Choose Wisely your AI Use Cases to Ensure Corporate Purpose in Call Center Operations

According to a report by Gartner, businesses that have integrated AI into their customer support operations have seen a notable decline in the need for human agents. Gartner's research reports a 15% decrease in hiring for customer support roles due to the efficiency and scalability of AI systems.

Where do all these people go?

As more companies streamline their call center operations and use AI or generative AI methods, are they investing in new skills to transfer their talent to new functions, or simply generating termination notices?

Research also shows that AI methods drive incredible ROI to customer service organizations with a tremendous appetite to improve customer service and reduce operating costs.

A recent example is Klarna which announced its AI assistant, powered by OpenAI earlier this year. Their growth is notable:

• The AI assistant has had over 2.3 million conversations, two-thirds of Klarna’s customer service chats
• It is doing the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents
• It is on par with human agents regarding customer satisfaction score
• It is more accurate in errand resolution, leading to a 25% drop in repeat inquiries
• Customers now resolve their errands in less than 2 mins compared to 11 mins previously
• It’s available in 23 markets, 24/7, and communicates in more than 35 languages
• It’s estimated to drive a USD 40 million profit improvement to Klarna in 2024

Klarna has also seen a massive improvement in communication with local immigrant and expat communities across all our markets.

Klarna is one of many companies building AI apps for customer service operations and this market is rapidly growing. The conversational AI market is expected to reach over $33B by 2030 (See more statistics here).

In today's world, customer attention spans are limited.

No one wants to wait in long queues and customers are looking for faster, more personalized, and less intrusive experiences. Reducing customer friction with easy-to-use generative AI chatbots is opening a new communication channel for servicing customers.

At SalesChoice, we have focused on a different AI use case, using generative AI to support call centers or in general employee engagement communication. We have built an exciting new AI/GenAI SaaS product, called MoodInsights, which was borne from COVID-19, and the research from Gallup showing the decline of human happiness globally. We developed MoodInsights in partnership with Purolator and the Ontario Center of Innovation (OCI) (see video here).

Did you know that 20-30% of employees wake up sad every single morning?

Enabling employees to check in daily on how they are feeling provides a mechanism for self-reflection which is proven to reduce or relieve stress, as well MoodInsights provides meaningful feedback to management on what's working or not working. These real-time insights provide leading indicators to improve operational inefficiencies and have a higher communication cadence with employees. MoodInsights is designed to optimize human performance and give humans an advantage every day to ensure their genuine voices are heard. Book a demo with us and see the joy this innovation ignites in humans every single day.

At SalesChoice, we believe leaders must think about more corporate purpose, and the job loss implications on society and giving humans more advantages.

I recently wrote a white paper on Corporate Purpose and Technology Adoption Impacts with Dr. Sara Diamond discussing these implications, sponsored by the strategy and communications firm, Navigator, the Canadian Center for the Purpose of the Corporation. You can read the white paper here.

Take a listen to Dr. Geoffrey Hinton's video from CNN raising ethical concerns on AI.

I believe a stronger balance is needed in customer service operations to not only reduce operating costs and inefficiencies but also to ensure humans remain in place to interact with customers in specific use cases.

We need to be far more astute on our AI use cases and our overall AI strategies undertaken in call center operations, or we will end up with an imbalanced world that we did not intend to create, but due to humans' lack of practicing foresight, we did.

This is what Dr. Geoffrey Hinton is warning us against. I agree with him.