WILL CALL centers be around in the next five, 10, 15, or even 20 years?
As far as the year 2000, rumor mills have been churning out claims that the call center industry is fading. The future belongs to live chat, self-service, and other communication channels – all of which will eventually lead to the demise of the BPO industry.
Fast forward to 2021, and it looks like the speculation isn’t true.
Customer service requests have gone through the roof since the pandemic began. People struggled to defer bill payments, cancel travel plans, and explore online purchase options. Overall, all business types locally and abroad caused surges in ticket volumes – all managed by global support teams such as those based in the Philippines.
To say that call centers have reached a “breaking point” is not overstating the state of affairs. Hold times (the total length of time an agent places a customer on hold) and call escalations (when a caller requests to speak to a supervisor) have given rise to new challenges.
So where does this obsolescence talk all come from?
The buzz came from the possibility that contact centers will stop answering and making calls altogether. This is because as digital technology improves, customers care less about how their issues are solved but care more about simply getting it solved quickly. To get issues solved in a flash, you need to be efficient. For the moment, it looks like AI (artificial intelligence) and automated responses are trends.
AI and auto-responses are truly heaven-sent for solving several customer issues – claiming refunds, tracking products, answering basic information. As technology progresses, it is better equipped to resolve problems – and can be so improved, it becomes more efficient than humans.
Where does this development put call centers and BPOs then? Should BPO employees be on the hunt for an alternative career? (considering that the IT business process management industry employs at least 1.5 million in 2019 to 2020?)
A stable call center is an evolving call center. Call centers will exist as the need for a real, live, breathing person on the other end of the line couldn’t be dispensed with. What changes now is how their agents interact with and serve their customers.
For instance, AI-powered systems could analyze customer interactions before redirecting that same call to the correct associate. The objective is to cut that tedious “explaining” portion of the call. Here, AI digs up the customer’s history then forwards the call to an agent equipped to solve the issue quickly.
Yes, contact center agents will still connect with clients through voice channels – but not in the form of traditional calls. Contact centers will also evolve into cloud-based systems. NEARSOL, for instance, has agents working remotely and answering calls and queries from the comforts of their own homes. This allows extreme flexibility and offers both agent and client a better experience.
If you’re worried about how AI is poised to replace call centers in the near future, don’t be. Robots can’t solve every problem. The resilient contact center of the future can neither rely solely on machines or humans alone. Rather, the key is a good combination of the two. Automation technology will find itself augmenting human agents to improve customer experience.
The demand for call centers and BPOs was made even more prominent by coronavirus disease 2019. Amid an economic slump, the last thing consumers have the patience for is an anonymous chatbot. Bots and auto-responses cannot process empathy (and who doesn’t need a little bit of compassion in these times?).
The call center is certainly alive and well. It won’t disappear, but it will change. The battle now belongs to those who can: successfully wield the power of technology, provide the best training for its agents, maintain a conducive work culture, and provide a great place to work for all its employees.
Call centers are here to stay./PN
