The headlines were cranked up to eleven:
“Google’s Duplex AI could kill the call center.”
— Quartz.
“Google Is Reportedly Looking to Take Over Call Centers.”
— Gizmodo.
As usual, the press misunderstands the role of the call center, and the forces that might make it grow or sink.
The demand for real-time human-assisted help – whether by voice or text – is not primarily a result of insufficient self-service tools. There are already many ways for companies to offer self-serve interactions to their customers. Adding a new format of self-service is exciting, and potentially useful, but rarely moves the needle in the balance between self-serve and human-assisted service.
It’s been a year since Apple announced “Business Chat”. The company staked out an audacious goal: to become the preferred channel for customer service communication. A year ago, Facebook, a competitor on this front, was reeling from weeks of bad press over privacy issues. But now, Facebook stock has hit a new all time high, with those transgressions seemingly forgotten by the market.
It’s that special time of year. Put your hands together and give it up for the 2018 winners of Fonolo’s Customer Experience Excellence Awards!
How will technology change customer service? A common answer to this question is, “Improvements in automation and self-service will erode the importance for call centers and the human agents in them.” That answer gets reinforced every time you read an announcement from a company touting success of a new automation project. It also gets strengthened by the marketing efforts of all the vendors selling self-serve technology. However, if we adjust for recency bias and profit motive, can we still be sure this trend is real? It’s a question too important for casual conclusions.
Full disclosure: I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek: The Next Generation lately. And no, it’s not all about spaceship battles, alien encounters, and boldly-colored jumpsuits. It’s about the future (the year 2364 to be exact), and it gives anyone in the Customer Experience (CX) racket a lot to think about.
As the weather warms up in the West and many take off for their summer holidays, customers are increasingly dealing with big-brand companies in the business of travel: Airlines. Modern airline customer service (CS) is a far cry from the days when Don Draper-like marketers were designing prime service experiences for anyone who could afford to climb aboard (as marketed in the below 1954 ad for American Airlines).
Most people don’t realize the impressive scale of the contact center industry. Collectively, we spent 190 billion minutes calling a company for help. On the other side of those calls were 3.6 million people working as agents (and those numbers are just for the US).
