Resources / For business owners
You hire someone keen, train them, and watch the calls wear them down until they leave. Here is what the research says about why, what it costs you each time, and how to take the hardest part of the job off their plate.
Week one, your new tele-caller is keen. Week six, they are slower to pick up the phone. By month three they have handed in their notice, and you are back to recruiting, training and waiting for the next one to find their feet.
It is tempting to blame the person. The research points at the job.
Most calls end in a no. Most calls end in a no, an unanswered ring or a hurried “not now”, and the next call still has to sound just as warm.
Rudeness is routine. In one study of 198 call-centre employees, agents reported being verbally abused by callers about ten times a day on average, and the more often it happened, the more exhausted they were.
Sounding cheerful when you are not is work. Across 95 studies, having to fake emotions on the job was consistently linked to emotional exhaustion and lower job satisfaction.
The calls are the same, again and again. Research in call centres links high workload and little variety in the work to exhaustion, and exhaustion to more time off.
The Indian figure comes from data collected in 2003–04 and counts promotions and retirements as well as people who quit, so read it as a sign of scale rather than today’s rate. In the US survey, 12% of centres lost more than a quarter of their new agents within three months.
More than the recruiting fee. A study of about 2,500 call centres in 17 countries put the cost of replacing one agent at about two months of their pay, and three to four months once the lost output of a new starter is counted.
And the cost repeats. Each new hire needs the same training, makes the same early mistakes and takes the same time to find their feet, while the leads keep arriving.
The voice itself tires. A 2025 study measured the voices of 50 call-centre operators in India through their working day: most went from normal to hoarse or strained by the end of it, and recovered only after rest. Other studies have found smaller changes, so treat it as one data point.
We could not find a solid study of sales results falling across a shift, so we will not claim one. But a tired voice on the fortieth call is not the voice you hired.
Give the calls with the most rejection to something that does not feel it.
First calls to new leads and repeat tries are where much of the rejection sits: unanswered rings, quick noes and people who were not expecting you. An AI agent can make those calls, ask the first questions and record the answers. Your people then spend their day on the leads who picked up, answered and asked for more.
No. It takes the first calls and the retries, where most of the rejection is. Your people take the conversations that need a person.
The agent stays calm and follows the instructions you gave it, and the call is recorded so you can see exactly what happened.
They will have different work: fewer cold first calls and unanswered retries, and more time with leads who have already said they are interested.
See an AI agent take the first calls and the retries, and hand your people the leads who want to talk.