Unlocking the power of AI: faster, smarter pathways to boost employee engagement and retention
Scene: The Senior Leadership Team (SLT) sit around a conference table, the air tense. Recent results have been disappointing—high turnover, low engagement, and mounting pressure. The contact centre executive stands at the front, ready to present the results of an AI transformation project…
"Through the implementation of AI-powered tools, we’ve seen employee turnover reduced by 25%, engagement levels rise by 30%, and productivity soar—all while improving customer satisfaction and maintaining operational efficiency."
This could be the future of your contact centre. When implemented effectively, AI has already started reducing turnover, increasing engagement, and driving higher performance in contact centres around the world. The results are not just potential—they’re happening now.
AI doesn’t just streamline operations—it transforms them. By automating routine tasks, providing real-time feedback, and personalising development pathways, AI empowers leaders to focus on what truly matters: building a motivated, engaged, and high-performing team.
In this blog, we’ll explore how AI is reshaping employee engagement and retention in contact centres. It’s not just about reducing turnover—AI unlocks smarter, faster pathways for learning, boosting engagement, improving performance, and building a future-ready workforce.
Why contact centres are turning to AI
Senior leaders in contact centres face mounting challenges such as high turnover, disengaged teams, and underperforming metrics. These issues ripple beyond day-to-day operations, impacting brand reputation, regulatory compliance, and long-term business strategy. Metrics like cost-per-hire, compliance adherence, and operational efficiency are now top priorities, intensifying the need for innovative solutions.
AI offers a transformative pathway to address these pressures holistically. By automating routine tasks, delivering real-time feedback loops, and aligning frontline behaviours with organisational objectives, AI enables leaders to make data-driven decisions that directly impact key performance indicators:
Cost-per-hire reductions: Personalised learning pathways streamline onboarding and agent development, reducing overall training costs.
Compliance readiness: AI ensures skill gaps and compliance breaches are identified and remediated promptly, reducing risk.
Strategic alignment: AI provides visibility into coaching goals and performance metrics, ensuring they are predictive of outcomes and aligned with organisational strategies.
Improved Net Promoter Scores (NPS): Predictive analytics identify trends in agent performance, allowing leaders to address pain points proactively, enhancing customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Higher Customer Effort Scores (CES): AI reduces task complexity for agents, enabling seamless service delivery and lowering customer frustration.
According to Gartner, by 2025, 80% of customer interactions in contact centres will involve AI, underscoring its increasing role in transforming operations. McKinsey highlights that AI adoption can reduce manual workloads by 20-30%, enabling leaders to focus on strategic priorities like coaching and employee engagement.
These global trends align with YakTrak’s client successes. For instance, a major Australian energy provider used YakTrak’s behavioural coaching tools to achieve a 13% boost in engagement and measurable improvements in sales conversions within just three months. This alignment between global insights and real-world results demonstrates how AI can deliver meaningful change in contact centres.
AI-driven tools for boosting engagement in contact centres
AI’s ability to tackle long-standing challenges in contact centres—like high turnover, low engagement, and underperforming teams—has made it a game-changer. But its value extends beyond automation. The most effective AI tools are those that foster employee engagement, improve compliance outcomes, and drive sustainable business success.
Global solutions driving results:
Verint’s FlexBot integrates employee feedback with AI-driven insights, enabling managers to tailor support and reduce burnout. This has led to increased agent satisfaction and lower turnover rates.
NICE gamification tools reward positive behaviours, creating a culture of motivation and friendly competition that enhances both engagement and productivity.
Genesys AI personalises customer interactions, offering agents real-time assistance to resolve complex issues more efficiently.
YakTrak and GRIST provide a complementary perspective by focusing on behavioural coaching methodologies that drive meaningful change. Platforms like Verint and NICE bring powerful tools to optimise metrics such as average handle time (AHT) and first call resolution (FCR), demonstrating the broad potential of AI in contact centres. YakTrak complements these innovations by focusing on the underlying behaviours that drive these outcomes. Through behavioural coaching methodologies, YakTrak helps leaders address the 'how' behind performance, enabling more precise and actionable development pathways. For instance:
YakTrak uses behavioural coaching goals, such as “clarify the customer’s primary concern in the first 30 seconds of the call,” to target specific actions predictive of performance outcomes.
