Most call centre training teaches agents what to say and then asks them to learn how to say it on live customers. Product knowledge, scripts and systems can be taught in a classroom. The skill of staying calm, clear and useful on a real call while someone is irritated, confused or in a hurry only comes with repetition, and the repetition usually happens on real people.
Voice practice with a synthetic AI customer is one way to move some of that repetition earlier, to a place where a mistake costs nothing. This article describes where it helps, how a team might use it week to week and what to check before adopting any tool for this purpose, including ours. It is practical guidance, not a promise of results.
The problem: new agents learn on live customers
A new agent's first real calls are the hardest, and they are often taken with limited preparation. The customer cannot tell that the agent is new, and an agent who freezes on a complaint or loses the thread on a long explanation cannot easily take the moment back.
Shadowing and role-play with colleagues help, but they have limits. Colleagues are busy, they know each other, and a trainer can only run so many role-plays in a day. The result is that agents often get a handful of practice conversations before they take hundreds of real ones.
How voice practice works
In DIRI AI, an agent picks a scenario, starts a call and speaks with a synthetic AI customer who responds in real time, interrupts, hesitates or pushes back according to the scenario. When the call ends, the agent reads a coach report: a summary, a few key moments quoted from the transcript and a suggested practice goal for the next call.
Three properties matter for a call centre:
- It is spoken. Typing a reply is not the same skill as saying it with the right pace and tone. Practice by voice trains the thing the job requires.
- It is repeatable. The agent can run the same scenario again straight away, which is rarely possible with a colleague.
- It is private by design. The agent practises without an audience, which tends to make people more willing to try something new and fail.
The AI customer is a synthetic persona, not a real person, and it will not behave exactly as a real customer does. It is a rehearsal, not a prediction.
Scenarios for sales, complaints, retention and collections
Call centres differ, so choose scenarios that match your calls. Typical families include:
- Inbound sales and upgrades. Understanding what the caller needs, answering price questions, asking for the next step.
- Complaints and de-escalation. Acknowledging frustration, staying specific, offering what you can do and being honest about what you cannot. See customer support de-escalation training.
- Retention. A customer who calls to cancel, and an agent who needs to listen before offering anything.
- Collections. A sensitive conversation where tone matters and the rules are strict; always follow your own compliance guidance.
- Onboarding calls. First-week scenarios for new agents. See sales onboarding training.
Start with the three situations that most often go wrong in your own call reviews, rather than with everything at once.
A weekly rhythm for agents and team leads
A small, regular habit tends to work better than an occasional long session.
- Each agent runs two or three short practice calls a week, ideally in the same slot, so it becomes routine.
- After each call, the agent picks one thing to try in their next real call, taken from their own report.
- Once a week, the team lead and the agent talk for ten minutes about that one thing, not about a list of faults.
- The team lead chooses a theme for the whole team, such as “first thirty seconds of a complaint”, and uses it for the shared scenario that week.
For a two-week structure for new hires, see prepare a new salesperson for first calls in two weeks; the same shape works for support agents.
Measuring progress without scoring people
How you use practice data matters as much as the tool. Practice works when people feel free to make mistakes, and it stops working when it feels like an exam.
DIRI AI is designed for training, not for evaluating employees. Agents see their own reports; a team lead sees team-level information, not a ranking of individuals. We recommend you keep it that way: do not use practice results for pay, promotion, discipline or hiring decisions. Rules on monitoring and automated assessment of employees vary by country and may be strict, so involve your legal or HR contact before you decide how practice data is used.
Better signals of progress are things agents report themselves: “I felt more prepared for the cancellation call”, or a practice goal that they could tick off. For more on this, see measure seller improvement without performance evaluation and how we score.
Rolling it out to a team
A sensible first step is a small pilot with one team and a clear question, for example: do new agents feel more prepared for their first complaint calls? Decide in advance:
- Who takes part and how long the pilot lasts. One team, a few weeks.
- What question you are trying to answer. Choose something you can observe, not a number you hope to reach.
- How practice data is handled. Who sees what, how long it is kept and whether your works council, if you have one, needs to be informed.
- What stays the same. Existing coaching, quality reviews and compliance procedures remain in place.
Read the privacy and security documents before you start, and ask your data protection contact to review the data processing terms. If a pilot is the right next step, see the team pilot page for how team plans are arranged. Check current plans on the pricing page.
Where it fits and where it does not
AI practice is a good place to rehearse conversation mechanics: opening, listening, clarifying, handling an objection, closing a call cleanly. It is not a substitute for product training, for a trainer's judgement, for listening to real calls or for the support a new agent gets from experienced colleagues. It works best as a supplement that makes the human parts of training more useful, since agents arrive at a coaching conversation having already tried something.
Related: Call Centre KPIs (AHT, FCR) and How Training Affects Them, A Call-Centre New-Hire Practice Plan, Call Centre QA Scorecard Template (Sales + Service).
Frequently asked questions
Does AI practice replace trainers?
No. It gives agents more repetitions between sessions with a trainer. Trainers still teach the product, set the standards and bring the judgement and context an AI customer does not have.
How many practice calls does an agent need?
There is no honest universal number. Start with two or three short calls a week and watch how agents feel and what they ask for. Adjust to your calls, your product and your agents' experience.
What happens to the recordings and transcripts?
Check the privacy documents and the data processing terms for the plan you intend to use, and ask your data protection contact to review them. Decide in advance who sees practice data, and tell agents plainly what is kept.
How long does a rollout take?
Most of the time usually goes on deciding scenarios, agreeing how data is used and talking to the team, not on technical setup. Plan for that, and check the current onboarding steps for teams before you commit to a date.
Does it work in several languages?
DIRI AI is available in 11 languages: English, Czech, Slovak, Polish, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, Romanian and Hungarian. Check which languages are available for practice calls on your plan before you plan a multilingual team.
Related situation: Sales call centres: practice for the whole team
A note on sources
This is editorial guidance based on common training practice, not the result of a study, and we do not claim a specific effect on handling time, quality or customer satisfaction. Rules on monitoring employees, recording calls and automated assessment differ by country; check them with your legal or compliance contact.
DIRI AI trains communication and provides a report after each practice call; the participant sees their own report. The intended purpose is training, not evaluating employees.
The Free plan includes 3 voice calls a month of up to 5 minutes each; e-mail confirmation is required. Check current terms before you start.