Tag: technology

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Telephone Answering Service

Dealing with Answering Service Technology

Technology Tools Can Be Our Friend

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

Most all telephone answering services (TAS) use a lot of technology to supplement the work of their agents. Yet technological advances aren’t always readily embraced.

Yes, a few visionaries will grasp the application and move forward right away. The other extreme is those who are the last to implement it.

Most people fall in the middle ground of being neither the first nor the last. They are the cautious middle.

Waiting for others to go before them, they only feel comfortable moving forward once they have studied and understand the answering service technology. This takes time.

Author Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

Regardless of where you are on the implementation curve, here are some tips to consider as you evaluate implementing a new technology in your TAS.

Be Aware that Technology Changes

More than once, I’ve looked at an emerging technology and dismissed it for its lack of utility. My perspective became frozen at that point, and I missed the exciting developments as it evolved.

If you’ve studied promising answering service technology and written it off, it may warrant a repeat look.

Ask for a Succinct Explanation

Many people want to fully understand how an answering service technology works before they’ll introduce it into their operation. Though understandable, this is not necessary.

When talking with a company about their new product offering, ask for a succinct explanation of what it’ll accomplish. Though it may take some effort on their part, its essence should be able to be summarized in one or two cogent sentences.

Few people understand how a computer works, yet we all use them. The same should apply to our answering service technologies (keeping in mind the next two items on our list).

Know Its Function

Often, marketing people use grand proclamations in promoting their newest product. As we wade through their exuberance, we’re challenged to understand the essence of their offering.

In this case, the goal is to distill into ordinary language what it will do—and what it won’t do. Don’t accept generalities. Insist on specifics.

Understand the Downside

Along with knowing the product’s function is to understand its downside. What risk do you open yourself to through this technology? This is often difficult to ascertain, and vendors are slow to acknowledge it.

As you consider the negatives, don’t give in to unwarranted fear over the unknown. Instead, ask others what they think. This includes those who have already implemented the answering service technology, as well as knowledgeable industry technologists.

The reason for this isn’t to persuade yourself from moving forward with the technology but merely to be fully informed before proceeding.

Implement and Use

Armed with this information, weigh the anticipated benefits and expected outcomes against the acquisition cost and operational downsides to make an informed decision.

If you give yourself the green light, go forth and install the answering service technology in your operation. Don’t delay, for this will only minimize its positive impact on your answering service.

Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.

Categories
Telephone Answering Service

Match AI Technology with Answering Service Strategy

AI Answering Service Strategy

Embrace Artificial Intelligence to Help You Meet Your Goals More Effectively

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

Many people worry about how artificial intelligence (AI) might impact our world, including their telephone answering service (TAS) business. They fear AI will emerge as a disruptive force that fundamentally changes their day-to-day operations. It probably will.

Author Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

But there’s no need to fear AI. Instead embrace it. The key is to align the promise of AI with your business strategy. Tap this burgeoning technology to better accomplish your goals for your TAS operation.

Here are some scenarios to consider.

Basic Service

Some clients are on a budget. They know voicemail won’t cut it, but they only need the basics of name, number, and message. They view anything more as frivolous. AI can come to the rescue. This will first be in supplementing the work of your staff, with an eventual potential to replace much of their work, but not all.

Low-Cost Service

If your answering service strategy is to be a low-cost provider, AI will be a great tool to help you save on labor costs, while still providing the level of service your clients want and expect and pay for.

But don’t expect AI to replace your staff. Instead view it as a tool to help your agents do more in less time and to do it better with greater ease.

The result is that AI will help you maintain your low-cost paradigm and maximize it for your clients’ benefit.

Premium Service

A third consideration is the value-added approach. Your goal is to offer more than your competition. In the past, the premium service strategy drove up payroll, not only in needing more staff but also in paying them more.

In offering premium service, however, there comes a point of diminishing returns. At some level, clients will balk at paying more for the extra value. They’ll decide it’s not worth a higher bill, no matter how much better your service is.

In this instance, you can tap AI to handle supplemental activities that increase the value of your service without growing your payroll. This can be on both the front end and the back end. Use your imagination. Get creative.

Summary

These three examples show how AI can help you achieve your answering service strategy in a cost-effective way. But these are just the starting points. Develop your ideal service strategy, and then look at how AI can help you better achieve it, not the other way around.

Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.

Categories
Call Center

Don’t Forget the Human Touch

Technology May Save Money but Human Agents Make the Difference

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D.

