AI means call centre workers will be highly skilled and highly paid!!
A lot of hype currently surrounds the 4th Industrial Revolution, 4IR. Digital technologies such as cloud, AI, mobile and IoT are becoming more common and are converging to revolutionise the way we work. AI in the form of digital chat bots are already transforming the way organisations interact with their customers. Call centres across industries are starting to get scaled back as automated, AI service bots become more prevalent. That trend will pick up pace as NLP and AI tools mature further and organisations seek to drive down their cost to serve.
One of the key areas is intelligent automation. Business Process Management (BPM) has been a theme for decades but organisations are now linking it to customer journeys and applying machine learning to their business processes. Organisations are producing digital assistants focused on delivering products and services to customers – anchored to the customer journey. Ultimately these digital assistants can then automate processes to fulfil customer needs and manage queries on a case-by-case basis.
Organisations are also reducing their back office staff and hence cost. This is happening across industries, from insurers and banks to online retailers. However, customers will accept automation for the mundane; when they speak to a human they’ll expect excellence and will want the person to be empowered to fix their problem. Those who remain in support functions will need to be advanced problem solvers with excellent customer service skills. The emerging call service analyst will be very different from those that have pervaded call centres the last few decades.
The more advanced organisations are going even further than just automating customer service and the back office. They are also applying machine learning to understand and minimise the exceptions that have to be dealt with by humans. When their AI bot can’t automatically revolve a problem, they allow it to ‘consume’ the human response and in this way learn how to resolve it the next time. The exceptions therefore reduce over time but those that do emerge become more and more complex.
There is a rush to automate customer services which is drastically changing the way people work and will make a lot of people redundant. Not just reducing the number of people, but by the type of person. As more becomes automated and the exceptions become extremely complex a service analyst needs to become more skilled, empowered and inevitably better paid!