Call center work was technologically simpler 25 years ago, but not necessarily easier. But today, the workforce is smaller, the economics are tighter, and the job itself is more demanding — even as agents have better technology and more flexibility than ever before.
- Contact center jobs have shifted from sometimes well-paid, potentially career-building roles to thin-margin positions marked by lower wages, limited advancement, and high attrition.
- At the same time, the work has become harder: agents must navigate more systems, complete longer training, and handle the complex, emotionally demanding interactions that automation cannot resolve.
- Technology alone will not fix the industry’s talent problems. Contact centers need to pay attention to their workforce: offer better pay, more realistic job design, and smarter hiring methods that identify people who are likely to succeed and stay.
Contact center work has changed a lot on the surface, but the same issues have plagued the industry for decades. High attrition, thin margins, competitive pressures — these problems have all remained and, if anything, have gotten more difficult to solve.
In a recent advisory session with eSkill, a veteran contact center leader with more than two decades in BPO and captive environments shared a candid, behind-the-scenes view of how the call center industry has shifted. Her story traces how contact center work has changed — or rather, how it’s stayed the same.
She says, “I wish I could tell you [contact centers] have evolved, but they haven't.”
The heyday of contact center work
“The call center had its heyday…20 years ago, where it had [a] vibrant culture [and made] a great career path,” our contact center leader says.
Our consultant started as an agent in a contact center while studying to become an archaeologist. It was just supposed to be a way to earn money during college. Instead, she stayed in the industry for 17 years, eventually running HR for the same organization.
One reason was simple: contact center work paid.
“When I started, call center work was very lucrative. I started doing technical support, and as a university student, the job…started at $15 an hour. But minimum wage at that time was like, $5 an hour,” she says.
At the time, that wage differential — triple minimum wage — did several things: it attracted higher-caliber candidates (including degree-seeking students); it made contact center roles feel like real careers, not just stopgaps; and it supported a genuine working culture.
In that first company, a BPO that grew from a garage startup into a global operation, the strong leadership and intentional culture, coupled with career mobility, kept her there for nearly two decades.
The same wasn’t true everywhere, though — contact centers were difficult to staff even then, and turnover at other contact centers was high, too. High attrition was a defining feature of contact centers in the ‘90s and early 2000s, and it's stayed that way: according to data from ContactBabel, industry-wide turnover now runs 30-45% annually, and attrition rates have actually trended upward since the early 2010s (27% around 2013 up to 34%+ by 2019, with 2021-2022 surveys showing attrition in the 35-42% range).
Contact centers may have once boasted a few bright spots, but today, they’re getting squeezed everywhere.
Contact centers get the squeeze
Fast forward to today, and the economic picture looks very different.
Why? Several forces are at play. Clients’ margins are under pressure, especially in telecom, healthcare, and financial services. Many enterprises don’t want to own the cost and complexity of running large in-house centers, so they outsource to BPOs. BPOs, then, need to out-bid what it would cost to run a contact center in-house and still make a profit in the end.
The result is sustained downward pressure on wages. And you can see it directly in who shows up to apply: “We hire the cream of the crap. You find the best of the crappy that you can find,” our consultant colorfully puts it. Many hires come from underserved communities with historically limited opportunities — yet others attempt to “job stack” and work multiple contact center jobs at once by using several monitors, and still others show up just to intentionally cycle through training programs to get paid without ever intending to stay or take calls.
In 2025, mean salaries for contact center agents fell year-over-year: new agent pay dropped 4.1% to $39,253; experienced agents dropped 5.9% to $45,362; team leaders/supervisors fell 3.0% to $59,241; and contact center managers fell 1.9% to $89,311.
Increasingly low pay is not only a top reason contact centers are difficult to staff, but also one of the top reasons for turnover. In ContactBabel’s aggregated historical ranking of attrition causes for contact center hires, “low pay” sits just behind "wrong type of person for the job,” and just ahead of "lack of promotion/development opportunity" in the top three reasons for turnover.
Work gets more complex
For many large clients, new agents are already expected to master multiple systems and complex products. That requires weeks — sometimes months — of training before an agent is considered production-ready. Couple that with the clunky and occasionally ancient systems that clients must learn to navigate, and the job reaches new heights of complexity.
“In a BPO, you're at the mercy of these [client systems]…We had some very big enterprise clients, and the bigger the enterprise, the more archaic their systems are, and the harder they are to work in. New, younger, smaller companies tend to be more progressive, but the big enterprise clients…support their old systems,” our consultant explains. “If you're going to be supporting [a major tech company] in service…you're going to do four weeks in class where you learn all the products, the guides…then you're going to do two weeks of Academy Bay.” Academy Bay, in call center-speak, is a hyper-supervised training phase where new hires begin taking live customer calls. In healthcare or financial services, our consultant explains, the entire training portion can take even longer, from 12 to 13 weeks.
That long training cycle creates a structural problem: it’s expensive. Additionally, attrition is highest in the earliest stages: many candidates simply don’t intend to stay beyond training, rather cycling through the training phases at various contact centers as a short-term income stream. They fall into a cohort our consultant calls "professional trainees.”
And with call duration up ~80% since 2003 for typical inbound service calls (since self-service and AI have skimmed off the simple interactions), agents are left to handle harder, more emotionally loaded calls — while still navigating the old, fragmented systems many large, legacy contact centers still rely on.