We’ve been hearing a lot about artificial intelligence (AI), and we’re going to hear a lot more about it. Some claim AI is the future of the call center industry, saving money and retaining business.

Others fear it’s the end of customer service as we know it. Neither is right, nor are they both wrong.

Author Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

But AI isn’t the only technology in our call centers. We have digital assistants to help our agents and automated bots to help our customers. Before that we had interactive voice response (IVR) and auto-attendant solutions.

Regardless of the technology or the era it comes from, each innovation brought with it the inherent promise to speed resolutions and reduce labor expenses. To some degree, they accomplished this. Yet they also fell short of meeting expectations.

In most cases, however, the implementation of technology has brought with it a corresponding ire of the customers it’s supposed to help.

In some cases, technology—especially AI—can make a real mess of things. When this happens, human intervention is the only way to correct the problem. This assumes, of course, that people are available to intercede to fix technology’s error.

Here are some things human agents can do that technology can’t do or can’t do well:

Correct Miscommunication

Technology struggles to correct its mistakes. When it determines what path to take, it persists on that course even if it’s the wrong one.

Often, miscommunication devolves into such a quagmire that the simplest approach—sometimes the only one—is to terminate communication and start over later.

Yet this is an ideal time for human intervention to clarify the customer’s concern and redirect action toward the right solution. This means that human agents need to have the ability to override technology. They also need to have both the training and confidence to know when to do so.

Calm Frustrated Customers

Technology isn’t good at realizing when customers are upset and responding in a truly comforting way.

Though through algorithms, AI can detect anger or frustration, customers will likely discern any attempt to diffuse their concerns as disingenuous. This will escalate their tension, not defuse it.

A successful outcome requires a real person, someone who will listen, comprehend, and offer sympathy. Though no human agent can accomplish this all the time, their chance of success is much higher than that of a machine,

Respond to Complex Issues

Convoluted problems can escape the ability of AI to accurately comprehend and successfully navigate. This is especially true when a situation is unique, something AI has not yet encountered and never will again. Yet human ingenuity shines in these situations.

Offer Empathy

Sometimes customers feel a need to vent. Ironically, this is often over the failure of technological solutions to appropriately address their concern. Though AI can determine the need to give an apology and mimic the right words to say, can it do so with empathy?

Will the customer feel they were heard? Will the response come across as sincere?

A person has a much better chance of doing this successfully than a computer.

Conclusion

Though AI technology will continue to improve, causing fewer problems and producing more satisfyingly complete solutions, don’t plan on replacing your staff. Though you will not need as many, you will need some.

And the skill set of these super agents will carry higher requirements than current ones.

Being able to offer the human touch will distinguish contact centers from their technology-only counterparts.

In an era when technology surrounds us and threatens to overwhelm, a human customer service agent stands as a core distinction between offering solutions that are close versus ones that are comprehensive and complete.

Don’t forget to offer the personal touch of a human agent to best serve customers whenever needed.

Read more in Peter’s Sticky Series books: Sticky Leadership and Management, Sticky Sales and Marketing, and Sticky Customer Service featuring his compelling story-driven insights and tips.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Connections Magazine, covering the call center teleservices industry. Read his latest book, Healthcare Call Center Essentials.

Categories
Healthcare Call Centers

Is Your Call Center Centralized?

A Decentralized Call Center Is an Oxymoron

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

In the early days of our industry, the label call center fit perfectly. We handled calls from a central location. This was necessitated by the platform we used, which we installed in our office. It consisted of physical hardware to switch calls and network our computers.

Author Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

Centralized

The physical limitations of our call center equipment required that all agent stations be onsite. It was impractical, if not impossible, to connect an offsite workstation.

Because of this configuration, both our practices and management styles emerged from the idea of everyone working as a team from a centralized operations room.

Though calls could originate from anywhere, they all ended up in one place. Our staff handled them with ease and effectiveness. It was efficient and easy to manage.

Multilocation

With the advent of the internet, it became possible to connect a second location to the centralized telephone platform. Though the offsite agent experience was often not as fast or as reliable as its onsite counterpart, it did, nonetheless, allow for the first wave of a decentralized call center to occur.

This simple change, however, revealed some weaknesses in how we did business.

First, managing staff in two locations required a different management style. The informal—yet proven—management-by-walking-around approach was great in a centralized environment.

Yet not being able to be in two places at once, the manager effectively ignored the staff at the other location. Though some employees worked well without direct in-person oversight, others did not. Too often quality struggled and productivity dropped.

