SHORT STORY
BWHAT
Contact centres have been transformed by technology. Chatbots today are better in comprehending human languages and addressing customer needs.
AND
With every tech advance, from IVR to chatbots, the human army has become smaller and the promise of better engagement between customers and companies has become bigger.
BUT
While this has helped enterprises reduce their spends, the contact centre industry, pegged to be worth $130 billion in 2023, will contract in the next 3-4 years.
conversations fed to them and new ones they attend to in real time. “The underlying technology is AI now. There’s more intelligence built in chatbots and they can even give a recommendation based on a combination of knowledge and intelligence,” said Rashid Khan, chief product officer and co-founder of Yellow.ai. His company focuses on automating access—be it voice, chat or email. Backed by Salesforce, WestBridge Capital and others, Yellow.ai claims to have over 1,100 customers, of which 400, including the Bajaj Group, Asian Paints and Tata Power, are in India.
Interestingly, there are more ventures like Exotel, Gnani.ai and Yellow.ai being set up today by entrepreneurs than call centres, as technology is tilting the scales in favour of chatbots. The call centre wave ended around the time the chatbots started appearing. It made way for an omnichannel customer experience that didn’t rely solely on humans but also included chatbots and social media platforms such as WhatsApp.
IMPACT ON JOBS
ots are getting better but humans won’t entirely disappear from contact centres, at least in the foreseeable future, for reasons spanning from regulation to technology limitations. “While technology is improving, regulation could delay a blanket use of bots,” said Quatrro’s Roy. Contact centres provide employment at scale and governments could step in to check a complete wipeout, at least, in the short term.
Besides, European and American regulators are coming up with guidelines on how companies portray chatbots to website visitors, users and customers. California’s laws restrain companies from making their chatbots appear as real humans. European regulators bar the approval of consumer loans by chatbots.
Some sectors like banking may not adopt GenAI in a hurry.
“We are custodians of customer money and data. A cautious approach on GenAI, ensuring data privacy and security, is the right thing to do. A good part of our innovation technology is in-house,” said HDFC Bank’s Rathor. Also, banks see themselves evolving with deeper customer engagements on, say, wealth management and insurance, while bots take care of routine queries.
Even as regulators step in, chatbots can’t take over the entirety of contact centre operations. “You can’t reschedule a flight via a chatbot,” explained Gartner’s Coshow.
“Data privacy, security, and hallucinations (GenAI giving out incorrect or nonsensical information) are among the major challenges with GenAI-powered bots. We will still require the human touch in this industry,” said Sharang Sharma, vice president, Everest Group.
Roy pointed out that processes such as mortgage origination have 1,800 questions. “It’s hard to say that it will all get automated,” he added.
On their part, contact centre companies believe their future lies in a blended model. “We use technology not to replace humans but to expand their capabilities and accelerate resolution through conversational chatbots for simple queries. We use our team of interaction experts for more complex resolution,” said Teleperformance India’s COO M.V. Prasanth.
Paris-headquartered Teleperformance has 500,000 employees globally and around 90,000 in India, serving more than 200 clients across industries.
Swedish outsourcing company Transcom acquired Gurgaon-based contact centre VCosmos in February to expand its operations here. “Natural language processing augments our capability to offer services to any market. Improvements in the technology will be key to automating processes, but humans will be needed for personalization,” said Amandeep Singh Arora, chief experience officer and managing director, Transcom India. Transcom Global has 30,000 employees in 30 markets, of which 700 are in India.
KEY TO ADOPTION
Even as the call centre business stares at its most disruptive moment with the proliferation of chatbots, customer satisfaction will be the key to quick adoption. “Using only humans is suddenly seen as an inefficient way to run a contact centre,” said Gaurav Vasu, CEO of Unearthinsight, a Bengaluru-based consultancy. “Omnichannel models, with human capability augmented by intelligent bots, will get strengthened.”
Those running contact centres, meanwhile, will see margin improvements with bots, compelling them to use more of them. Businesses will tilt towards technology as these (customer care divisions) are seen as ‘cost centres’, which won’t add to their bottomline.
According to Unearthinsight, pure human voice business gives a company a 9-11% margin; humans combined with bots and email support is 12-13%. Adding maintenance will widen that to a 14-15% gross margin. But while companies get bullish on bots, customers are likely to react in different ways. Some, especially those from the older generation, will always prefer to interact with a human— and feel a deep sense of frustration interacting with a bot. “When my mother calls up Microsoft tech support, she expects Bill Gates to answer! For my teenage daughter, an exchange with a chatbot is good enough,” said Gartner’s Coshow.
When that teenager gets to her grandma’s age, she may not even remember that an army of humans once populated contact centres. To be sure, they’ll still be around, just not so many of them. Indeed, contact centres will increasingly become chatbot centres. But that also means there’s likely to be a less-harassed human being waiting to answer that call when it is beyond the chatbot’s capability. And that’s a win-win for all.
California’s laws restrain companies from making chatbots seem like real humans. European rules bar the approval of consumer loans by chatbots.