Contact Center Pipeline June 2026 | Page 9

Also, Canada’ s infamous winter weather poses a workforce management( WFM) challenge! WFM teams need to keep an eye on weather reports because a snow or ice storm or severe flooding can mean half your agents cannot get into work, and the other half cannot get home!

Hybrid and work-from-home( WFH), including emergency WFH models, can help ease that problem. But as these weather events also affect homes, contact centers need to have agents in other climatic and geographic areas to provide business continuity.

Meanwhile, in Toronto( which, I understand from Wikipedia, ranks just behind Mexico City, New York City, and Los Angeles, as the fourth largest metropolitan area in North America), traffic congestion and the cost of living downtown mean WFH or hybrid are very popular options for contact centers.

Canada has several federal and provincial / territorial statutory or public holidays. These may impact contact center staffing, such as scheduling agents, and costs, such as overtime pay for when employees work on those days.

Some of the following holidays are unique / not common and may be unfamiliar to those outside of Canada:

• Family Day

• Victoria Day

• Fete Nationale / Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day( legal holiday in Quebec)

• Canada Day( also observed as Memorial Day in Newfoundland and Labrador)

• Civic Holiday( not observed in Quebec)

• National Day for Truth and Reconciliation

• Thanksgiving( second Monday of October; celebrates the fall harvest)

• Boxing Day( day after Christmas)

Note: both Family Day and Civic Holiday have different names depending on the province e. g., Family Day is referred to as Louis Riel Day in Manitoba, while Civic Holiday is known( naturally enough) as B. C. Day in British Columbia.

Note also that Canadians may take the time out to honor those fallen in war on Remembrance Day( Nov. 11); it is a statutory holiday federally and in several provinces. Many people wear fabricated red poppies or poppy pins out of respect.

The poem,“ In Flanders Fields” was written by a Canadian, Lt. Col. Dr. John McCrae, who served as a physician in World War I and died before it ended.

There is also an unofficial“ holiday” and that is spring break, which is in mid-to-late March but also in April depending on the province.

This is when the elementary, junior, and high schools, and the CEGEPS( in Quebec), are closed. It is when many families have their vacations at the end of the country’ s typically arduous winters.

AK: A few come to mind and they’ re very tied to who we are as a country. When the pandemic hit, we moved incredibly fast to remote work.

Now many centers have transitioned to become hybrid, while others want their teams to be on-site. It may not be a unique challenge to Canada, but variances in productivity is an issue that is top of mind here.

What may be unique is that a number of Canadian businesses are taking advantage of the access they have to talent across our nation versus confining themselves to a geographic footprint.

We no longer have to go just to Quebec to find bilingual team members. We have countrywide access to bilingual agents, technical specialists, and people living in isolated areas where access is by ferry or small aircraft. For Canadian businesses, expanding that recruitment reach has been a major win.

When it comes to modernizing operations, large Canadian organizations such as banks, insurers, and even some telecom providers tend to adopt new technologies and AI more cautiously than their U. S. counterparts.

So, modernization is happening, but it’ s slower because the foundational upgrades required are both complex and costly.

Before companies can fully leverage AI and automation, they need to rebuild or modernize their core platforms. That initial phase doesn’ t generate ROI on its own; it simply lays the groundwork for the capabilities that will create value later.

Canada’ s stringent regulatory environment also plays a role. When you layer rigorous compliance requirements onto technology roadmaps, timelines naturally stretch out.

Even Canadian organizations that are further along in their modernization, ROI isn’ t guaranteed. One of my clients implemented Agent Assist and realized little benefit.

Here’ s why. The client hadn’ t asked the most important question, namely“ What problem are we solving?” They also had a very tenured, highly knowledgeable team that often knew the answers better than the AI bot.

This lesson there is real. And it applies to all contact centres, in Canada and elsewhere. If employees don’ t see or trust the value in a tool, adoption stays low and ROI becomes negligible.

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