of a cust serv call center or sales.

I hated working as an actual agent on the phones, but call center ops and strategy at scale has always been fascinating.

[lljk_kennedy]

Thank you, I came to say this too. You're mushing your humans harder, and they'll break. Those 5 mins of downtime post-call aren't 100% note taking - it's catching their breath, trying to re-compose after dealing with a nasty customer, trying to re-energise after a deep technical session etc.

I think AI in general is just being misused to optimise local minima in detriment to the overall system.

[ponector]

Imagine how AI changed the call center's work:

1. Some agents have been laid off.

2. Survivors got stripped off 5-minutes summarizing breaks between calls and assigned new higher targets of how many calls should they take per hour/day.

And it wasn't a good job before AI...

[doorhammer]

So, I fully agree that we should be aware how AI use is impacting front-line agents--honestly, I'd bet AI is overall a bad thing in most cases--but that's just a gut feeling.

That said, it's possible the agents weren't given extra time to make notes about calls and write summaries; often they're not.

You usually have different states you can be in as a call center agent. Something like: "On a call", "Available to take a new call", "Unavailable to take a new call"

Being on a call is also being unavailable to take a call, but you'd obviously track that separately.

"Unavailable" time is usually further broken down into paid time (breaks), unpaid time (lunch) etc

And _sometimes_ the agent will have a state called something like "After Call Work" which is an "Unavailable" state that you use to finish up tasks related to the call you were just on.

So, full disclosure: I did work for a huge e-com supporting huge call centers, but I only worked for one company supporting call centers. What I'm talking about is my experience there and what I heard from people who also worked there who had experience with other call centers.

A lot of call centers don't give agents any "After Call Work" time and if they do, it's heavily discouraged and negatively impacts your metrics. They're expected to finish everything related to the call _during_ the call.

If you're thinking "that's not great" then, yeah, I agree, but it was above my paygrade.

It's entirely possible that offloading that task to an LLM gives agents _more_ breathing room.

But also totally possible that you're right. I don't know the GPs exact situation, but I feel pretty confident that other call centers are doing similar things with AI tagging and summaries and that you see both situations (AI giving more breathing room some places and taking it away others).

[ponector]

>> It's entirely possible that offloading that task to an LLM gives agents _more_ breathing room

In theory, yes. But there is no way they are going to save millions by giving more breathing room to agents.

[doorhammer]

As a whole the incentives of capitalism are aligned as you suggest, but every major corp I've worked with has not-so-rare pockets of savvy middle managers that know how to play the game and also care about the welfare of their employees--even if the cultural incentives don't lean that way. (I'm assuming a US market here--and I'm at least tangentially aware that other cultures aren't identical)

E.g., when I worked in call centers I was directly part of initiatives that saved millions and made agents lives better, with an intentionality toward both outcomes.

I also saw people drive agents into the ground trying to maximize utilization and/or schedule adherence with total disregard for the negative morale and business value they were pushing.

It makes me wonder if there are any robust org psych studies about the prevalence and success of middle managers trying to strategically navigate those kinds of situations to benefit their employees. I'd bet it's more rare than not, but I have no idea by how much.

[tafda]

Moral Mazes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Mazes ) is a sociology classic along these lines.

Here's a relevant interview with the author, Robert Jackall: https://anso.williams.edu/files/2015/07/Jackall_interview_Ch...