Why call-taker and dispatcher seats keep turning over

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes projections of annual-average occupational separations, not just how many jobs are projected to open. Workers leave an occupation two ways: they exit the labor force, due to retirement or other reasons, or they transfer to a different occupation while staying in the workforce. BLS says that in most occupations, openings caused by separations, both labor force exits and occupational transfers, outnumber openings caused by employment growth. Its projections for 2025 through 2035 put customer service representatives at a total separations rate of 11.7% a year. Dispatchers, except police, fire and ambulance, land at 8.0%.

(We use customer service representatives here as a proxy for a dealer’s call takers. That mapping is ours, not BLS’s.)

For both occupations, projected transfers outrun exits: 6.7% against 5.0% for customer service reps, 4.8% against 3.2% for dispatchers. BLS’s own note on the method matters here, because its estimate of openings “does not count workers who change jobs but remain in the same occupation.” So a transfer, in this count, means someone left the occupation itself, not just the employer.

On raw headcount, neither occupation is growing. Employment, which BLS counts in thousands, falls from 2,666.0 to 2,524.1 by 2035 for customer service reps, a 5.3% decline. Dispatcher employment slides more mildly, from 203.5 to 202.1. Nationally, BLS projects modest employment declines in both occupations, not growth.

Even with declining employment, BLS projects hundreds of thousands of annual separations among customer service reps and thousands among dispatchers. On that same thousands scale, it puts total separations at 303.7 a year among customer service reps against 289.5 annual openings, and 16.2 among dispatchers against 16.0 openings. Split by kind: 129.3 customer service reps exit the occupation and the labor force each year, and another 174.4 transfer out to different work. Among dispatchers it’s 6.5 exiting against 9.7 transferring. (A separate occupation on the same table, public safety telecommunicators, shows the same 8.0% separations rate. BLS tracks the two apart.)

None of that tells you why any one person left. BLS’s data doesn’t identify individual reasons, but the shape of it holds in both occupations: more occupational transfers than labor force exits.

What that looks like from a dealer’s desk

None of this is published with office technology dealers in mind. In our conversations with dealers, two concerns recur: service and dispatch help has been scarce for years, and requests for another seat are often denied. Some teams then turn to IT, or to automation, instead.

These figures suggest recurring replacement hiring at the occupation level. They don’t predict whether any one dealer’s seat turns over, or when, only that BLS projects annual-average separation rates of 8.0% and 11.7% for 2025-35, occupation-wide, on top of employment that isn’t growing to begin with. For dealers we work with, repeated training on the same seat can be costly. That’s our experience, not a conclusion the BLS data itself establishes.

In our experience, a dispatcher’s departure can take account-specific knowledge with it, leaving a replacement to rebuild that context while learning the phones and the paperwork both. Auralis is built to preserve some of that continuity, handling meter reads, toner and service calls, and dispatch logging around the clock regardless of who is on the seat that day.

If the seat stays hard to fill, Build vs buy: how to add AI agents to your team sets out what it takes to build an AI agent in-house or buy one: time, cost and the people each needs.

Sources

• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Projections program, Occupational separations and openings, Table 1.10, projected 2025-35.
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Projections program, Occupational Separations, last modified Aug 27, 2026.
• Auralis conversations with dealers and product information (internal).