Sci-Fi fans among you will now doubt be tuning in over the coming weeks to new Channel 4 drama Electric Dreams, a series of one-off stories based on the work of Philip K. Dick.
Writing from the 1950s to 1970s, Dick’s work has already been turned into numerous smash hit films such as Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report.
And while the main thread of those tales focus on the dystopian possibilities of a technologically advanced future, he also had an eye for the ordinary, humdrum details of how tech might affect everyday life. Alongside rogue cyborgs and digital mind control, for example, he also explored such dilemmas as being locked out of your own apartment because you do not have enough credits to tip the talking doors.
Dick would have recognised from his own imagination many of the latest technologies now shaping daily life, the likes of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), bots and robotics. He may even have been surprised by the accuracy of his own predictions - the way, for example, many service activities, once only possible through human-to-human communication, are now being automated thanks to the evolution of ‘smart’ systems which can analyse, predict and respond to human requests.
So customers having entire online conversations with automated chatbots, far from being a fiction drawn from a script of Electric Dreams, is now very much part of everyday reality. When you call up a business with a query, you may now have your call routed to a certain department or agent based on your past contact behaviours or spoken requests, rather than using a numbered keypad menu.
The question facing the contact centre industry is, how far will all of this go? Will human agents, like in one of Dick’s stories, one day be superfluous to service roles, as more efficient, cost-effective and perhaps trustworthy intelligent machines take over? And if that does become a reality, what will be the impact on a service-based economy like the UK’s, where 4 per cent of the workforce is employed in contact centres alone?
Technology in the Present
As things stand, contact centres maintain a careful balance between human and technological touch points. By and large, it is people who still do most of the hands on delivery when it comes to service. But over the past few years, technology has taken an increasingly prominent enabling role. And as systems and tools have become more and more sophisticated, the possibility that technology might become more important than people has raised its head.
At the heart of it all is the customer experience. If you want to improve response times in your contact centre, increase the number of first time resolutions and raise customer satisfaction rates, you have two choices. Either train every agent to such a level of expertise that they can deal with every type of query in exactly the right way every time. Or use technology to help.
We have seen the emergence of Big Data analytics in the contact centre. Used to monitor call handling efficiency to provide intelligence for staffing and organisation, the latest analytics platforms also log customer interactions, across multiple touch points if necessary, and also integrate with CRM data. The result is a form of predictive analytics which, based on sophisticated mapping of previous outcomes, can forecast what the customer wants at high speed, and help suggest or find the right solution with maximum efficiency.
The development of this kind of technology has led to two particular types of contact centre solution which are recognisable as AI - IVR and chatbots. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) picks up on cues from the caller’s voice (or text cues in a text message) and automatically routes the call through to the right department or best qualified agent.
Chatbots, on the other hand, are growing in popularity as customers opt for self-service over calling, emailing or IMing a business. While looking for an answer to their query on a business website, the chatbot can either ask to be of assistance, or pick up on cues from the pages they navigate to offer suggestions of where to find what they are looking for.