The other issue was out of sight, out of mind. Leaving a box of donuts in the break room as a “thank you” to the staff, dismissed the employees at the second location.

The proven communication technique of posting notices on a physical bulletin board ignored staff at the second site.

And holding an office potluck became more problematic, resulting in further division as opposed to enhancing comradery. Too often, an us-versus-them mentality emerged between two sparring locations.

Yet over time, wise managers adjusted their management style and operational practices to equally embrace employees at both locations.

Home Based

As hosted systems, also called SaaS (Software as a Service), became available, the longstanding dream of many a manager at last became a viable reality.

What was this grand vision? A truly distributed workforce where every employee could work at a different location, such as their own home. In truth, any location with a stable internet connection could become an effective remote agent station.

Though some resisted this opportunity, citing HIPAA and data security concerns, others already had procedures in place to effectively deal with this. And when the pandemic hit, forcing many call centers to close or pivot, some easily switched to a 100 percent home-based operation.

Hybrid

Though some call centers today continue to operate solely in one of these three operational models, most take a hybrid approach.

In this fully decentralized call center model, some staff work in a central office, other employees operate from a second location, and still others work from their home offices. This allows for the greatest efficiency and flexibility.

In this way, our operation benefits, our organization benefits, and our patients and callers benefit. Having a distributed operation is an ideal situation, even if we still refer to it as a call center.

Read more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s Healthcare Call Center Essentials, available in hardcover, paperback, and e-book.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of AnswerStat and Medical Call Center News covering the healthcare call center industry. Read his latest book, Sticky Customer Service.

Categories
Writing and Publishing

Lessons Learned the Hard Way

lessons learned

Here are the lessons learned from a computer fiasco I had:

  • Have a technology plan, but be flexible. [I had a plan but wasn’t flexible with it—until I was forced to. I doggedly stuck to the plan, even when it was inadvisable to do so]
  • Multiple data backups were imperative. I used three methods, and keep several historical versions, spanning six months.
  • Having backup hardware is essential. During this ordeal, I was using both my backup desktop computer and my laptop to handle critical items and not fall too far behind.
  • Having a help desk to call for emergencies is critical.
  • If a computer begins displaying flaky problems, it’s likely telling you something—make sure you are listening.

Learn more about writing and publishing in Peter’s book: Successful Author FAQs: Discover the Art of Writing, the Business of Publishing, and the Joy of Wielding Words. Get your copy today.

Peter Lyle DeHaan is an author, blogger, and publisher with over 30 years of writing and publishing experience. Check out his book Successful Author FAQs for insider tips and insights.

Categories
Telephone Answering Service

How Should You View Answering Service AI?

Determine the Role Artificial Intelligence Will Play in Your Telephone Answering Service

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

Unless you’re intentionally ignoring it, talk of artificial intelligence (AI) is all around us. It’s hard to miss. AI is not a fad that will soon fade, a hype that will soon die down. AI is a trend that will continue to grow and become more pervasive in our everyday lives.

It’s infiltrating every industry, including telephone answering services. Given this, you may wonder how you should view answering service AI.

Author and blogger Peter Lyle DeHaan

Let’s set aside the doomsday prognosticators who foresee a future where artificial intelligence will take over our world and deem human life as inadequate and worthy of eradication.

Though some futurists view this as a slim possibility, there’s little you or I can do to stop it. And the degree to which we embrace or dismiss AI will have no bearing on the technology’s overall impact.

Therefore, instead of fearing the concept of AI on a macro level, we should consider the potential of AI on the micro level, such as on telephone answering services. Given this, the question we must ask is how should we view answering service AI?

Answering Service AI is Not Something to Fear

First, there’s no need to be afraid of using artificial intelligence in your answering service. Though we don’t understand how AI works to do what it does, we don’t need to. What we need to focus on is the results, the outcome the technology provides. The how doesn’t matter.

Answering Service AI is a Tool

Next, we should view AI as a tool. Just as a computer is a tool, the internet is a tool, and VoIP is a tool, so is AI. In the same way we evaluate the cost, the effectiveness, and the outcome of any tool we provide to our answering service, we should do the same with AI.

Can we afford AI? Will AI be effective? What results will AI provide? If the answers to this deliberation are positive, then we should look at adding this tool to our tool chest.

Note that AI is not one application, but a means to empower every application. This means we could end up with multiple AI powered tools in our answering service.

