Bot-wranglers- the new age career for the Gen-Now generation
Dr Asoke Das Sarma
Head - Consulting, SIAM, IT Service Management & Supply Chain Management
Accessing a web chat service (through mobile phones / computers) instead of calling up a contact centre agent is increasing used by young consumers to resolve their queries or address any service issues.Besides Chat services cost almost half of a traditional voice interaction and as per some surveys, chat interactions also result in higher customer satisfaction over voice calls. So little wonder that contact centre across the globe prefer this channel over traditional phone calls.
To address this growing channel shift in contact centre operations (from traditional voice calls to web chat) – many companies are creating corporate “chat-bots” that can respond to customer-service queries or dispense information.
These chat-bot are roughly equivalent to what is IVR (interactive voice response) of a call centre operation, but their job is much more complex as they need to contextually understand the question from the client and respond accordingly.
Just as websites need designers and programmers, bots will need specialists to devise their business rules, write their dialogues and keep them up to date. This will be a specialist job and as per “The Economist” , the job category that may be collectively named as “bot-wranglers” . Some companies are contemplating to hire poets and creative writers, who can empathise with the chat users and write witty and intelligent responses. These dialogues will be canned for the chat-bots to use while these inanimate robots respond to living human beings.
But make no mistake- the bot wranglers is no simple job category which needs only good language skills. The bot wranglers need to have deep understanding of human psychology , programming skills, knowledge of data modelling, user experience design and process analysis.
The question then – is it humanly possible to have such diverse set of skills in a single individual? Or will the bot wrangling be a function which houses a set of talented associates with cross functional skills as mentioned above? Many Indian IT companies are heavily investing in chat-bots - they can be the pioneer in the field of bot wrangling as well.
Product Owner | Ex Deloitte | Conversational AI | Project & Program Management | Consulting & Delivery | Generative AI | Intelligent Automation
7 年Our challenge is that we go after every new thing without judging the long term impact. Bots are a requirement but how much? Is it only to save human resource cost or something else. How much does it impact or improve the processes that question is still not answered completely.
18+ years of success in building high-performing organisations by Process Re-Engineering, Continuous Improvement, QA, Audits, Lean, Six Sigma, Global Business Transformation, Digitisation, Change & Project Management
7 年Chatbots is definitely a solution every IT industry is going for but there are still some critical challenges as how deep an artificial intelligence can be built in the system to run chatbots..Facebook is already facing a technical challenge with it.. I believe that the focus must be on the process design and try to reduce the frequency of customer contacts with respect to queries and concerns..