New York (AP) – Armen Kiakosian remembers the frustration of its first job as an agent call center almost 10 years ago: impaired customers, constant search for information and notes that he had to physically write for every call he managed.
Thanks to artificial intelligence, the 29 -year -old from Athens, Greece, does not write notes or restless offers. He often has complete customers’ profiles in front of him when a person calls and may already know what the customer has before he says “hello”. It can spend more time actually serve the customer.
“AI of us took the robot,” Kirakosian said.
About 3 million Americans work in call center jobs and millions more work in call centers around the world and correspond annually to billions of questions about everything from broken iPhones to shoe orders. Kirakosian works for TTEC, a company that provides third -party customer services in 22 countries in industries such as cars and banking that require special capacity or outsourced their call center operations.
The answer to these calls can be grateful work. About half of all customer service agents will leave the work after a year, according to McKinsey, while stress and monotonous work are among the reasons why employees ended.
Much of what these agents are dealing with in this industry is referred to as “break/fix”, which means something breaks – or is bad or confusing – and the customer expects the person to solve the problem on the phone. Now it is a question of who will have the task of repairing: Man, computer or human widespread computer.
AI agents have already taken over the routine tasks of the call center. Some jobs were lost and for these individuals there were terrible predictions about the future labor market, from modest losses in one percent to up to half of all jobs in the call center in the next decade. However, the decline is unlikely to coincide with greater predictions, as it is clear that this industry will still need people, perhaps with an even higher level of learning and training, because some customer service problems are increasingly solved.
Some financial companies have already experimented with the fact that they have come to AI for their customer service problems to come across AI limitations. Klana, Swedish purchase now, Pay later the company, replaced its customer service department of 700 people Chatbots and AI. The results were mixed. While the company saved money, the total customer satisfaction rates also fell. At the beginning of this year, Klana hired a handful of customer service employees back to the company, acknowledging that there were certain problems that AI could not handle, as well as a real person like theft of identity.
“Our vision of Ai-first contact centers, where AI agents can handle most of the conversations and less, better trained and better paid human agents support only the most complex tasks, is quickly becoming a reality,” said Gadi Shamia Replicant, Ai-Software Company, which sounds more people.
The customer’s experience of the Call Center, even though it has improved, is far from perfect.
The initial call of customer service has long been handled through interactive voice response systems that are known in this industry as IVR. Customers interact with IVR when they say “press one for sale, press two to support, press five for billing.” These raw systems received an update in 2010, when customers could have triggered the system by “selling” or “support” or simple phrases such as “I want to pay an account” instead of navigating through the Labyrinth Set of Offer options.
However, customers have little patience for these offers, leading them to “zero out”, which is the slang call center when the customer hits the zero button on their keyboard in the hope of reaching a person. It is also not unusual that after the customer “zero out” will be suspended and transferred because they did not end up in the right place for their request.
The Consciousness of the Collective Eaturity of Americans with IVR, Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Republican Jim Jim of West Virginia introduced “Keep Call Centers in America”, which would require clear ways to achieve human agent and provide
Companies are trying to introduce telephone systems that generally understand customer service requirements and predict where to send the customer without navigation in the offer. Openai, the manufacturer of Chatgpt, comes with its “chatgpt agent” service for users that is able to understand phrases as “I have to find a hotel for a wedding next year, please give me opportunities for clothes and gifts.”
Bank of America says that it has been increasing in the integration of such functions into “Eric”, his chatbot, which debuted in 2018. When Erica fails to suppress the application, the agent will transfer the customer directly to the correct department. Erica is now also predictive and analytical and knows, for example, that the customer can repeatedly have a low balance and may need better budgeting or can have more subscriptions of the same service.
This month, Bank of America said that Eric has been used 3 billion times since its creation and is increasingly receiving a higher burden on customer service requirements. Moniker Chatbot comes from the last five letters of the company’s name.
James Bednar, Vice President for Products and Innovations at TTEC, spent much of his career to make callers callers and society for less painful. He said that these tools could eventually kill the IVR forever and end the need for anyone to “reset”.
“We get to the point where AI gets you to the right person for your problem without having to go through these offers,” Bednar said.
(Tagstotranslate) Call center tasks
