Does this sound familiar?
Someone, somewhere in the business is banging on about AI with the enthusiasm of a kid who’s just discovered unlimited Wi-Fi.
‘It’s going to change everything.’ ‘It’ll fix the customer journey.’ ‘It’ll make Mondays bearable.’
You’re sitting there quietly thinking: I’d settle for a day where the routing behaves, Karen remembers to update the knowledge base, and the queue doesn’t go vertical at 10:03.
You’ve read the articles. You’ve sat through the conference calls. You’ve survived the demos where someone promises the earth but can’t explain how to get an agent out of After Call Work.
And you’re left with one very real question:
How do I lead people through this without losing my team, my sanity, or the will to open another dashboard?
Here’s the bit everyone skips:
AI changes what your job means.
It’s different now. Like swapping a manual car for an automatic. Eventually it makes your life easier. Once you stop reaching for the clutch.
So let’s talk about what this looks like when people and technology are suddenly meant to work side by side.
1. Explain what it’s for (in words humans use)
There’s an awkward moment in every rollout where people start whispering.
‘Is this replacing us?’ ‘Is this watching us?’ ‘Is this going to judge every word we say?’
Say nothing and fear takes over.
Talk about it the same way you’d talk about power tools in a workshop: here to make the job safer, faster, and less painful. The carpenter stays.
Explain the point of each bit in plain English:
Summaries give people their evenings back. Guidance is the sat-nav, not the backseat driver. Sentiment helps agents hear what customers aren’t saying. Routing avoids the ‘wrong queue, wrong mood’ lottery.
Teams get the ‘why’ and adoption feels natural. Skip it and everything feels enforced.
2. Coach with data, not hearsay
Every contact centre has the legendary agent you point to and say, ‘Just do what they do.’
Half the time, nobody (including the agent) can explain what that is.
Technology lets you coach from evidence instead of hunches. Like moving from ‘Grandma’s recipe that nobody can replicate’ to ‘Here’s the exact recipe and the oven tells you when the temp drops.’
Supervisors who are appreciated: Coach the moments, not the myth. Use patterns to show where calls go sideways. Show agents what good sounds like instead of describing it vaguely at 4pm on a Friday.
Agents love it. Concise feedback is one of the best perks you can give someone juggling 14 things at once.
3. AI handles the hovering. You do the helping.
There’s a valid fear that technology will turn you into a hall monitor with dashboards.
Reality check. It frees you from the tedious bits. The policing. The hunting for call notes. The ‘Did you definitely read the new process on page 17 of the intranet?’
It takes the admin. You get the people. More time spent: Supporting confidence. Building judgement. Listening properly. Solving root causes instead of moods. Workforce optimisation becomes about real people, not headcounts.
Hovering vs helping. Technology handles one. You do the other.
4. Treat it like the colleague who never moans about the rota
AI is the colleague who volunteers for the boring stuff.
It summarises calls. Pulls up customer history. Spots patterns. Flags risks. Does it consistently. Never complains.
Your team handles the thinking bits.
Frame it that way and adoption follows naturally.
5. The atmosphere changes when you get this right
You know when a contact centre is off.
You can feel it before you see a single metric: The queue has an edge to it. Team leads hover more than they coach. Customers are constantly repeating themselves. Even the coffee machine feels stressed.
Get your tech and people in line and the whole day improves: The floor sounds calmer. Agents stop guessing. Decisions happen faster. Workflows stop mutating silently. Coaching becomes a time to connect with colleagues instead of a rescue mission. People finish their day with something left.
This kind of improvement often goes unnoticed. Like a good night’s sleep taking care of problems you didn’t know were connected.
6. What you must stop doing right now
Time for some honesty. These habits kill progress:
Stop doing work the system can handle. If it can write the summary, let it write the summary. Your people have bigger fish to fry.
Stop holding out for perfection. Tech improves by testing stuff that’s not quite ready. Contact centres hate uncertainty. Tough. You have to let things be a bit rough around the edges.
Stop letting decisions die in meetings. Data that sits in reports does nothing. Insight without action is pointless.
Stop letting everyone solve problems differently. When agents handle the same issue seven different ways, the system has no idea which one to learn from. Pick a way. Stick to it.
Working longer hours won’t solve this. Working through a clearer lens will.
7. What this looks like now (in one sentence)
You’re the translator now. Between people and systems. Between gut instinct and hard data. Between “we’ve always done it this way” and “here’s what’s possible now.”
Technology makes your role matter more, not less.
Nick Benzie, Head of Solutions Delivery, Cirrus is pretty clear on the matter. “People ask me what makes AI work. Wrong question. Ask what makes people work with AI. And the answer’s uncomfortable: they need to trust it more than they trust their own habits. That’s hard. Agents have spent years building instincts. Now you’re asking them to follow a system’s suggestion instead. That only happens when the system earns it. Most don’t, because the data feeding them is garbage.”
Want your operation to feel the difference?
Cirrus runs a one-hour readiness session that shows you where the work is steady, where it’s slipping, and what to change first to make technology work best. No jargon. No long programme. Just a clear plan based on how your day works. Get in touch.