Answering Service AI Should be a Strategic Consideration

Just as with every other business decision we make, tapping AI for our answering service should be a strategic choice.

Don’t jump on the AI bandwagon without first considering its merits. Don’t let FOMO (fear of missing out) rush you into making a rash decision.

Instead, make an informed judgment based on the available facts and a careful cost-benefit analysis.

Don’t Ignore Answering Service AI

Using artificial intelligence in your answering service may be ideal for your operation and goals. Conversely it might not be the right solution for you at this time. But don’t dismiss it without first considering it.

The only wrong approach is to ignore it.

Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.

Categories
Healthcare Call Centers

Integrate Your Call Center Tools

Make Sure Each Piece of Contact Center Technology Works as a Seamless System

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D.

In continuing our series on call center integration, we move to the topic of technology, specifically the need to integrate your call center tools. Today’s vendors offer a wide array of technology options to enhance the contact center operation.

Yet if these tools don’t integrate with each other, we lose—or even negate—their promised productivity pronouncements.

Author and blogger Peter Lyle DeHaan

Technology tools that won’t talk with one another is almost as detrimental as not having the tools in the first place. Therefore, it’s essential that we integrate our contact centers’ tools and technology. That’s why you need to integrate your call center tools.

Interoperability

We’ve all called places and given basic information in step one of the contact, only to have to repeat it in step two. This happens too often, and it infuriates callers, setting the stage for ineffective communications from the onset of a contact.

I’ve also had cases where I had to repeat the same information a second time. Another company made me reconfirm my identity each time they transferred my call.

Today’s consumers—your healthcare systems’ patients and customers—deserve better. And they expect more. Complete integration passes on all collected information through each step of the call. This includes transfers, switching channels, and moving between systems.

Databases

Today’s healthcare providers amass a plethora of information. This data ends up in a database. But not just one. Multiple databases. Too often inter-database integration is nonexistent. Even a basic interface is missing.

This requires contact center agents and healthcare professionals to re-enter information, transferring it from one database to another.

Sometimes this requires rekeying, which is time consuming and error prone. Even copy-and-paste functionality fails to provide the desired ease of information transfer.

Then with the same information existing in two places, a nonintegrated environment means that updates must also occur in two—or more—places. This seldom happens and points to the need to better integrate your call center tools.

I know. In the past week I’ve had two organizations try to call me on a number I haven’t had in eight years. Though I let them know of the change when I moved, not everyone’s records received the update. Hence needless frustration on their part and mine.

Apps

Similar to databases are apps and software. Though on a basic level this is addressed with interoperability initiatives and database integration, more work still needs to be done.

Many times I’ve had reps tell me they were writing down the information I gave them so they wouldn’t have to have me repeat it as they moved from one program to another.

I’ve also had instances where they didn’t write down what I gave them, but they tried to remember it. And they remembered it wrong. This meant I had to give them the same information again.

Does your message taking app integrate with your appointment setting app? Does your answering service software integrate with your telephone triage software? Does your class scheduling program interface with your literature request program?

Conclusion

To provide a holistic and satisfying solution to your patients and customers, you need to fully integrate your call center tools to optimize your operation.

When you do so you will enhance outcomes, increase agent workflows, and improve customer satisfaction.

Read more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s Healthcare Call Center Essentials, available in hardcover, paperback, and e-book.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of AnswerStat and Medical Call Center News covering the healthcare call center industry. Read his latest book, Sticky Customer Service.

Categories
Call Center

Artificial Intelligence in the Call Center

3 Responses to Using AI to Serve Customers

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D.

Predictions about the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) have been with us for decades. But until recently they only showed up in science fiction books and movies—usually with dire results. Such is the basis for good fiction.

Yet in recent months, advances in artificial intelligence have surged forward, reaching into every industry, including the call center and customer service sphere. With AI, just as with any technological advancement, there are three responses.

Author and blogger Peter Lyle DeHaan

Ignore It and Maybe It Will Go Away

The first reaction, which is really a nonreaction, is to dismiss it. Maybe you’re already sick of the hype or maybe you’re not aware of it. Yet assuming a computer algorithm has no place in your call center is not a wise conclusion to make.

The risk of this approach is getting left behind. You will find—likely in short order—your call center operation and your company competing with others who have thoughtfully integrated artificial intelligence into their operation.

They will serve customers in a way you cannot and save money you’re not able to.