That means even more training.
See how pre-hire testing can help your hire contact center agents who stay
Technology: leaps forward, stuck in place
Contact centers have been getting squeezed for a while — and the biggest squeeze right now is coming from how AI is shaking up the contact center workforce.
Industry-wide, headcount has stalled, even as interaction volumes keep growing — forcing contact centers to handle more calls with the same number of (or fewer) hires. Among contact center and customer service businesses using AI, 31% have reported that they’ve reduced (or plan to reduce) agent headcount as a result.
While AI has skimmed off the easier calls and therefore offloaded some of the more difficult work onto human agents, agents now have to handle more emotionally demanding calls, while some are even in charge of wrangling flocks of AI agents. That’s one of the many ways technology has been a double-edged sword for contact centers.
Hybrid work
Technology has also reshaped where contact center work happens. Remote and hybrid work surged from about 19% of agents working from home in 2019 to 87% in 2021 (due to the pandemic), with many centers now planning for 60–80% of agents to remain remote.
For employers, flexibility is as much a cost strategy as an employee perk. Remote work can reduce office expenses, expand the labor pool without broad pay increases, and provide some of the savings associated with offshoring without moving operations overseas.
But working from home hasn’t made the job less closely managed. As AI handles more routine contacts, human agents are increasingly evaluated through automated call scoring, sentiment analysis, performance dashboards, and gamified leaderboards. The contact center may look less like a traditional factory floor, but surveillance has arguably become more granular — digital rather than physical.
And despite better tools and greater flexibility, the underlying retention problem remains. Repetitive, emotionally demanding, closely measured work continues to burn agents out at stubbornly high rates.
AI power
“AI has taken the robot out of us.”
Those are the words of one contact center agent interviewed in an AP article — who describes how technology has helped him focus on actually serving customers, rather than taking notes or spending time clicking through menus.
Technology is one area where, on paper, contact centers have made undeniable strides. Tools like AI-powered routing, knowledge systems, and even accent-neutralization have changed what’s possible.
That’s where contact center investment is heading, as well. In 2025, 68% of contact centers ranked artificial intelligence among their top five IT investment priorities, compared with just 14% in 2016. Over the same period, workforce management fell from 35% to 7%, according to data from ContactBabel.
Accent translation
“One of the things that's been fantastic for global is [Sanas], so it's an accent neutralization tool, which is fantastic. It's mesmerizing to listen to it…that has been fantastic. It helps,” our consultant explains.
The Washington Post published an article profiling the creators of Sanas and how it’s affected contact center work globally. Particularly, they focus on Indian call center agents and how their accents have been smoothed out, “making their speech more understandable to American clients on the other end of the line.”
Co-founder of Sanas, Sharath Narayana, has said AI has helped create thousands of new jobs in India, “which was overtaken by the Philippines as the world’s largest hub for call centers more than a decade ago, due in part to accent concerns.”
The human core hasn’t changed
Despite all the economic and technological shifts, some fundamentals are surprisingly constant. Attrition is still the leading problem for contact centers. And empathy is still one of the highest-valued characteristics for agents.
In fact, if anything, empathy has become even more valued — empathy has jumped from 26% (2014) to 55% (2025) as the most valued trait among contact center agents, according to ContactBabel data — a proxy for how much more emotionally demanding the work has become.
There are still “lifers” who genuinely love the work, build community in their classes, and stay for years even at modest pay. “You do see your lifers…we have some people on a very small line of business…they've been [there] years…They love the job. They come to work every day, and that was just their pace,” our consultant explains.
What’s beginning to change — slowly — is how progressive leaders think about fit and retention. Instead of relying only on resumes or personality tests, our consultant has experimented with interest-based data to find people who are more likely to stay and thrive.
In I/O psychology, this is called empirically keyed biodata. It describes information about a person’s background and life experiences, including a wide range of details such as hobbies, early work experiences, or attitudes toward teamwork.
The “keying” process is empirical, meaning it is based on actual data rather than assumptions. For example, if current hires who like to play Dungeons & Dragons or other tabletop games are found to be the ones who succeed and stay on the job, new hires who also like playing tabletop games may also be more likely to succeed at work.
Our advisor has seen far stronger links between agents’ outside interests and their likelihood to stay and perform, than between traditional personality scores and outcomes — down to the level of recruiting night-shift stars from local role‑playing game communities.
“There's so much more correlation…with people who would stay and just come to work every day and have better attendance just by doing, like, a general interest survey,” our consultant explains. “We did this personal interest survey and collected all of this data. I started recruiting people [who] play these little games with cards and people and those kinds of things…So we started putting up posters in these places, and these were our night shift people. They did fantastic. They stayed. They were great, but we just learned, ‘Oh, they all play this role playing stuff.’”
What does that mean for contact center hiring overall? Broadly, focusing on the people — their personalities, their interests, and their skillsets — makes the biggest difference in contact center hiring.
About 3 million Americans work in call center jobs. Millions more work in call centers around the world. They answer billions of inquiries a year. While overall, the contact center workforce has shrunk, that means the people that do have the job are even more important to overall functions.
Under the layers of technology and metrics, the core challenge that contact centers face remains human: finding people who will not only do the job well, but who genuinely enjoy the work — and feel supported by the company they work for, too.
