You know that a business trend has become more than hype when the headlines start talking about ‘investor concern.’ When the people investing in companies are worried about a particular trend then there will be consequences.
As you might expect, the trend in question is generative artificial intelligence (AI). The release of ChatGPT last November really introduced this to the public because their chatbot is so simple to use. Anyone that can use Google to search for memes can ask ChatGPT a question, so it has made more of an impact on the public awareness of AI than years of earlier research.
Verdict reported that education providers, such as Chegg and Pearson, are watching their share price decline as ChatGPT is causing fewer students to sign up for their services. Chip supplier Nvidia has experienced a sudden wave of growth as they are supplying the chips that power all these AI systems.
Interestingly, there is also the potential that AI will increase call volumes. We are already used to smart assistants at home – Alexa and other similar devices. Google has been quietly improving their Duplex bot for the past few years and now commentators are suggesting that it sounds ‘nearly human.’ As it becomes more common to have smart AI-powered assistants handling our restaurant reservations and haircut bookings it is possible that we create more customer service interactions – because an AI system is placing the call.
Gartner agrees. They estimate that over 20% of all customer interactions will be created by an AI assistant making the call or sending a message inside the next three years. Far from this just being a question of AI replacing people in contact centres – the reality is that AI may be on both sides of a call.
In addition, it’s worth thinking about the calls that do get through to human agents today. They are usually quite complex. FAQ and self-service systems are fairly good these days. Most companies post the answers to common questions online so if you Google a problem, you find a video that explains it.
Eliminating most of these simple issues means that the contact centre interactions are usually investigative and complex. Nobody is calling these days just for a password reset.
These complex calls that require thought and investigation, are likely to be the last customer interactions to ever be replaced by AI. For this reason I believe the real change in the short-term will be AI as a support tool for the agents.
The contact centre can use AI to improve service quality by monitoring every call, it can coach and guide agents on a very personal level, it can design training for them that focuses on where they need to improve, and it can listen to customers and advise the agent on the next best action. There is a suite of services that can be applied inside the contact centre to dramatically improve the customer experience.
If AI dramatically improves then all bets are off for many different types of professional jobs, but for the foreseeable future I see the real change in CX as improvements inside the contact centre and more customers outsourcing their personal tasks to AI assistants. Humans still matter.
