Will AI replace call center workers?

This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC.
The benefits and drawbacks of artificial intelligence are increasingly in the spotlight as AI creeps into more and more parts of our lives. One of those areas is customer service, where AI tools are being developed at breakneck speed to both cut costs and provide more capacity for call answering and queries. At the same time, in many countries, call center work is a valuable source of income.
Mylene Cabalona is a call center worker in the Philippines and president of the BPO Industry Employees’ Network, or BIEN, for business process outsourcing workers. The BPO industry generates around $30 billion a year for the economy and a huge 8% of the country’s gross domestic product, but Cabalona said workers are worried about the emergence of AI systems that can speak and answer questions,
“For a worker like me, I would say, eventually, AI will replace us.”
This is despite Cabalona acknowledging that the threat to jobs is recognized by the government.
“They have an upskilling program to cushion the impact of AI, and it’s good, but then again, those who are low skilled will eventually go away.”
And Cabalona said it’s not just call centers that will lose out if human interaction goes. She said it’ll also be bad for customers. “I don’t think AI is empathetic. People are more compassionate than when you talk to a robot.”
And Cabalona’s not the only skeptic. Ben Winters, director of AI and privacy at the Consumer Federation of America, said many consumers aren’t keen on interacting with AI agents, even though they could cut down call wait times.
“A lot of time when you’re actually hearing from folks, it’s about the inability to get those more complicated or less clear policy exceptions granted, and more often than not, people are just finding that AI is a barrier.”
And Winters said there are stats to back up the anecdotal evidence,
“There was a relatively recent survey from the company Gartner that found 64% of customers preferred their companies didn’t use AI for customer service.”
But some people are more optimistic about the future of AI in customer service. Evan Macmillan is the CEO of Gridspace, which has developed software capable of producing very human-sounding AI responses to customer service queries. He believes his products will be more than capable of dealing with complex customer demands.
“Most people dial up the phone number on the back of their credit card, and they’re faced with a contact center agent that doesn’t necessarily have access to the tools to take care of the problem.,” he said. “We address this by making AI agents that have access to the right information as well as the tools to get the job done.”
So what about that worry that AI could replace call center staff? Macmillan said that while some jobs may go, others will be created in their place.
“The challenge isn’t really ‘What do you do when that existing set of jobs goes away?’ It’s ‘How do you build on that existing expertise and transition those jobs to voice agent trainers and maintainers, as opposed to call takers and makers?'”
Whatever the eventual outcome, the advance of AI will only speed up, and with it, cost savings and job uncertainty for some in the customer service sector.
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