Deconstructing the Contact Center in the AI Era

"The contact centre wasn't built for customer experience - it was built to solve a 100-year-old math problem."

TCN traced this back to Agner Erlang, who figured out how many phone operators you need to handle unpredictable call volume. Everything else (scheduling, scripts, QA, routing) was built to manage that problem.

TCN's central claim: if AI reduces the need to have humans standing by for unpredictable demand, the contact centre loses the reason it was originally built for.