AI Software Is Taking Over Call Centres. Will That Make Customer Service Better — Or Worse?

Byline - Call centres are scrambling to adopt chat GPT-like software, despite problems with ‘hallucinations’ and inappropriate comments. Reaching a human will become almost impossible, but service might actually improve.

By Christine Dobby, Business Reporter, The Toronto

Star Saturday, June 17, 2023 It should have been simple. Ian Collins’ travel plans changed and he just wanted to update his check-in time, so he called the customer service number for the hotel to make what he assumed would be an easy fix.

“How can I help you today?” an automated voice asked him.

The voice — smooth yet stilted, clearly recorded — asked for his reservation number. He responded that he didn’t have the number handy.

“How can I help you today?” it asked him again, taking him right back to the beginning.

No matter what he said, Collins couldn’t get out of the automated voice loop. It was the type of experience that leaves many of us thinking fondly of the days when you could quickly get a live human on the line, but digital customer service is not going away. In fact, it’s about to take over.

Thanks to the arrival of “generative” artificial intelligence (AI), a type of machine-learning technology that can create new content, such as text, images or music — or provide natural-language answers to customer service complaints — more than a third of Canadian companies are looking at how AI can improve their operations, according to a recent survey by KPMG Canada.

Over the next few years, telecoms, insurance providers, banks, utilities and government departments of all kinds are expected to lean heavily on AI technology for customer service and support.

Many consultants, corporations and researchers say the next generation of automated support will be much better than the chatbots of today. The new systems will be able to learn and adapt on the fly, instantly tapping into reams of information to deliver individually tailored responses.

But there are also concerns that if businesses rush in too quickly or implement systems poorly, the call centre experience could become worse. Customers could find themselves stuck in more frustrating automated loops, unable to reach a human, or even running into AI systems that are unintentionally offensive or succumb to “hallucinations,” where they firmly state incorrect information as fact.

Either way, millions of call centre workers will lose their jobs over the next decade or so as they’re replaced by machines — and the shorter-term scenario isn’t much better. Experts warn workers will face constant monitoring by the machines they work with, which will not only make suggestions for how to respond to queries but also report on workers’ performance, potentially making an already difficult job even more stressful.

Still, with the promise of significant savings and productivity gains — a McKinsey report just this week said improvements to customer service functions alone could create $404 billion (U.S.) in value globally — the pull of generative AI will be impossible for businesses to ignore.

For Collins, the CEO of Toronto software development company Wysdom.AI, encountering bad customer service in the wild, like he did with that hotel chain, may be frustrating, but it’s also a marketing opportunity.

His business is built on helping clients make sure their digital customer-support tools work properly and for years he’s used older versions of AI technology to do that.

If you fine tune today’s chatbots using analytics, you can keep people pretty happy, he says, but that’s nothing compared to what’s coming.

“That’s all gen one,” Collins says. “The second generation just emerged and nobody really saw it coming.”