Gung Ho Adoption

The second response is the opposite. It’s to go full speed ahead in adopting artificial intelligence technology for the call center. Yet this is also fraught with peril.

The news is filled with artificial intelligence going awry. In recent months, companies have been publicly embarrassed and their stock has taken a hit, not because of human error (at least not directly) but because of computer error.

These occurred from AI applications running unchecked and without restraint.

If you’ve ever used text chat to submit a customer service request, you’ve likely interacted with a chat bot, which is an artificial intelligence application. In my experience they’re unlikely to solve my problem, but usually they collect some preliminary information and route me to a real person who can help.

Yet just recently, a chat bot took me down the wrong path, leaving me with two unacceptable options: agree that the chatbot had solved my problem or pay to upgrade my service. End of discussion. But it wouldn’t allow me to start a new chat session until I concluded the first one by picking either of its two unsatisfactory answers.

I also think artificial intelligence was involved in a recent near-miss with an email support effort. I had submitted a service ticket, but a couple hours later I figured out the solution on my own. I sent a follow up email to cancel the ticket.

The response told me how to cancel my service with the company. This may have been a human error by an agent who scanned and didn’t read my email, but I suspect it was artificial intelligence which responded wrongly to the word cancel.

Fortunately, the AI bot didn’t take the initiative to close my account.

Imagine seeing these examples extended to telephone calls at your call center. Yet it’s already happening.

I recently read a report of artificial intelligence telling human agents how the solve customer problems and what to say. The AI then grades the agent on compliance, penalizing agents who use common sense to override the AI’s bad guidance.

Then the common excuse of “I was just following orders,” becomes “I was just doing what the computer told me to.” May it never be.

Cautious Implementation

The third response—the one I recommend—is a balanced perspective. Investigate the use of artificial intelligence in your call center operation. Make an informed decision as to how to best use it. The wise application is to implement artificial intelligence to better serve customers.

Don’t pursue AI merely to save money, even though this should emerge as an expected outcome.

Seek ways where artificial intelligence can make your agents’ jobs easier. Look for ways where AI can help your human staff better serve your human customers. A guiding principle in this is to keep AI in an advisory capacity.

Give your agents final say. They should be able to control the AI, not have the AI control them.

As you appropriately implement artificial intelligence in your call center, the goal should be to offer better customer service, improve response times, and lower payroll costs. But don’t look for AI to replace your staff anytime soon.

And my advice is to resist the urge to blindly implement AI, lest you end up with a public relations nightmare, lost business, and a decrease in new customer acquisitions, all through AI run amok.

AI Conclusion

A good baseline requirement to guide your use of artificial intelligence in the call center is to empower your agents to control it, not let AI replace the common sense and empathetic problem-solving ability of real people.

Read more in Peter’s Sticky Series books: Sticky Leadership and Management, Sticky Sales and Marketing, and Sticky Customer Service featuring his compelling story-driven insights and tips.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Connections Magazine, covering the call center teleservices industry. Read his latest book, Healthcare Call Center Essentials.

Categories
Call Center

Embrace SaaS Flexibility

Tap Internet Provided Services to Maximize Outcomes

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D.

SaaS (Software as a Service) is a subscription service that provides software solutions from a centrally located host. It also goes by other names, with some vendors making distinctions between various offerings. For our purposes, however, we’ll look at the concept generically.

SaaS offers several benefits not found in traditional premise-based call center solutions.

Affordable

SaaS is a subscription service, usually paid monthly, often in proportion to usage or configuration. As a monthly expense it shows up on your operation’s income statement. The SaaS provider handles all support and maintenance.

This contrasts to a premise-based system that’s installed at your call center. This system requires that you purchase it, install it, and maintain it. The purchase price appears on your balance sheet. The distinction between income statement and balance sheet is significant from a financial and tax perspective.

Scalable

When you buy a system, you make a guess at the size of the system you need. This includes the number of stations, ports, and options. The result is that you may pay per capacity you never use or find yourself under resourced and needing to buy more.

With SaaS you can make quick adjustments as needed to scale up to handle additional traffic or cut back to save money.

Portable

Moving an installed system from one location to another is a time-consuming, expensive task. It involves downtime, which inconveniences callers. With SaaS moving is easy. All you need is a quality internet connection and a device (usually a computer) to connect to it. This is ideal if you need to react quickly to changing situations such as a pandemic, manmade catastrophe, or natural disaster.

