AI shakes up the call center industry, but some tasks are still better left to the humans

By KEN SWEET NEW YORK AP Armen Kirakosian remembers the frustrations of his first job as a call center agent nearly years ago the aggravated customers the constant searching through menus for information and the notes he had to physically write for each call he handled Related Articles Musk s SpaceX spends billion to acquire spectrum licenses from EchoStar Hasbro announces HQ move to Boston Robinhood joins new band of companies calling the S P their home means to get on the path to lifetime income FAA extends ban on US commercial flights to Haiti s capital because of peril from gangs Thanks to artificial intelligence the -year-old from Athens Greece is no longer writing notes or clicking on countless menus He often has full customer profiles in front of him when a person calls in and may already know what obstacle the customer has before even saying hello He can spend more time definitely serving the customer A I has taken the robot out of us Kirakosian explained Roughly million Americans work in call center jobs and millions more work in call centers around the world answering billions of inquiries a year about everything from broken iPhones to orders for shoes Kirakosian works for TTEC a company that provides third party customer arrangement lines in countries to companies in industries such as autos and banking that need extra maximum or have outsourced their call center operations Answering these calls can be thankless work Roughly half of all customer utility agents leave the job after a year according to McKinsey with stress and monotonous work being among the reasons employees quit Much of what these agents deal with is referred to in the industry as break fix which means something is broken or wrong or confusing and the customer expects the person on the phone to fix the difficulty Now it s a question of who will be tasked with the fix a human a computer or a human augmented by a computer Already AI agents have taken over more routine call center tasks Specific jobs have been lost and there have been dire forecasts about the future job realm for these individuals ranging from modest single-percentage point losses to as numerous as half of all call center jobs going away in the next decade The drop likely won t match the more dire predictions however because it s become evident that the industry will still need humans perhaps with even higher levels of learning and training as selected customer institution issues become increasingly harder to solve Particular finance companies have already experimented with going in heavily with AI for their customer function issues Klarna the Swedish buy now pay later company replaced of their roughly customer operation agents with chatbots and AI in The results were mixed While the company did save money Klarna discovered there was still a need for higher skilled human agents in certain circumstances such as complicated issues related to identity theft Earlier this year Klarna hired seven internal freelancers to handle these issues Earlier this year Klarna hired a handful of customer amenity employees back to the firm acknowledging there were certain issues that AI couldn t handle as well as a real person like identity theft Our vision of an AI-first contact center where AI agents handle the majority of conversations and fewer better trained and better paid human agents backing only the most of complex tasks is briskly becoming a reality reported Gadi Shamia of Replicant an AI-software company that trains chatbots to sound more human in an interview with consultants at McKinsey The call center customer s experience while improved is still far from perfect The initial customer organization call has long been handled through interactive voice response systems known in the industry as IVR Customers interact with IVR when they re reported press one for sales press two for backing press five for billing These crude systems got an update in the s when customers could prompt the system by saying sales or help or simple phrases like I d like to pay a bill instead of navigating through a labyrinthian set of menu options But customers have little patience for these menus leading them to zero out which is call center slang for when a customer hits the zero button on their their keypad in hopes of reaching a human It s also not uncommon that after a customer zeros out they will be put on hold and transferred because they did not end up in the right place for their request Aware of Americans collective impatience with IVR Democratic Sen Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Republican Jim Justice of West Virginia have introduced the Keep Call Centers in America Act which would require clear means to reach a human agent and provide incentives to companies that keep call center jobs in the U S Companies are trying to roll out telephone systems that broadly understand customer institution requests and predict where to send a customer without navigating a menu OpenAI the maker of ChatGPT is coming out with its ChatGPT Agent operation for users that s able to understand phrases like I need to find a hotel for a wedding next year please give me options for clothing and gifts Bank of America says it has had increasing success in integrating such features into Erica its chatbot that debuted in When Erica cannot handle a request the agent transfers the customer directly to the right department Erica is now also predictive and analytical and knows for instance that a customer may repeatedly have a low balance and may need better help budgeting or may have multiple subscriptions to the same function Bank of America announced this month that Erica has been used billion times since its creation and is increasingly taking on a higher affair load of customer system requests The chatbot s moniker comes from the last five letters of the company s name James Bednar vice president of product and innovation at TTEC has spent much of his career trying to make customer organization calls less painful for the caller as well as the company He commented these tools could eventually kill off IVR for good ending the need for anyone to zero out We re getting to the point where AI will get you to the right person for your concern without you having to highway through those menus Bednar revealed