AI Changes the Rules of Contact Centre Staffing

There has been a lot of hype about Artificial Intelligence (AI) recently. Headlines in respectable newspapers and magazines threaten massive job losses to robots and other AIs who will become our new overlord masters. Great minds like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk warn us of the impending “Singularity” where AIs become conscious and we are reduced to being the slaves of our own creations. It makes for great stories and wonderful TV but the reality is much less sinister.

What is AI?

AI is about computer programs that do tasks normally performed by humans. Sometimes AI leverages data as if it were sense-based input. Some AI programs can “see” and “hear”. AIs can build cars on an assembly line without any human assistance. Or they can steer your self-driving car. But most interestingly for customer care, an AI can be taught to advise a human chat agent. And because the AI can be taught by the best customer care agents, it will give great advice. So new, inexperienced agents will be able to supply better answers from day one, and consequently get up to speed quicker.

Why AI?

Newly developed AI approaches are capable of automating as much as 70% of the work done in a customer care centre. This is a remarkable productivity improvement that completely changes the cost/benefit equation for supplying service to customers. It will free up agents to focus on complex issues rather than repetitive questions. Service levels that were previously regarded as prohibitively expensive can now be offered to even marginally profitable customers.

Service quality will improve while costs are driven down. This changes all the rules of staffing customer service. We can imagine a world where good service is no longer prohibitively expensive.

Interestingly, almost no one is talking about staff reductions in this context because providing superb customer service is the key to customer retention. Customer satisfaction measures (like CSAT and NPS) are now almost universally collected and analysed. Supporting customers who have questions or problems is still the most important driver of Customer Satisfaction.

But what kind of AI works in the contact centre? Will it be rule-based systems, or decision trees, or neural networks? And how will traditional IT be able to support this latest innovation? We will explain this in our next blogpost.