Contact centres will start to rely more heavily on artificial intelligence in a bid to boost customer satisfaction and cut costs. Brexit will also boost the technology as Britain struggles to fill vacant posts.
In an exclusive interview with UC Today, Martin Taylor, deputy CEO at cloud communications specialist Content Guru, said that the UK’s possible exit from the EU would mean that contact centres are having to think about how they are going to manage with fewer people in the country post-Brexit.
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Martin Taylor[/caption]
“We’re going to have to manage with fewer people in all likelihood,” he said.
He said that at one of his customers, it was reporting a 60 per cent churn in its agent workforce last year.
“What we've done for them is we brought in a new AI-based natural language processing front-end onto their main service. So we're taking away a lot of tedious regular, frequently asked questions and automating them.”
AI doesn’t seem to be unpopular with agents. Especially ones who want an easier working experience.
“Workload is the number one cause of agent dissatisfaction,” he said
He said that many agents think they are overworked just answering the phone and then they are being asked to deal with multiple chat sessions, as well as dealing with Facebook, Twitter and emails as well.
“Unless we organise that agent workload carefully, then that workload is just going to drive higher and higher unsustainable churn.”
He added that agents are going to need support for those agents.