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Report Finds Automation Will Ultimately Replace Human Customer Support
The customer support industry is on the move from both a technological and human labor perspective. As self-service solutions get smarter and communications media channels proliferate, customers are approaching support in a different way. Whereas once the first instinct might have been to pick up the phone, there is evidence that customers today are saving the telephone as an option of last resort. The reason is that self-service solutions have gotten so much smarter than old “dumb” IVR solutions or a list of FAQs on a Web page.
In particular, chat bots are on the rise. These are automated, artificial intelligence-inspired chats that can scan a customer’s query and find the right answers very quickly, delivering them in the form of instant messaging. Facebook (News - Alert) has been making a big splash with chatbots, improving its first generation by orders of magnitude. Earlier this month, the social networking giant introduced DeepText, a natural language-learning network engine to help its chatbots and other software better understand and mimic human language by scanning “several thousand posts per second” by Facebook’s global users, according to Newsweek. The new chatbot works well enough that it’s being adopted on a business-to-business basis by other companies looking to personalize a chatbot for their own customers.
From here, the automation of customer support will only get better. As robotics, speech technology and AI improve, expect to see more and more automated “smart” customer support solutions. It’s a great revolution for customers.
But is it great for workers? Probably not, particularly female workers, according to a recent World Economic Forum report that predicts that by 2020, the disruptive technology behind chatbots could lead to “a total loss of 7.1 million jobs — two thirds of which are concentrated in the office and administrative job family.”
“One particular set of jobs affected by this, for example, are customer service roles, which will become obsolete due to mobile internet technology,” according to the report.
Women still make up the lion’s share of the administrative and customer support workforce, so the newer technologies could place a greater burden on the female workforce. At the same time, jobs in the traditionally male, STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) are on the rise, according to Emma Teitel writing for Canada’s The Star.
Colleen McMorrow too, partner of Strategic Growth Markets at Ernst & Young, told Teitel that the most effective way — and in fact, likely the only way — to close this ever-widening gender gap is to encourage more women to enter the STEM fields.
“McMorrow is worried that women are being ‘left behind’ in the STEM fields because of an absence of female role models in the industry,” wrote Teitel. “Few visible female role models she believes, results in limited interest in science and technology on the part of girls.”
Until girls catch up in the STEM jobs, there may still be a part for human customer support workers to play alongside chatbots. Some companies are offering human-driven chatbots to better personalize the customer experience. While the chatbot can be responsible for typing scripted language, the human could ensure that the response is adequately warm, human and personalized for the machine.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi