A Study Reveals That 95% Of The World’s Contact Centers Will Be Automated By Next Year

According to a joint study between Replicant and Demand Metric, 95% of contact centers across the globe have implemented automation as a part of their services, or plan to within the next year.

Automation has become an essential part of contact centers ever since the voice answering machine entered the fold (and probably took a few hundred people out of their jobs in the process). Naturally, of course, the human element still needs to be a part of such centers because customer queries rarely ever fit a singular mold that AI can attend to. However, there is still a lot that can be automated and continually is by such services. Greeting and holding messages don’t need a separate branch of individuals when they can be left up to AI. Redirect numbers on phone lines can be directed by pre-recorded messages instead of a real person waiting to fill in each individual. With contact centers having evolved from landlines to involving all forms of communication including social media as a whole, there’s a lot of room that can be made for automation, and everyone’s eager to save themselves a few bucks here and there by doing so.

Replicant is a firm that exclusively deals in contact center automation, and I love its Blade Runner-inspired name. There are a lot of fun layers there, but I digress; the firm conducted a study with marketing guru Demand Metric to conduct research, consisting of over 300 contact center leaders, on just how prevalent automation is within the contact center industry. An easier question would have been something along the lines of “how prevalent is the opposite?”. It does warrant mentioning that automation isn’t just a desire to reduce production costs (even if I suspect that this ranks very high), but also a necessity that arises out of the need for effective customer service. The actual figures reported by this study reveal that 77% of respondents had customer care as a top priority, and 60% reported workforce concerns as also being a major concern. No one in the digital age likes to wait for long hours on telephones or message platforms. The goal is an efficient, quick call where work gets done and no one’s waiting for any longer than necessary.

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World