April 15, 2026
31% of Contact Centre Agents Plan to Quit Within Six Months
The acceleration of AI across customer service has generated no shortage of vendor optimism about what contact centres could look like in the near future. Meanwhile, the agents working in those contact centres today are answering a different question altogether. According to Verint’s State of Agent Experience 2026 report, 31% plan to leave their current role within the next six months.
What’s driving departure intent? Not AI replacing jobs. Only 8% of agents fear that outcome in the near term. The more immediate problem is a workforce drowning in repetitive, manual work that technology could already handle. Agents spend an average of 2.7 minutes per call searching for knowledge, 3.2 minutes gathering interaction context, 3.8 minutes completing a task, and 3 minutes on after-call work. Multiplied across thousands of daily interactions, those minutes represent an enormous, ongoing drain on both capacity and morale.
In 45% of incoming calls, agents are actively searching for answers to customer questions while the customer waits. In 57% of calls, they are gathering context that a well-configured system could surface automatically. In 54% of calls, they are completing after-call work that generative AI can now automate at scale. None of this is new knowledge for the industry, and that is exactly the problem. Organisations are aware of where the time goes, yet many remain locked in AI pilot mode rather than full deployment. Every month spent in that holding pattern is another month of compounding agent frustration and avoidable attrition.
At $20,000 per Replacement, Inflexible Scheduling Is an Expensive Policy
Retention pressure is made worse by scheduling, as 90% agents rate schedule flexibility as important when choosing a job, yet the traditional contact centre model has not moved fast enough to meet that expectation. Frost & Sullivan’s Alpa Shah notes that replacing an agent costs approximately $20,000 on average, a figure that rises as roles become more technically specialised. For a 1,000-agent centre running a 31% attrition rate, total replacement costs could reach roughly $6.2 million. AI-powered workforce management tools that give agents meaningful control over their schedules, while maintaining coverage through intelligent forecasting, are a retention mechanism.
The report finds that 94% of agents expect AI to change their roles within three years, with 61% anticipating that those roles will become more complex or technically demanding. The contact centre of 2026 is already evolving toward a model in which routine queries are handled automatically, and human agents handle the interactions that genuinely require judgement, empathy, and creative problem-solving. But that evolution requires investment in agent readiness.
Nearly half of all agents surveyed work across multiple channels, and 78% of customers say they will switch to a competitor after a single poor experience. Agents navigating disconnected systems, toggling between tools, and re-gathering context that was already captured in a previous interaction are not positioned to meet that bar. A unified omnichannel desktop is the infrastructure requirement; AI-powered context retrieval is what makes it functional in practice.
