Contact Center ... re-imagined

How can you convert a traditional contact center into a chatbot-driven service that can delight your customers while creating highly engaged employees at the same time?  

How can you change call center fear of transformation into excitement of learning new competences while upgrading people to become more employable within and outside of your own organization?  

?How do you apply your leadership skills to create a workforce of the future that is comfortable and excited to work hand in hand (and head in head) with the artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies? 

The chatbot technology powered by AI is getting more popular these days as it has become much more accurate and human- like. There are, however, a few issues that need to be addressed when transforming a traditional contact center into a chatbot powered department. 

 First, is important to ensure that there is a very smooth customer journey, leading consumers from their mobile device to engaging with a bot. One of the ideas worth exploring is changing the IVR message into “Press 1 for immediate service and ... press 2, if you prefer waiting on the line”. When people press 1, an SMS can be  sent to a customer, with a link to a chatbot, that continues servicing the consumer.

 In those cases where there will be access to customer private or confidential data, the verification process should be included. For customers with online banking, it can be the consumer’s login and password that allows them to continue chatting with the bot. For customers without an online banking relationship, it may be a card number and PIN, that will allow them to use the service. Thanks to such an easy customer journey, the take up of the new service can become quite significant.

Another solution that can be delivered is a chatbot powered by voice, where the journey is similar, but the customer remains on the phone and continues speaking with the bot. 

 Secondly, any exceptional cases (i.e. situations when the consumer doesn’t get what they want) should be immediately handled by a live agent,  irrespective as to whether it’s on the handset or on a chat. A decision to handle exceptions in this way has an enormous positive effect on customer adoption of the new ways of using a contact center, as people always feel comfortable that there is an easy fallback to a comfort zone.

 It is a little like having agents at the automated check-in machines at the airport. It works when you go through the process with them first and when they are always around when you need them. With such an approach, customers’ comfort with using new technology is increasing enormously. 

Thirdly - promoting a new way of thinking among the contact center staff.

Imagine what happens to the people morale when you pass a blunt message to your few hundred staff at the contact center, “we are going to replace you with a robot”. This is never going to be accepted warmly. 

 But there is a different and more insightful way of passing the same message, and doing it in such a way, that it creates engagement and willingness to participate in the transformation. There is usually around 30 per cent turnover in the banking contact centers around the world. In vast majority of the cases, it is also the first job for people working there. The majority of agents at contact centers are dreaming to pass their 2-3 years on the line with customers and get promoted to a more sophisticated job. 

 Imagine that you gather your staff from the contact center and tell them, than rather than spending their (anyway limited) time at the contact center answering the calls from (many times) angry customers, they can do something much more meaningful.

 They can start analyzing answers given by the robot and start editing them, so that the bot gets better at servicing the customers every next time they will use it. Such a process, called annotation, basically equals to teaching the bot.

 So suddenly people after a few years of working at a contact center, when they start looking for a career progression, can add a very important item to their resumes. In addition to answering repetitive calls from the customers (by mostly reading information from the screens), they can add they participated in a digital transformation project of converting a traditional contact center into a bot-driven service that drastically increased customer satisfaction.

 I have had discussions like that with real employees throughout my career in Asia, and believe me, I have not met anyone, who would not be excited about such an opportunity. Turning a threat into opportunity by giving people a wider context and a chance to understand “what is there for them” (i.e. how they can upgrade their job, make it more meaningful and relevant in today’s context) is the way to go as far as the new ways of working are concerned. It is also a simple way to remove fear and turn it into excitement and opportunity to learn new things. 

 Such a leadership approach makes people understand that the employer is caring for them and their future, by making them better employable in the world of tomorrow. 

 The adoption of the new ways of working and making the transition smooth from human driven activities into human and artificial intelligence/machine learning powered activities is largely dependent on the mindset change and leadership skills of the top management of the companies going through the transformation. It can easily translate, like during the industrial revolution, into people trying to destroy the machines. Or, taking more recent and positive examples, it can turn into people accepting computers as a necessary or even indispensable part of their lives.