Leaders gain real-time visibility into coaching progress, ensuring development pathways are actionable and aligned with team priorities.
AI automates workflows like goal-setting and progress tracking, freeing leaders to focus on impactful conversations.
As Caitlin Ziegler, head of product and design at GRIST and YakTrak, explains:
"Our approach ensures that AI-driven coaching isn’t just about metrics—it’s about creating behavioural change that sticks. This is how we drive engagement and build a future-ready workforce."
The future of AI in engagement and retention
AI is no longer a future concept—it’s here, reshaping the way contact centres operate and redefining what’s possible for employee engagement and retention. As tools evolve, their potential to deliver smarter, faster pathways for learning and development grows exponentially.
Predictive analytics and personalisation
In the near future, AI-powered tools will move beyond automating tasks to offering predictive analytics that identify trends in employee behaviour and performance. This will enable leaders to take proactive steps in addressing disengagement or turnover risks before they escalate. Personalisation will also play a pivotal role, with AI tailoring development pathways to individual needs, ensuring that employees are supported in their unique growth journeys.
YakTrak and GRIST’s evolving role
YakTrak and GRIST are already delivering advanced AI-driven capabilities that are reshaping how contact centres approach employee development. Today, organisations using YakTrak can:
Trigger automated workflows in response to compliance breaches or skill gaps, initiating targeted coaching sessions, setting behavioural goals, and scheduling follow-up activities.
Provide leaders with real-time visibility into coaching goals, ensuring they are predictive of outcomes and aligned with organisational priorities.
YakTrak and GRIST are also exploring advanced AI capabilities, such as predictive analytics and automated learning pathways. While these features are in development, our existing tools already offer significant value. Real-time coaching summaries, workflow automation, and actionable behavioural goals are designed to close the development loop effectively.
Soon, YakTrak will enable leaders to consolidate insights from the past six months of coaching interactions, identifying trends and informing development plans with even greater precision. These innovations, backed by GRIST’s 30+ years of behavioural coaching expertise, provide contact centres with smarter, faster pathways to improved engagement and retention.
“The next evolution of AI in contact centres isn’t just about automating processes—it’s about creating a dynamic system where insights lead directly to meaningful actions. This is how we ensure that engagement translates into measurable results.”Caitlin Ziegler
Broader implications
As AI matures, its potential extends beyond the contact centre floor. Machine learning and predictive analytics will provide senior leaders with unprecedented insight into organisational capabilities, helping them forecast the effectiveness of leadership strategies, compliance adherence, and overall employee readiness.
AI’s ability to close the loop on development, from identifying gaps to validating skill mastery, positions it as a critical tool for building a workforce that is not only engaged but also equipped for future challenges.
Real-world examples: AI delivering results in contact centres
AI’s impact isn’t theoretical—it’s already making waves in contact centres across industries. Here are some real-world examples showcasing how AI is driving engagement, improving retention, and delivering measurable results.
Case study 1: Verint’s FlexBot and agent wellbeing
A global insurance provider implemented Verint’s FlexBot to help agents manage their workloads and well-being. By integrating real-time feedback on performance and using predictive AI tools to suggest break schedules and workload adjustments, the company saw a 12% increase in agent satisfaction within six months. The flexibility and personalised support provided by the system helped agents feel valued, leading to a reduction in turnover.
Case study 2: NICE gamification for engagement
SKYGEN USA revitalised employee engagement using NICE CXone’s gamification tools, featuring journey mapping, real-time dashboards, and tailored rewards. Results included a 46% reduction in hold time, a 24% decrease in after-call work, and a 5% drop in attrition, saving $67,500 annually.
