Right now, the demographic
that holds the most buying power is the Millennial generation. These
young buyers or Millennials seem to embrace anything that is
self-service for customer service. This leads to the great debate of who
will win in the end: man or robot?Smart IVRs, Chat-bots and web-based self-service have made things easier. In some ways, it seems like customer service is turning more robotic than anything else. When dialing customer service phone numbers, it’s extremely rare to have a human being answer the phone rather than an IRV. You can often handle all of your transactions and get your questions answered without ever being put on hold or speaking with a representative. Many instances, you don’t even need to make a phone call. Once upon a time, you had to call airlines in order to make a reservation for a flight, but now you can do it online or through an app on your phone. Self-service machines are making it much easier to accomplish simple tasks. This makes things much easier on businesses as well. Business’ costs are dramatically cut when they are able to rely on a smart IRVs, Chat-bots and websites to handle mundane and repetitive work.
Humans Are Still Indispensable
However, this doesn’t mean that human beings are totally out of the picture. In fact, some would argue that humans are even more important than ever. One of the first rules of technology is, “If something can go wrong, it will.” When you run into a problem, there must be a backup plan, and your customers will want a human to take care of things. There are many times where the unexpected occurs and the IRVs, Chat-bots and websites will not be able to respond. Read this to see specific cases: The 10 Biggest Cloud Outages Of 2015. And when you’re dealing with tens of thousands of customers a day, when things go wrong they go really wrong. Delta Airlines flights were grounded by a global system outage two weeks ago, that brought the airline to its knees. No flights, no boarding passes, no communications. When all's said and done, the smart IRVs, Chat-bots and websites of customer service could have been extremely useful, but it’s only useful until something goes wrong. When that happens, customers demand the help of a human beings. Any company that tries to do away with human CSRs entirely will lose business as a result.- Tech outage (website, billing, booking, cloud, database, etc)
- Weather related outage (flood, snow, hurricane, volcano cloud, etc)
- Human related outage (labor strike, illness, bird flu, salmonella, etc)
- Marketing has unplanned product release
- Product update goes bad
- Product outage or shortage
- Product recall or defect
Don’t worry, Humans will still have jobs
A major concern in the robot vs. human debate is that automation is taking over human jobs, and pretty soon, the job market will plummet. But that hasn’t happened yet. If anything, it’s created better jobs. Although most companies need fewer CSRs answering the mundane, the CSRs will be answering the 20% of the more advanced questions. The CSRs will be answering the crisis calls that build brand loyalty. Business will need more people who can solve the problems of technology-gone-wrong. These jobs pay better and are often more comfortable than phone jobs.In addition, this age of automation has led many businesses to recognize the power of humanization in their CX (customer experience). When automation and online experiences first became popular, businesses were struggling to create strong relationships with their customers. It’s difficult to engage on a personal level with empathy, relevance, and kindness when your entire operation is being run by smart IRVs, Chat-bots and websites.
There will always be people worried about robots taking over the world, but there’s no need to be concerned here. There’s more need for humans in customer service than ever before, and savvy businesses are making a strong effort to humanize every customer experience as much as possible.
Call Center Pros can bring the right OmniChannel software to your Call Center.
Please contact us for any call center technology need or telecom challenge.
Thank you,
James W Wilson
Call Center Pros
james@call-center-pros.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jameswwilson
1-404-936 4000
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