More than half of contact centre leaders say continuously developing their people is one of the hardest aspects of performance to get right, according to a new industry poll from Elephants Don’t Forget.
When asked which performance challenge was hardest to do consistently, 51% selected developing people continuously rather than periodically. A further 33% chose measuring customer outcomes alongside efficiency, while just 3% selected enabling AI to handle routine work so employees could focus elsewhere.
The webinar, which attracted 150 contact centre leaders, suggests that maintaining frontline competence remains a significant challenge as organisations accelerate their investment in AI and automation.
This comes as businesses continue to invest in training, QA, coaching and technology, but often struggle to make those initiatives work together consistently enough to deliver sustained improvement.
Elephants Don’t Forget’s own data, based on more than 200 million employee knowledge interventions, shows that the average competence score of a trained frontline employee is just 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, organisations 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 webinar explored how AI can reduce cognitive load through applications such as summarisation, automated QA, pattern identification and real-time guidance. However, employees still need sufficient underlying knowledge to recognise when an AI recommendation may be inappropriate and when human judgement should take over.
Professor Patricia Riddell described this as the difference between “cognitive offloading” and “cognitive surrender”: using technology to remove unnecessary mental effort without allowing people to stop independently assessing the information presented to them.
The discussion also highlighted a broader measurement challenge. While organisations can readily track training completion, this does not necessarily show what an employee still knows or can apply months later during a live customer interaction.
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.”
Elephants Don’t Forget customer results show that improving employee competence can translate into familiar contact centre measures, including improvements in First Contact Resolution and customer satisfaction, alongside reductions in reportable complaints, employee errors and Average Handling Time.
Elephants Don’t Forget is the home of Clever Nelly, a multi-award-winning AI-powered continual assessment solution that helps organisations turn workplace training into lasting in-role competence. By continually assessing and reinforcing knowledge using proven learning science, Clever Nelly helps organisations improve performance, reduce risk and strengthen customer outcomes. The company works with customer service, operations and compliance leaders across a range of sectors and financially guarantees to improve employee competence.
For additional information on Elephants Don’t Forget visit their Website
