AI gives operators sight of what people spend time on.
Contact centre leaders are under increasing pressure to do more with less, improve customer experience, support agent wellbeing and meet ever-tightening compliance requirements, all while controlling costs. Yet many organisations are trying to solve these challenges without a clear view of where agent time is actually being spent.
By Sally Hodgin, Principal AI Consultant at Connect
While customer interactions remain an agent’s core responsibility, a significant portion of their day is consumed by after-call work (ACW) and other non-customer-facing tasks such as call wrap-ups, reporting, knowledge searches and administration. The problem isn’t that this work exists, it’s that most operators lack the visibility needed to understand how long these tasks take, where inefficiencies sit and which activities genuinely add value.
This lack of insight creates a blind spot that impacts operational performance, customer satisfaction, agent experience and compliance. Artificial intelligence is now closing that gap.
The hidden cost of after-call work.
Industry data suggests that up to 50% of agent time is spent on non-customer-facing activities. This includes training, team meetings, scheduled breaks and administrative work such as ACW. While none of this time is idle, poor visibility into how it is distributed often results in lower agent utilisation, higher costs and missed opportunities for optimisation.
When excessive or manual ACW goes unmanaged, several challenges emerge:
- Longer wait times and higher abandonment rates
Agents tied up completing lengthy post-call tasks are unavailable for the next interaction, directly impacting service levels and customer satisfaction.
- Agent burnout and increased attrition
Repetitive, low-value administrative work is a major contributor to fatigue and disengagement. Over time, this leads to burnout and higher staff turnover, which can be an expensive and disruptive cycle.
- Compromised data quality and compliance risk
Under pressure to reduce handle times, agents may rush call notes or data entry. This can result in incomplete records, miscategorised tickets and gaps in compliance documentation.
Without granular visibility into these activities, leaders are left reacting to symptoms such as, rising costs, declining CX scores or audit findings, rather than addressing the true root causes.
Contact centre health depends on three interconnected dimensions.
The health of a contact centre can be measured by three tightly linked dimensions: customer experience (CX), agent experience (AX) and compliance.
An exhausted agent struggling with inefficient tools and processes (poor AX) is unlikely to deliver consistently high-quality customer interactions (poor CX) and increasing the risk of non-compliance.
Consider regulated environments such as collections or financial services. A customer may leave an interaction satisfied (high CX) and the agent happy (high AX), but if the agent failed to follow mandated scripts or explore required outcomes, such as attempting debt recovery, the organisation faces compliance risk, even if CX and AX metrics appear positive, leading to a skewed perception of contact centre health.
Turn blind spots into operational clarity.
AI-driven visibility reveals how agent time is really spent.
How AI delivers the visibility leaders have been missing.
AI delivers the greatest impact in the contact centre when its capabilities are aligned to the distinct needs of agents, supervisors, and senior leaders. Rather than a single use case, AI creates visibility at every level of the operation, supporting frontline performance, strengthening quality oversight and enabling strategic optimisation.
- Agent assist and after-call work: helping agents do their best work
For agents, AI acts as a real-time assistant and administrative co-pilot, reducing friction during and after customer interactions. AI-driven Agent assist solutions listen in the background during live conversations, surfacing relevant knowledge, next-best-action prompts and compliance reminders in real time. This guidance helps agents stay on track without increasing cognitive load, particularly in complex or regulated interactions.
AI also transforms after-call work. Instead of manually typing notes, updating systems and categorising interactions, AI can automatically generate accurate summaries, populate CRM fields and structure interaction data across voice, chat and email. Agents simply review and confirm the output before moving on to the next interaction. By removing high-volume, low-value administrative tasks, AI gives agents back time, reduces fatigue, and allows them to focus on delivering better customer outcomes.
- Quality assurance and quality management: empowering supervisors
For supervisors, AI fundamentally changes how quality and compliance are monitored. Traditional QA processes rely on manually reviewing a small sample of interactions, often weeks after they occur. AI-driven QA and QM solutions can analyse 100% of interactions, continuously and consistently, across all channels.
Every interaction is assessed against defined CX, agent performance and compliance criteria, providing supervisors with objective, data-backed insights into where standards are being met and where coaching is required. This enables earlier intervention, more targeted coaching and greater confidence that policies and procedures are being followed consistently. Importantly, this approach reduces the administrative burden on supervisors, allowing them to spend more time supporting their teams rather than scoring interactions.
- Optimisation and operational intelligence: enabling contact centre leaders
For CIOs, CX and compliance leaders, AI delivers the end-to-end operational visibility that has historically been missing.
