Humans and chatbots collaborating in the contact centre? Good call!

Just as call centre work begins to acquire the respect it deserves, workers face the prospect of having their jobs stolen away from them by the army of artificially intelligent chatbots that are transforming industries across the world. There was a time when work in a call centre was seen as a "McJob" – low skilled, low status and tedious to boot. This misperception has now been laid to rest as consumers begin to value and demand exceptional customer service across channels, and businesses increasingly understand the benefits of providing a great contact centre experience. But will robot employees actually replace humans – or is it more likely that they will complement them, freeing them from the more mundane aspects of day-to-day call centre work? Those of us who have been involved in contact centres for over two decades will struggle to suppress a wry smile at the thought of artificial intelligence (AI) and in particular, machine learning, replacing human workers in the call centre. We've been here several times before: Interactive Voice Response (IVR), speech recognition, digital TV, WAP and the Web, feature phones and smart phones – these were all all billed as the final nail in the coffin of the contact centre.