Does Automation and AI Mean The End of People-Based Customer Service?
We are a business with very different thinking. We’re constantly thinking about people; the people inside our business helping customers every day and the future for this industry. Operating in the customer contact space, we are naturally very curious to understand the changing nature of customer service with the introduction of additional channels and automation. It has widely been said by many industry analysts and experts that automation and AI will eliminate the need for people in the contact centre, our view is somewhat different to this, we believe automation will remove transactional activity leaving complexity to be dealt with by humans. When automation fails or can’t support the customer, then a knowledgeable agent needs to be well equipped to meet the expectations of the future customer. However, we were keen to cast our nets wider to understand industry leader’s views on this. 
To help us gain some insight we teamed up with the Directors Club to ask leaders in our industry what they thought about the future of person to person communication. The Director’s Club surveyed 100 senior executives in their network across various organisations and drawn some interesting conclusions.
Some insights from this research revealed that:
- 92% of organisations have a strategy in place to deflect a greater proportion of customer service queries to automated or self-service channels in the future.
- 19% of organisations currently us Chat Bots and 16% use virtual agents for their customer service. In the future, 70% believe their organisation will use these.
- 66% of organisations believe in the future contact centre agents will need a higher level of qualification/expertise compared to today.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll share the full research report with you and some additional information related to this topic. To keep up-to-date with this research series you can click here to learn more.
We will also be presenting a webinar alongside the Directors Club on the 5th June, to discuss the conclusions from this research, to register your free place, please click here.