Generative AI could soon decimate the call center industry, says CEO

[Northy]

Millions less soul destroying jobs... this is good for people despite the pain of change.

 

[wiyosaya]

And who will customers complain to? AI Bots, of course!

There always the old school method. Write a letter to the president or CEO of the company or both. Back before companies convinced people that the only way to get customer service was to talk to the customer service department this was a way to get customer service. And there's also complaining to your state attorney general, and the FTC Those means might not get an immediate response, but I guarantee you that if enough customers get mad enough to write their AG or the FTC, something eventually will get done.

If talking to the customer service department or its bots is the only thing that people think they can do, the company has them right where it want them. Its time for people to remember that they have more power over crap customer service departments and crap companies than they think,

 

[Adhmuz]

Between a chat bot and a human, it's a really hard choice, but I'll still have to lean towards the flesh sack, despite the lack of knowledge, they can be reasoned with, they have emotions that can be manipulated, they can feel sympathy towards your problem. AI will have none of this, in exchange you'd potentially get knowledge backing the responses, if programmed correctly, which is the main issue there, they're be programmed deliberately to be unhelpful, with limited responses and no way of actually using their AI to help you with your problem.

Amazon being a perfect example, the chat bot there is completely useless and only helps with what you can do yourself on their site, when you have a real problem, you still need to get a human on the other end, and so far, they've always helped me.

However I've also had absolutely horrid customer service from useless sacks of flesh who shouldn't be breathing, let alone employed. Samsung's customer service and Bestbuy's Geek squad, what a hot pile of garbage those customer service representatives are, I Can tell you this much, if you ever consider buying a refrigerator from Samsung, run, don't walk, away from it. And if you already have one, you'd better have an extended warranty, because the base 1 year warranty with Samsung is worthless as they can't fix their products to save their lives. But I digress.

 

[Watzupken]

If you take a step back and think about all these "AI/ Bot replacing people" news, you really wonder how would they expect sales to improve when people are out of job. So AI will buy instead of people? So sure, you reduce cost replacing people with half baked solutions, and left to wonder why you need to keep cutting cost because revenue never improve. Great idea or the great and wise have become fools?

 

[axiomatic13]

Sales will always fix this. I worked at HPE for 28 years in engineering. We had plenty of customers that flat out refused to work with "support" and happily paid their way to always get to engineering first through sales contracts. This will never change.

 

[Reallyhow]

Who's going to pay for the (permanent) unemployment benefits for all these soon to be millions of redundant humans? Will the corporations stop dodging taxes and help society feed them? I doubt it.

Oh, that's the best part of outsourcing. The companies that use it won't. The countries where the clients are won't. It's exporting a problem to another part of the world, yet again.

Thing is, there are a few sticking points. One, people are going to abuse the chatbot with impunity. It's not a person, so there's no chance of guilt. Someone still will have to quality the bad calls. They get to read the carnage.

This is absolutely going to be used as an automated snitch. There is no chance that the AI won't be paired with voice to speech to ensure that employees are behaving.

The ability to simply generate a script on command or look up resources for the callcenter rep is great and all, but I have little faith in how useful it can be.

 

[GFitzpatrick47]

Being able to talk to an AI that knows almost everything is considerably better than talking to someone who can only read off a script.

An important question that is getting missed is accountability.

If the AI makes an error, how does the consumer hold the company responsible, especially if they fully defer to the AI and the ability to reprimand a bad employee is no longer there?

With a quick thought, all you do is necessitate the hiring of support staff to essentially go over the work of the AI. Seems rather inefficient to me, especially for call center jobs that require a great deal more nuance than merely (as that CEO in the article said) "cut-and-paste".

I can't fathom it working in the healthcare or insurance industries, where being correct is significantly more important than being fast.

 

[GFitzpatrick47]

Having been a call center agent for Dell and DirecTV I know there are many times a person has to go outside of the box to solve a technical problem that is not covered in the preprogrammed ideal decision tree. I can't see how they would ever address all of the issues to solve any problem, especially since they will take the cheapest route to do that as well. Hell, I can't even call the phone company or ISP without have to wait to be transferred to a live agent because my issue is not covered in the phone menu.

Exactly.

Having had years of experience in the call center space myself (specifically in the healthcare and insurance fields), the idea of AI taking over these roles falls apart when you introduce them to situations that require more nuance, and where the focus is on getting things correct rather than merely getting the call done as fast as possible.

The other issue is that AI would necessitate a layer of technological supervision that could end up being more expensive than human employees. The AI won't ever be perfect, so you'd need a line of workers to resolve any issue that arise with the AI. I can't imagine those employees come cheap, so if you have a mixed-use company (AI and humans), you've merely added an additional layer of employees that, at a quick glance, appears to increase costs and inefficiences.

 

[xennoni]

No one care replace the Indian guy from Microsoft, not even generative AI.

 

[Mark Fuller]

No one care replace the Indian guy from Microsoft, not even generative AI.

Even with the language barrier, I had a tech I worked with in New Delhi that was second to none editing the registry. See if AI can do that especially with a virus.