Replace unreliable people with tireless cloudy software, they said …
Your correspondent once met the manager of a contact center dedicated to processing parking and speeding fines. This chap's"customers" were understandably nearly always unhappy, and the folks who answered the phones therefore copped more than their fair share of surliness and abuse.Other call center operators don't have to deal with 90 percent attrition, but 50 percent staff annual turnover is not uncommon.
Customer service operations do their best to automate routine chores, so that their best people can be applied to the sort of tasks that require humans to solve problems. That kind of job is more fulfilling, so those workers stick around for longer and, over time, learn to offer superior service. In theory, automated systems therefore improve service and reduce the enormous recruitment and training costs contact centres face.
We offer this quick primer on the customer service caper in the context of a Monday outage at Google's Dialogflow CX service, which the search and ads giantas an AI-infused offering that creates automated agents that are"similar to a human call center agent. You train them both to handle expected conversation scenarios, and your training does not need to be overly explicit."
The tech behind Google's Assistant powers the service, which offers both chatbots and voicebots. Google says whichever you choose they"Deliver more natural customer experiences" and"support multi-turn conversations with supplemental questions."Which they weren't between 10:19 and 12:40, Pacific time , on Monday September 19.