Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
The Rise of Chat Bots May Change the Nature of Call Center Scheduling
If you were a fly on the wall of the marketing C-suite of many companies right now, chances are good you’d hear a lot about bots. Bots are automated, interactive and intelligent self-service chat solutions that can help solve customers’ problems when those customers communicate with them in natural language. Many high-profile companies are beginning to use them, most notably Facebook (News - Alert) and Microsoft.
Many marketing executives believe that bots will ultimately replace apps, according to a recent article by Parmy Olson (News - Alert) writing for Forbes. The underpinning idea behind this is cost reduction, and the fact that many mobile apps are poorly utilized today.
“Bots are cheaper and quicker to make than apps, and gaining prominence at a time when new apps are struggling to get downloads in a maturing market,” wrote Olson. “It’s why many in tech are saying that bots are poised to take over from apps.”
Olson notes that many of the bots that have either hit the market or are getting ready to launch, carry out tasks traditionally done by humans, and this includes contact center agents. Rather than build their own bots from scratch, many companies are turning to Facebook Messenger as their platform of choice for launching bots.
“Facebook’s pitch to businesses is that over time they can use its bot engine and expertise in artificial intelligence to automate those customer conversations with bots, saving them money they might otherwise spend on human agents,” wrote Olson.
Will the rising use of bots replace the need for human contact center agents? Of course not, no matter how smart they get. Some problems can only be solved by humans, and some customers will resist using automated channels for even simple problems. Understaffing the contact center in the hopes that bots will “take care of it all” is naïve in the extreme. The use of bots may, however, change the way contact centers must staff with live agents.
Dutch airline KLM recently began a program that combines Facebook Messenger with live human agents. By blending answers from human customer service agents and automated bots, the airline can make certain that a customer is never road blocked by a bot that simply isn’t capable of grasping the problem. Some bots are also capable of being corrupted by pranksters.
Microsoft’s chatbot Tay recently made the news, because when it began operating via Twitter (News - Alert), it began issuing racist comments. (There’s a big downside with artificial intelligence when the system begins learning the wrong things.) Olson notes that when there’s a large audience to broadcast too, bots might do better in the background doing the grunt work. Hence the need for human agents to “steer” the responses and ensure that no “bots gone wild” situations arise.
Going forward, contact centers that adopt bot technology will need to rethink the way it trains agents. They will also need to ensure that their call center scheduling solutions are robust enough to accommodate changing agent work schedules so there are enough agents to “guide” the bots, or step in if necessary. While most customers wait until lunchtime or after hours to make telephone calls to contact centers, the rise of bots may mean they engage throughout the day in an asynchronous way. That possibility alone is likely to completely change the reality of how contact centers must be staffed and scheduled.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi