Customer care: How the bot army will shrink the outsourcing pie

livemint.com:

Voltas, half of the customer engagements, including demo, installation and service requests, are now handled by bots. This is a massive shift from 2018-19, when 95% of customer calls were handled by human agents. At Japanese home appliances and consumer electronics major Panasonic India, bots handled 20% of the queries when they were introduced in 2020.

Today, that has doubled. The world of the contact centre, once manned by an army of humans, has been transformed by technology. With every new technological advance, from interactive voice responses (IVR) almost three decades back to chatbots a decade or so ago, the human army has become a little smaller, and the promise of better engagement between customers and companies has become bigger.

At first, it was patchy, good enough only for ‘routine’ tasks such as resetting a password, ordering a cheque book or updating an account’s balance. That left all the stakeholders—the company, customers, and the human agents—wanting more. Complaining customers fret about talking to chatbots who can’t comprehend their ‘intent’.

Human agents, on the other hand, have to turn the other cheek and endure the ire of customers (and frequently, their abuse) to ensure the company they represent appears to put the customer first. But today, customer engagement is dramatically changing thanks to AI. Generative AI (GenAI) powered chatbots are far better in comprehending and processing human languages and addressing customer needs than their earlier avatars.

So much so, that in a 24 April interview with The Financial Times, K. Krithivasan, chief executive officer (CEO) of the $30 billion tech services major TCS, said that AI will result in a “minimal" need for call centres within a year. “Chatbots