Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has made several quips around the future of customer service.
First, he predicted human customer support will be “totally, totally gone”. Next, Altman suggested that he is “confident” contact center jobs will be the first to be replaced by AI.
With leading AI voices making such predictions, AI experiments are ramping up, CIOs are paying more attention to the contact center, and leaders are honing in on deflection and containment rates.
Yet, while these are helpful metrics, they’re not a strategy. A hyperfocus on these measures can lead to poor customer experiences. As Goodhart’s Law suggests, when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure.
In this case, by valuing automation above all else, contact centers risk high-value calls getting diverted away from agents. These may be make-or-break to customer loyalty or offer a significant upsell opportunity.
As such, contact centers should be clear on why customers are contacting the business and the value each of those contacts has.
Breaking Down Customer Demand
Take the contact center’s most common contact drivers and consider which have the most value to the company and which have the most value to the customer.
Those with low value to both are prime candidates to eliminate completely. Contact automation is a powerful solution here. However, by tracing back the root cause of the issue, through an analytics initiative, the service team can often remove the need to reach out to the business altogether. That’s pre-emptive customer support at its finest!
For those with high value to the company or customer, look to simplify the process. Again, a virtual agent flow may be an effective solution. However, also consider opportunities for proactive customer service, detecting signals in back-end systems to automate the entire process without the customer lifting a finger.
Finally, there are those calls of high value to the company and customer, where loyalty is won and lost. That’s where the human touch shines, and human reps will ideally be equipped and ready to deal with these common contacts as they reach them.