The Call Centre Replaced 140 Staff With AI. Six Weeks Later It Hired Them Back
The rollout was announced as a triumph. The reversal was announced in an internal memo with no press release attached.
By Nikau Bennett · 8 September 2026 · 6 min read
In July, the company told investors its new voice system would handle 80 per cent of customer contacts by Christmas. It handled 71 per cent in week one, which looked like a triumph until anyone read the second number.
Repeat contacts — the same customer calling back about the same unresolved problem — rose by 214 per cent.
"It closed tickets beautifully," one former team leader said. "It just didn't fix anything. Closing a ticket and solving a problem turn out to be different jobs."
The 43-second problem
Average handle time dropped to 43 seconds, a metric the board celebrated in August. What the dashboard did not show was that the shortest calls were the ones where customers gave up.
By week five, complaint volumes to the industry ombudsman had roughly doubled. By week six, recruiters were calling the same people who had been made redundant, offering roles at the same pay, occasionally with the word "AI" now in the job title.
What actually stayed
The system has not been switched off. It now triages and drafts, with a human approving every outbound resolution — the boring hybrid that vendors rarely put on a billboard, and the only version that has worked so far.
