31% of contact center agents say they’re likely to quit within six months, a Verint report reveals.
Having recently released its State of Agent Experience 2026 report, the workforce is now reportedly under pressure, driven not by fear of AI, but by the absence of where it matters most.
This places CX directly at risk, with customers likely to see longer wait times, less experienced agents, lower quality conversations, and ultimately more churn on the customer side too.
In conversation with CX Today, Anna Convery, CMO at Verint, highlights that failing to deploy AI in agent workflows directly drives frustration and disengagement.
“Those who are not using AI have a higher chance of that increased frustration with the employees, because what they’re doing is those manual tasks, they’re spending three minutes in wrap-up after a call when AI can do it for them,” she explained.
“Where we see contact centers with agents where they are applying AI to remove those manual tasks, we do see an increased level of employee satisfaction and employee engagement.”
The Retention Crisis in CX
With contact centers losing nearly a third of their workforce, this becomes a direct threat to customer experience quality.
Every human agent who walks out the door takes with them institutional knowledge, customer relationships, and hard-won product expertise that is difficult to replicate with a new agent without customer service being affected.
For the customer, speaking to an agent with less experience, confidence, and equipped to resolve an issue the first time can result in longer handle times, more escalations, and lower CSAT scores, creating a fast-moving ripple effect.
But what’s driving these agents out? Customer-facing teams are reporting an increase in feeling overwhelmed rather than feeling supported by their contact center.
Currently, nearly almost half of agents are already working across multiple channels simultaneously, meaning if enterprises don’t address these problems soon
These customer team losses can also create significant financial stress on an enterprise, as the report reveals that replacing a single contact center agent costs an average of $20,000, including recruitment, training, and lost productivity.
For a contact center with 1,000 agents at a 31% turnover rate, that could likely result in an annual bill of $6.2MN, all before enterprises can account for a single point of customer churn.
“Agents are the face of the brand,” Convery continued.
“When they feel empowered, when they feel knowledgeable, when they have the tools and technologies at their fingertips to do their job, they will represent that brand much better.”
With 61% of agents anticipating more complex, technical work as routine tasks get automated, the tools and support structures haven’t kept pace, resulting in a workforce that feels stretched thin, underequipped, and undervalued.
Agents are therefore demanding higher flexibility in their workforce, with 9 out 10 agents saying schedule flexibility is a critical factor in choosing a job, making it one of the most important qualities a brand can offer to reduce attrition, despite many still remaining rigid in how they treat agents’ schedules.
The Tasks Nobody Should Be Doing Manually
The daily reality of the workforce is also a significant driver in agent retention loss, with many experiencing high volumes of low-value, repetitive work.
In 45% of calls, agents will spend an average of nearly three minutes simply searching for the right answer, and 57% spend time gathering context and customer history at the start of a conversation, adding on another three minutes.
With 54% doing additional wrap-up work post-conversation and 67% of interactions involving completing routine tasks such as refund processing and record updating, much of an agent’s workday is consumed by administrative tasks.
As none of these additional tasks require empathy, human judgement, or creative thinking, Verint argues that these tasks should not be put infront of a human, despite this being most of an agent’s job.
An agent spending a significant portion of their day doing the digital equivalent of filing paperwork manually and repeatedly is likely to end up exhausted from tasks that could have been completed by an AI.
“Those who are not using AI have a higher chance of increased frustration, because what they’re doing is those manual tasks,” Convery explained.
“They’re spending three minutes in wrap-up after a call when AI can do it for them. There is a big opportunity lost for those who are not yet using AI.”
Based on these results, only 8% of agents surveyed said they feared being replaced by AI, meaning that they likely want relief from the tedious, time-consuming work so they can focus on empathy-driven conversations that require a human being.
With the technology already existing to automate wrap-ups, surface customer knowledge in real time, and receive context from an AI before the call begins, more call centers will need to introduce targeted AI deployment to ensure the retention of frontline employees.
The Mindset Shift CX Leaders Need to Make
With agents burned out, stretched across channels, buried in repetitive tasks, and leaving in significant numbers, the pressure on CX in these contact centers is real and is building.
This comes down to framing, as too many organizations continue to approach AI through the wrong lens, either treating it as a cost reduction tool designed to shrink headcount or getting stuck in an endless cycle of pilots that never make it into production.
Whilst 94% of agents are ready for this shift, expecting AI to change their roles within three years, the organizations are lagging behind these expectations.
“The track of AI replacing agents is actually really detrimental, because AI is all about augmenting human beings,” Convery said.
“AI is all about empowering them. AI is all about scaling the work so that we can deliver better service.”
By reframing AI replacement to augmentation helps change what success looks like in a brand, no longer being about how many roles AI can eliminate but how much better each human interaction becomes when an agent isn’t wrestling with multiple databases and manually logging in notes and summaries.
What Success Actually Looks Like
By enhancing agents instead of replacing them, these contact centers are the ones that will likely come out of this retention and experience crisis in the strongest position.
From a customer perspective, enhancing customer interactions for more personalized, efficient experiences can make a real impact on a brand.
In an interaction with a different call center deploying AI alongside its human agents, Convery noticed the considerable value shift in customer experience.
When I called them, they were able quickly to bring up the transaction history of what happened recently,” she said.
“I left there giving that agent five stars. And I know it was technology behind that that made that happen.”
These positive outcomes are what separate brands that treat agent experience as a CX strategy from those that still treat it as a headcount problem.
