Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
"Robo-Agents" May Have Their Limits in the Near Future
While “Robocop” and “robo home housekeeper” (courtesy of “The Jetsons”) may still be concepts for the distant future, the idea of “robo agents” in customer service may be a more attainable future. Automation is rapidly entering the customer relationship – let’s face it, most customer inquiries can be automated with existing technology today – and the “smarter” this automation becomes, the less room it leaves for human agents…or so it seems.
This may be bad news for the nations that build their economies on contact center outsourcing (think: The Philippines). A recent article in The Wall Street Journal theorized that many of the 1.2 million call center positions in the Philippines could soon be replaced by customer service robots, often in the form of “chat bots” that use machine learning, natural language processing and integrated databases to search for and present conversational answers to customers’ queries.
So will it happen in the U.S.? Maybe, but for starters, Americans need to get over their loathing of robotic messaging that has cropped up with the use (and abuse) of “robocalling,” according to Monet Software (News - Alert) CEO Chuck Ciarlo, who noted that it’s only going to get worse in the lead up to a presidential election season.
“In this political season rife with robo-calls, consider the frustration most of us experience in listening to recorded message[s] that cannot be altered,” wrote Ciarlo in a recent blog post. “Now apply that same principle to a contact center customer trying to ask a question or place an order. An automated voice cannot make a customer feel appreciated. No matter how sincere the ‘We appreciate your business’ recording is, many will think, ‘If you really appreciated my business, you'd hire someone to let me know in person.’”
That said, there is a time and a place for intelligent automated customer support technology, such as in chat bots that can help point customers who don’t wish to call the contact center in the right direction to look up information for themselves. Any more than that however, such as forcing customers who don’t want to chat with a robot to do so, risks alienating customers.
“We have all come to embrace cutting-edge technology as a boom to our businesses and our lives. But at some point, it's wiser to take a step back, and understand that just because something is technologically possible, it doesn't mean it's better than what has gone before,” wrote Ciarlo.
No matter how much foresight is applied to anticipating customer requests and automating them, there is still an expectation among customers today that a human agent will be there for complex issues, or if the customer simply doesn’t like using automated systems. Many customers will still need to be forwarded to a live agent, and since they’ve wasted time interacting with an automated system first, they’ll wonder why they couldn't receive that kind of attention in the first place.
Going forward, savvy companies may combine automated “robotic” customer support with on-the-spot human agents who can recognize when the limits of usefulness of automated systems has been reached, and quickly step in to provide the human touch.
Edited by Alicia Young