With 92% of agents engaging weekly, performance and motivation improved significantly, fostering consistency and productivity across teams
Case study 3: YakTrak’s behavioural coaching transformation
In a large Australian energy company, YakTrak’s AI-powered coaching tools helped team leaders focus on setting behavioural goals that directly impacted performance. For example, instead of vague targets like “reduce AHT,” team leaders set specific, observable goals such as “clarify the customer’s primary concern in the first 30 seconds of the call.” YakTrak’s system tracked progress and provided real-time feedback, resulting in:
A 13% boost in employee engagement within three months.
A measurable improvement in sales conversions.
Reduced team leader workload by automating session summaries and goal tracking.
As Seb Cox, head of customer experience at YakTrak, puts it:
"Our approach focuses on creating behavioural change that sticks, using AI to support leaders in making coaching precise, actionable, and predictive of success."
What these cases teach us
These examples demonstrate that the most effective AI solutions focus on aligning employee development with organisational outcomes. Whether it’s through gamification, behavioural coaching, or personalised support, AI provides the tools leaders need to foster engagement, reduce turnover, and improve team performance.
Building long-term engagement and retention with AI
AI isn’t a one-time implementation—it’s an evolving tool that continues to adapt and grow with your organisation’s needs. The most successful AI strategies are those that are integrated seamlessly into daily operations, supported by leadership behaviours, and continuously refined through feedback and data insights.
Embedding AI into leadership operating rhythms
To sustain engagement and retention, leaders must view AI as an enabler, not a replacement. The true power of AI lies in how it complements human expertise:
Coaching workflows: AI can automate routine tasks like scheduling, summarising coaching sessions, and tracking progress, freeing leaders to focus on meaningful conversations with their teams.
Behavioural precision: By generating goals based on specific, observable actions, AI helps leaders create development plans that are clear, actionable, and predictive of success.
Continuous improvement: AI’s ability to analyse patterns and trends ensures that coaching remains relevant and impactful, adapting to the changing needs of employees.
Leveraging AI to close the development loop
One of AI’s greatest strengths is its ability to create a closed-loop system for employee development. For example:
Identification: AI pinpoints skill gaps or compliance breaches through QA assessments.
Remediation workflows: Automatically triggers the right coaching session, personalised learning pathways, or team discussions.
Follow-up: Schedules regular check-ins to assess progress and provide support.
Validation: Ensures goals are met through leader reviews and third-party sign-offs, with real-time data available to senior leaders for monitoring.
Leadership alignment through visibility
AI offers senior leaders unprecedented visibility into the effectiveness of their strategies. For example, YakTrak’s system allows senior leaders to monitor the types of goals being set during coaching sessions. This ensures that leadership communication aligns with organisational priorities, while also providing a clear view of whether frontline strategies are predictive of the desired outcomes.
As Brad Thomas, co-founder of YakTrak, explains:
"When AI gives leaders a direct line of sight into what’s happening on the ground, they can ensure that the entire organisation is working toward the same goals. This alignment drives not only engagement but also results."
Why sustained AI adoption matters
The contact centres that successfully integrate AI don’t just react to challenges—they anticipate them. By leveraging AI to improve employee experience, support continuous learning, and align organisational goals, they create a culture where engagement and retention become self-reinforcing.
The opportunity AI brings to engagement and retention
Engagement and retention are no longer just buzzwords—they are the foundation of thriving contact centres. AI provides the tools to turn these priorities into measurable outcomes, creating workplaces where employees feel valued, supported, and equipped to succeed.
The examples and insights explored in this blog demonstrate one clear takeaway: AI is not just a solution—it’s an enabler. When implemented thoughtfully, it doesn’t just reduce turnover or improve productivity. It empowers leaders to deliver faster, smarter pathways for learning, development, and employee satisfaction, shaping a future-ready workforce.
What’s your next step?
Reflect on how your contact centre’s leadership behaviours, coaching practices, and compliance readiness could benefit from AI’s ability to align actions with outcomes. Consider exploring AI tools that provide faster, smarter pathways for learning, development, and employee satisfaction.
Explore how behavioural coaching, real-time insights, and AI-driven workflows can transform your team’s engagement and performance. Visit our website to access case studies, tools, and resources designed to align leadership strategies with measurable outcomes.
The tools are here. The decision to lead this transformation is yours.