Current

When you buy and install a premise-based system, you quickly find using a platform that’s not running the latest version of software or you find yourself buying periodic updates. With SaaS this is never an issue. The provider keeps their hosted solution on the latest version, and all you need to do is login to access it.

Summary

Using a SaaS solution for your call center provides many advantages. It is affordable, scalable, and portable. It’s always up to date. Though you may have a business case or strategic purpose for purchasing, installing, and maintaining a premise-based system in your call center, don’t accept this as the default solution.

Give SaaS thoughtful consideration.

Read more in Peter’s Sticky Series books: Sticky Leadership and Management, Sticky Sales and Marketing, and Sticky Customer Service featuring his compelling story-driven insights and tips.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Connections Magazine, covering the call center teleservices industry. Read his latest book, Healthcare Call Center Essentials.

Categories
Call Center

Is the Future Our Friend or Foe?

Be Ready for Artificial Intelligence to Revolutionize Your Call Center

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

One of the spaces I inhabit is the call center industry. Another of my worlds is writing. These two areas intersect in this column. Another commonality is how technology, specifically artificial intelligence (AI), will affect both sectors.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, Publisher and Editor of Connections Magazine

Futurists in the writing community talk about how AI will arise as a disruptive force. Indeed, the disruption has already begun, with computer programs writing poetry, song lyrics, a screenplay, and even a novel. Much of the writing community isn’t aware of this emerging reality.

Other writers deny that AI even exists and consider it a pipedream. Some see it as the end of writing as we know it and a threat to their livelihood. Last are those, like me, who see AI as a tool that will help us write more, write better, and write faster.

Yes, writing as we know it today will change dramatically, but that change is something to embrace.

AI is also making inroads into the call center industry, and the reactions to AI in the call center space are much the same as in the writing world.

Blissfully Unaware

Many people in the call center industry aren’t aware of the burgeoning developments with AI and how it will dramatically change call centers and their provision of customer care. They view AI as the topic for sci-fi movies, scientific labs, and a far-off future reality—one that will occur long after they no longer care.

Instead, they focus on the day-to-day urgencies of hiring, training, and scheduling agents. They look at metrics such as first call resolution, speed of answer, and average call length.

They consider the number of calls in queue, time in queue, and abandonment rate. And their world focuses on resolving customer complaints. There’s nothing wrong with these worthy pursuits, but it keeps them from considering tomorrow and embracing the future.

Deny It’s a Threat

Others acknowledge the existence of AI, but they don’t see how it could help call centers serve customers better. If anything, they assume AI will make customer service harder and therefore perpetuate the need for live agents. To them, AI is another call-center fad that will receive a lot of hype for a few years and then fade away. Their response is to maintain the status quo and pursue business as usual. 

Fearful Over the Future

Next, are the Luddites, those who oppose technology. Though some call centers embrace technology much more than others, every call center has some degree of tech in its infrastructure and operations.

These people have formed a comfortable truce with the tools they use, and they don’t want any more of them. They have enough, and everything works fine, thank you very much. More tools, especially AI-powered solutions, makes them shudder.

They fear that self-learning programs will take over the call center space and eliminate their jobs. 

Embrace It with Optimism

The final group looks at AI as an intriguing call-center solution. Yes, it will fundamentally change how call centers operate. And this transformation could happen much sooner than most people suspect.

Yet instead of fearing uncertainty over the unknown, these forward-thinking futurists welcome AI as a smart solution to many of the challenges call centers to face.

Yes, in some cases, AI will replace jobs, just as answering machines, voicemail, automated attendants, and IVR have done in the past. In other cases, AI will assist call center agents, helping them work more effectively and efficiently.

This will occur just as our existing tools have improved the results produced from our prior toolset. Then, now, and in the future, the customer benefits by realizing enhanced outcomes.

Thanks to AI, in the future you won’t need to hire as many people to staff your call center. And those you do hire will benefit by having AI to guide their work. These employees will find their call center job less dreary and more invigorating.

The days of routinely shuffling through repetitive calls will end, replaced with variety in handling challenging calls that AI can’t address. This will provide the opportunity to excel in call-center work as never before.

AI isn’t coming. AI is here. What role will it play in your call center?

Read more in Peter’s Sticky Series books: Sticky Leadership and Management, Sticky Sales and Marketing, and Sticky Customer Service featuring his compelling story-driven insights and tips.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Connections Magazine, covering the call center teleservices industry. Read his latest book, Healthcare Call Center Essentials.