Digital Colleagues: Friend or Foe?

It might be time for some of us in the customer service industry to start dusting off our resumes. They never take a break, never go on vacation, they don't even require benefits. They're not just after customer service jobs either, look out sales, marketing, and even HR recruitment: digital employees, often in the form of chatbots, have entered the workforce and there's no looking back. The market for customer support chatbots and automated messaging services is surging to all-time highs due to recent strides being made with machine learning and artificial intelligence, as well as the prominent push into the space by the likes of Amazon and Facebook. Now, when I say that it may be time for customer service professionals to start dusting off their resumes, there's some debate as to why. Critics of chatbots argue that these technologies will replace live agents, sacrificing the human touch that is required when addressing complex customer inquiries, at the expense of the customer experience.