As time passes, the demand for delivering faster, more efficient and much more diverse customer service in contact centres has increased considerably and will continue to do so well into the future.
With this in mind, one of the questions we must ask is will agents and the contact centres they work for be able to handle this huge growth in work rate and responsibility without the help of AI?
The rising trend of AI in customer service
In short, when you take into consideration a recent prediction made by Frost & Sullivan Contact Centre Research which claims that the growth rate of AI solutions is set to surpass that of Agent Services by 2030, it’s clear that AI’s presence in contact centres is inevitable and will play a huge role in the industry’s future.
But for what reason is such a huge growth rate expected?
As customer contact centres increase in size and evolve from basic call centres into multi-channel ones that handle a wide variety of queries and complaints that cross over many different fields of expertise, finding a solution without the assistance of AI is going to be an extremely difficult and long-winded process.
With AI, however, Contact Centres are able to save both callers and agents a great deal of time by having all routine transactions fully automated whilst calls regarding more complex issues can be sent through to specialists who excel in that particular field and can resolve the issue as quickly as possible.
Will humans still have a role to play in contact centres?
As the Frost & Sullivan statistic suggested, AI growth rates are set to surpass Agent services by 2030 and when you look features such as the highly intelligent Chatbots and voice recognising Virtual Agents that are so well-designed people often struggle to realise they are not talking to a human, it’s easy to see how AI will replace many roles currently held by humans in the years to come.
However, machines replacing humans isn’t exactly news and has been happening in many industries for a number of years. Having said that, this isn’t necessarily the end for human agents in contact centres, it is just going to change the roles they play and in theory could be a huge advantage that will make their working day far less tedious by handling menial tasks.
When can we expect to see these changes?
When you take into consideration how far AI has come in the last five years alone, we wouldn’t be surprised to see the number of contact centres deploying AI solutions to have doubled in the five years that follow.
To think otherwise would be a foolish error as how many businesses would refuse to follow a trend that is pretty much guaranteed to reduce costs, improve overall efficiency and performance and strengthen the company as a whole against competitors in future markets? Our answer is, not many.
