The new faces of customer service

TEXT: TIMO MANSIKKA-AHO

During the past year, the hype around AI has grown rapidly – in the opinion of many, even out of proportion. As new ways to automatize human tasks keep popping up, concern over restructuring organizations – and, hence, losing jobs – intensify.

Matthew Doerner, Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Teleperformance Nordics, explains that especially in the contact center and BPO world, it is an obvious fact that AI is already disrupting organizations and the entire industry – particularly when it comes to deploying AI within the business.

The times of customer service professionals sitting in a large room answering every phone call and email are already over. Chatbots are handling those tasks better and better, supported by omnichannel presence and other advanced tools. Generative AI bots and large language models are being developed to build continuously more comprehensive problem-solving sets for an even wider variety of purposes.

“According to Gartner, 20% of inbound customer service contact volume will come from machine customers by 2026”, Doerner says. “This means a significant skill shift for customer service – from answering the phone to supervising the interaction between machines who are capable of even discussing between themselves via their own chatbots.”

A dishwasher can send a problem signal to a service center, and in the best case the problem is solved before a human even notices it. While the outcome sounds good for the customer, it means a serious wake-up call for the customer service companies who are still to figure out the role of AI in their business.

Every new technology should still make sense

The most recent AI hype, fueled by the launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, has fundamentally changed our world. At the same time, it has raised questions and even concerns of where the real value of this development may be.

“While AI may make us more productive, it can also take us away from reality”, Doerner points out. “When we speak about a user experience being ‘with a human touch’, I think that this will get increasingly difficult to discern as we move forward. We will always have a role of course, but most of the interactions won’t need our involvement.”

Do people really care if I exist, if I solve their problems – and do they even know they have a problem if AI is able to predict it, and prevent it from happening at all? Those are examples of questions that will soon need to be answered on all fronts. The role of an employee in a company, as well as the role of the company itself, needs to be thoroughly reconsidered.

“The market has a fascinating way of dusting off old concepts and creating new heroes for the modern time”, Doerner continues. “We must really start to ask ourselves again, what exactly is an expert? If ChatGPT and similar tools already can pass legal bar exams, write PhD papers, and do advanced financial calculations, is a human field expert really needed anymore?”

While many companies at first think the development inevitably leads to less revenue potential out of customer service, Matthew Doerner still sees the glass half full. As processes become more automated, the volumes can increase accordingly.

“The solution lies in shifting the top-line focus into delivering more products, expertise, and technologies instead of delivering sheer manpower. This, now more than ever, is a scale game, and the ones already with the largest reach should be able to maintain their influence within the industry.” |

Read more at teleperformance.com