Through a pandemic, the Great Resignation, and difficult economic conditions, an age-old contact center challenge has become more complex: agent retention. According to Forrester, 63% of contact centers deal with staffing shortages.
While there’s no single cause or fix, a few factors rise to the top. Our 2025 “Managing the Modern Contact Center Employer Trends Report” found that workload and stress are today’s leading causes of unmanaged attrition.
Nearly 40% of North American survey respondents said that employee workload and stress are too high. This was six percentage points higher than reported concerns about pay or benefits; the spread is even greater in Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA).
...employees face substantially increased demands from both the market and their employers.
This increased stress can be attributed in part to the two factors (a) proliferation of digital channels and (b) customer service expectations that are now 24/7/365 globally and across multiple platforms.
Businesses no longer dictate where and how customers interact with them. Consumers are in the driver’s seat, and they demand that organizations handle their customer service issues anytime and on any channel.
In fact, 60% of contact center leaders say the number of channels agents are expected to manage and communicate on has increased, according to the survey. More than 80% of respondents said they use email, 72% said they use live chat, and 67% said they use social media to serve their customers: all equal to or higher than those who use voice channels.
But while employees today handle more channels, adding new levels of complexity and stress, KPIs have remained the same and, in some cases, have become more stringent. In today’s contact center, employees face substantially increased demands from both the market and their employers.
The stress and increased cognitive load agents experience from an overload of channels and interactions have a major impact on contact center operations. Understanding the science of stress and its impacts can help create an action plan to reduce it in the contact center.
What Is Stress, and Its Effects
Stress, by definition, isn’t inherently harmful; some stress is actually good! Exercise places physical stress on the body, which is part of improving overall health. Similarly, some demanding mental tasks cause cognitive stress, which can improve focus and decision-making. However, there is a limit, and excessive stress will negatively impact performance at some point.
Stressed and burned-out employees may experience challenges with memory recall, fatigue, and poor decision-making. They also tend to be less engaged at work and show signs of difficulty in other areas of their lives. According to Gallup’s “State of the Global Workplace: 2025 Report,” disengaged employees report higher stress levels than those who are unemployed.
The negatives of stress can quickly spill over from employees to the broader business:
- Losing team members to attrition and filling open roles are costly, and stressed employees may struggle to deliver adequate (let alone exceptional) customer service.
- Lackluster customer service can tarnish a brand’s reputation for years. “Meh” level customer service can read as apathy to consumers, who will quickly look elsewhere after a bad experience.
Cognitive Overload
When agents are feeling crushed from cognitive burnout, aka cognitive overload, scheduling can make or break the health of the contact center.
Schedules must account for agents managing multiple touchpoints at a time. The simultaneous way both customers and agents use digital channels adds layers of complexity to each interaction.
Chats and direct messages are a prime example. It’s common to experience some delay in customers’ responses in chat sessions. During these pauses, employees may handle another message in the chat or an interaction from another channel. But these non-linear communications introduce frustration in the scheduling process.
Additionally, many workforce management (WFM) solutions currently lack the capability to assess workload thresholds for individual employees. Schedulers will know that an agent can handle a single interaction at a time. But what about the number of simultaneous interactions? For an individual agent, is it two, three, 10?
Understanding the mental capacity of your employees will remove the mystery of “how much is too much?”
Beyond concurrency, employee thresholds around interaction intensity, reading ease in text-based channels, and cognitive effects of switching between platforms will also vary.
But schedulers using legacy WFM solutions simply do not have a tool to assess cognitive stress for employees. They rely on intuition and guesstimates to land on the “optimal” amount of cognitive load a given employee can handle (which is also different from the load at which they perform their best).
Unlocking Smarter Schedules
In the “age of AI” in WFM, there might just be a better way. A scientific approach, supported by a quality WFM solution, can be taken to measure cognitive load.
Some modern WFM platforms offer AI-driven optimization tools that help managers spread out tasks and optimize workloads for individual agents, taking into account skill sets and the complexity of certain types of tasks. Understanding the mental capacity of your employees will remove the mystery of “how much is too much?”
Once you understand your team’s cognitive load, the right WFM solution can also help you alleviate some of the pressure. Features that automate certain tasks for agents will free up their brain space for customer interactions. Look for places where AI can assist the team by taking menial tasks off their plates and give them some breathing room.
That’s just the start. Understanding cognitive load opens an entire world of opportunities to enhance all phases of the WFM lifecycle and the agent experience. Happy, healthy agents can best support customers and a thriving business.