By converting unstructured interactions into structured, analysable data, AI provides a clear view of how agent time is spent, where processes create bottlenecks and which activities drive, or erode value. Leaders can see patterns across customer journeys, agent behaviours and compliance outcomes that were previously hidden.
This level of insight enables proactive optimisation: identifying inefficient workflows, improving customer journeys, strengthening compliance assurance and making informed technology investment decisions based on their data rather than just assumptions. With AI, leaders move beyond lagging indicators and gain real-time operational intelligence to optimise performance across the entire contact centre.
Turning insight into outcomes.
Once this level of visibility is achieved, organisations can move beyond insight to driving outcomes. AI-driven analytics reveal where customer journeys break down, where agents are repeatedly slowed by manual steps and where sentiment declines. These insights enable targeted process improvements and the introduction of AI and automation where it delivers the greatest return.
Conversational AI and workflow automation can take over routine follow-ups or transactional steps, such as payment processing or information capture. This reduces friction for customers while freeing agents to focus on higher-value, complex interactions that require empathy and human judgement.
Visibility is the foundation of healthier contact centres.
Contact centres cannot improve what they cannot see. AI provides the operational visibility needed to understand how agents spend their time, where processes fail and how CX, AX and compliance truly intersect.
When deployed with a clear strategy, AI doesn’t make contact centres less human, it enables agents to spend more time on meaningful work, ensures compliance is embedded rather than enforced after the fact and delivers better experiences for customers and employees alike.
For leaders looking to modernise their operations, the question is no longer whether AI belongs in the contact centre, but whether they can afford to operate without the visibility it provides.
Building an AI roadmap that delivers real ROI.
Despite its potential, AI is not a plug-and-play solution. Many organisations struggle to realise value because they deploy tools without the right infrastructure foundations, data readiness, integration strategy or a clear, ROI-backed roadmap.
At Connect, we meet organisations where they are on their AI journey. We start by assessing the foundations, existing CX infrastructure and data availability, because these elements are critical to the success of any AI deployment. From there, we guide organisations through a structured infrastructure and data improvement plan enabling scalable AI deployment and sustained operational impact.
Next through our Data Driven Insights service, we analyse both structured and unstructured interaction data using advanced analytics and AI models. Our business analysts work with organisations to translate these insights into a practical optimisation roadmap, identifying immediate quick wins alongside longer-term initiatives for process improvement, automation and AI deployment over a one-to-five-year horizon. In one engagement, our data-driven insights roadmap identified $3.6 million in projected annual savings, with early AI initiatives delivering sufficient ROI to support subsequent roadmap investments.
As a vendor-agnostic systems integrator, we focus on maximising value from existing investments while recommending best-of-breed technologies where genuine gaps exist. Given the wide variation in AI maturity across platforms, this holistic view is essential to unlocking untapped capability and delivering measurable business outcomes.
Finally, we support organisations through the delivery of roadmap initiatives and ongoing optimisation. Ensuring AI continues to deliver value as business needs, customer expectations and regulatory requirements evolve.
If you’re ready to move from AI insight to measurable outcomes, Connect can help you build a roadmap that delivers sustainable ROI.
Frequently asked questions.
How can AI help contact centre agents manage their after-call work more efficiently?
AI acts as a real-time assistant and administrative co-pilot for agents. It can automatically generate call summaries, populate CRM fields, and structure interaction data across channels, allowing agents to review and confirm instead of manually typing notes. This reduces repetitive, low-value tasks, lowers fatigue, and frees agents to focus on delivering better customer experiences.
What benefits does AI bring to supervisors and quality assurance in contact centres?
AI-driven quality assurance and quality management solutions can analyse 100% of interactions across all channels in real time. This provides supervisors with objective, data-backed insights on CX, agent performance, and compliance. The result is earlier intervention, targeted coaching, reduced administrative burden, and greater confidence that policies and procedures are consistently followed.
How does AI provide operational visibility for contact centre leaders?
AI converts unstructured interaction data into analysable insights, giving leaders a clear view of how agent time is spent, where workflows create bottlenecks, and which activities drive value. This visibility enables proactive optimisation of customer journeys, agent performance, and compliance, supporting informed technology investments and strategic decision-making.
About'Connect.
Connect combines global contact centre and customer experience (CX) expertise, deep domain knowledge, and unparalleled industry skills to make the complex, simple. Since 1990, we have leveraged our vendor-independent managed services approach to digitally transform how organisations communicate, both internally and externally. We specialise in combining the most relevant technologies and services from leading vendors and platform providers to create opti-channel engagement solutions, orchestrating frictionless experiences and simplifying complex communication challenges.
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