Hold, Please…
“Hold, Please…” a cartoon that illustrates how AI technology is reducing the likelihood that any of us will soon talk to a live customer support agent.
The customer service industry is expecting significant growth from the use of AI to help with call routing and customization.
For example, research company Acumen predicts that the AI Call Center market is expected to grow to $14BN by 2032, with most growth in the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance industries.
One example is Klarna, which recently trumpeted that its new AI assistant is doing the work of 700 full-time agents more accurately (with a 25% drop in repeat inquiries) and solving customer problems in 2 minutes or less.
This AI agent is 24/7, speaks 35 languages and now handles two-thirds of Klarna’s customer conversations, which is estimated to have saved the company $40M.
While this proves that AI takes jobs and then appears to perform them better, there is general skepticism about whether this can provide a better customer experience as I think most of us have reached for the “0” button once our ‘unique problem’ is not covered off by the first or second level options.
Viputheshwar Sitaraman, a tech consultant for several Fortune 500 companies and a Tedx talk AI speaker, remarked “bot customer service tools have been around for a long time, and consumers universally find them frustrating timewasters.”
One of the more innovative companies in the space is Denmark-based SupWiz, which learns the domain language of a given company and then deploys an AI-informed co-pilot with the call center agent to speed up problem diagnosis and resolution during in-person calls rather than try to just replace the human agent altogether.
