Co-op Legal Services has started using an AI model to score every call its advisers take from customers handling wills, probate and estates. Each call is rated on more than 50 points, and managers see a pass or fail. One adviser calls it dystopian. Co-op calls it a way to make sure bereaved customers get consistent, caring advice.
Sampling was what kept most of the work private
Quality review in a call centre has always been a sample, usually 1% to 2% of calls. A supervisor picked a few, listened, and talked them through with the adviser. Nobody designed that as a kindness to staff, but it worked like one: a bad ten minutes got lost among thousands of ordinary ones, and a manager judged you on a handful of calls and knew it.
The reason was cost, and the arithmetic is easy to do. Take a team of 30 advisers who each handle six calls a day for 20 working days. That is 3,600 calls a month. At 20 minutes a call, listening to all of them takes 1,200 hours, the full-time work of seven or eight people who do nothing else. Listening to 2% takes 24 hours, about three working days. Nobody paid for the first, so everyone lived with the second.
An AI model removes that cost. It listens to all 3,600 calls in the time it takes to ask, and it applies the same checklist to the first call and the last. That is not only more surveillance. It also finds patterns that ten calls never could, such as an adviser who never explains fees, or a script line that makes upset customers go quiet.
It will not stay in call centres
Scoring calls with software is not new; contact centres have been buying it for years. What has changed is that the checklist can now be written in plain language and run by a general model, so a recruiter's screening calls, a clinic front desk, a school admissions line or a bank's phone advisers are all easy to score. Burger King has already put a version in 500 US restaurants that rates how friendly staff sound. Co-op's team is small, dozens of people, and that is the point: no job needs to be big enough to justify a special system any more.
My expectation is that the scorecard becomes something staff and unions negotiate, the way they negotiate shift patterns. Which of the 50 points count, who sees the results, how long recordings are kept and whether a score alone can lead to a warning will become normal parts of an employment contract. The Communication Workers Union has already started pushing back on the Co-op system.
What decides whether people accept it
What separated the 1990 phone workers from the ones watched by supervisors was that the measuring never paused. A scheme that gives staff their own scorecard the same day, lets them argue with a score, and requires a manager to listen to the actual call before any consequence keeps what is useful about full coverage and removes what people fear. A scheme that sends a percentage to a manager's dashboard does the opposite, and it will cost the employer the people it most wants to keep.
If you run a team that talks to customers, the question to answer before any tool is switched on is what a low score will lead to, and your staff should hear the answer from you first.