As the countdown to CC&CX Expo continues, industry leaders are zeroing in on one of the sector's biggest challenges: keeping people at the centre of an increasingly automated customer experience. In a recent webinar, four experts unpacked what's changed for contact centre teams and what needs to happen next.
Wellbeing used to sit quietly in the background while businesses chased targets and tech. Not anymore. That was the starting point for our recent webinar, where four industry experts sat down to unpack what's really happening on the frontline of UK contact centres, and what it means for customer experience.
Chaired by Charlie Adams (Director of Customer Success and Experience at Custom Connect, and author of "It's Just People: A Manager's Toolkit"), the panel brought together:
- Elaine Lee, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Reynolds Busby Lee
- Mandy Kendrick, Senior People and Culture Leader at LifeSearch
- Nicola Callan, Founder and Director of Boost HR
Here's what came out of the conversation.
The scale of the challenge
Contact centres employ more than 1.16 million people in the UK, around 3.4% of the working population. Of those, roughly 850,000 are frontline agents, and 47,000 are team leaders. Whatever changes in this space ripple out to a huge chunk of the workforce.
And plenty has changed. The panel pointed to a real shift over the last 15 years: software investment has more than doubled, but training budgets haven't kept pace. Meanwhile, employee engagement in contact centres and workforces more broadly has dropped to somewhere between 15 and 20%, according to recent Gallup research.
Empathy is the skill everyone wants, and nobody has enough of
One of the sharpest stats of the session: 75% of agents believe they deliver strong empathy, but it's the skill most team leaders say is missing on their floor. That gap, drawn from Calabrio research, sums up a lot of what's going wrong. As automation takes over routine queries, agents are no longer just competing with the colleague at the next desk. They're competing with the bot.
That shift is also pushing up the value of experienced agents, at the same time as entry-level roles are disappearing. Fewer people are coming up through the ranks, which raises a longer-term question: where does the next generation of team leaders and managers come from if the traditional first rung on the ladder isn't there anymore?
Wellbeing needs a strategy, not a gesture
LifeSearch, recent winners of a UK Contact Centre Award for their approach to EDI, shared some of what's worked for them: trained financial wellbeing champions ("Money Moguls"), a structured "Moments That Matter" programme mapped to key points in an employee's journey, and a men's mental health forum modelled on Andy's Man Club. The common thread was consistency and follow-through, including a visible "you said, we did" board so staff can see their feedback actually leads somewhere.
The panel agreed wellbeing initiatives only work if leaders treat them as core business, not an add-on competing for scraps of budget. One useful number to bring to that conversation: a one percentage point rise in employee satisfaction tends to be followed by a 0.41 point rise in customer satisfaction.
Measuring what matters
Attendance isn't the same as productivity, and it isn't a reliable proxy for wellbeing either. One approach discussed was a "thriving to surviving" scale, adapted from first responder assessments, used alongside regular pulse surveys to spot when someone's sliding from coping to struggling before it becomes a crisis.
Hybrid working is here to stay, and leadership needs to catch up
Remote and hybrid teams are now the norm, but the panel was candid that most organisations haven't fully cracked how to keep culture and connection alive across distributed teams. Leading presence at a desk is a different skill to leading output, and several panellists argued that mandating office days doesn't have a proven link to better performance. The more useful investment, they suggested, is training leaders specifically to manage remote teams, and being intentional about communication and inclusion regardless of where someone's logging in from.
The bigger picture: designing for today, not the 1990s
Perhaps the most provocative point of the session came from Elaine Lee, who argued that much of the current thinking in contact centres is still built on a model from decades ago; a model built around desks, shifts, and fixed structures that no longer reflects how people actually work. Her challenge to the industry: start with a blank page and design the modern contact centre role around today's reality, rather than retrofitting old solutions onto a new world.
Catch the full conversation at the expo
This was just a taster of the people and culture content coming to CC&CX Expo, taking place at ExCeL London on 18–19 November 2026. Registration is open now, and tickets are also available for the after-party on the first evening, a great chance to keep the conversation going in person.
Register for your free ticket to see more sessions like this live.
Watch the full webinar here:
