Will the contact center agent be 'automated away'? Nicola Millard, Psychologist and Head of Customer Insight & Futures at British Telecom, don't believe it. The vast majority of jobs are sums of various tasks. Parts can be automated in every job, but tasks that require implicit knowledge are particularly difficult to put into code. In other words, artificial intelligence depends on the agent of the future for years to come.  

For now, we can Moravec's paradox (an Austrian researcher affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University) as a rule of thumb. Moravec states: what is easy for humans is difficult to automate and vice versa. AI finds logic and math simple, but things like perception and mobility complicated.

'Agents are necessary for creating brand value'

Millard, who spoke at the Pegaworld2019 user conference, strongly believes that contact center agents are key in creating brand value for the organization – compare them to an airline's cabin crew who add more to the brand value than the pilot – but perhaps Millard is not sure what decisions pilots make to make a flight as pleasant as possible for passengers.

Perhaps there is another reason why the fear of job loss due to technology is not as great among contact center agents, but one that Millard ignored. The vast majority of agents remain in office for a short time – a large minority for a few years at the most – and they are also hardly organized. No one is concerned about or championing the job of contact center agent.

Personalization and AI go hand in hand

Every two years, BT and Cisco conduct a survey of 'the digital customer' (always among 500 consumers from ten countries) and it shows that personalization is growing in importance. An essential part of this is empathy: taking the customer's context into account. Millard expects companies to increasingly understand that intent and context should determine the way a solution is offered. Omnichannel may make interaction with companies more accessible – the customer determines the channel – but also more complex. You should not let a customer in crisis navigate through a complicated IVR: there is a good chance that this will go wrong. The same applies, for example, to having your boarding pass arranged by Amazon's Alexa.
Millard is also critical of chatbots, which she calls the “IVR for digital”. Bots lack knowledge about the context, they can – if they are good at all – only do one task well, says Millard.

Companies aim for lower call volumes

The role of the contact center is undeniably changing. Particularly in financial institutions, the call volume has been declining for years. At ING, this is an explicit objective that is passed on to IT, he said Vaishal Gariwala, Head of IT – Lending at ING. Millard explains that with the remaining call volume, the average call duration increases by about 40 percent and that empathy plays a prominent role in these conversations.

BT has been thinking about what the agent of the future will look like. Millard has grouped them into five personas, inspired by an article in MITS Loan Management Review.

The default agent is very similar to the current agent: able to take over the conversation if the chatbot fails. In addition, there will be problem solvers, who know how to find their way in complex problems that have arisen thanks to 'computer says no'. The third persona is the negotiator, a role that, like the previous one, is difficult to automate. The fourth person is the tech savvy agent, who can talk to developers – for example about the motives for making certain choices. These professionals are able to help develop bots and dialogues. The last category is concerned with the performance of AI systems: the benefits (also from a non-economic point of view) and the negative aspects (such as malfunctions).

Millard has fairly rosy views on the role of the agent of the future. She states that we need AI to empower agents, but also to train, explain and monitor AI. As far as she is concerned, these will be new skills in the contact center, but the question is whether you need 'agents' for these kinds of tasks, or whether you would rather look in the corner of 'IT people with a sense of empathy'.

VodafoneZiggo: fully engaged in 'assisted AI'

The BT futurologist also sees opportunities for the contact center as a manager of knowledge and information rather than a department that primarily handles contacts: “The contact center is the relationship hub. Contact centers will become strategically important in the future, because data is the new gold.”

Years ago, both the contact center and the agents who work there were positioned as 'value centre' and 'business card of the organisation' respectively. It remains to be seen whether Millard's vision for the future is realistic, but that AI will increasingly influence the content of agents' work is undeniable and visible, for example, at VodafoneZiggo.

Shortly after the merger, a pilot was started with the use of “assisted channels” as Nicole Verburg, Director Customer Value Management, indicates. Customer lifetime value is becoming more important as a metric for VodafoneZiggo's contact centers. There, agents who work for the Ziggo products are supported by AI from Pegasystems in cross selling, upselling, deep selling and data enrichment, among other things. And since the end of May, Vodafone has also been working with AI support from Pegasystems: both via the contact center and via the web and app.

Text and image: Erik Bouwer

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