Robot co-workers in the contact centre – not what you think

It's been reported that contact centres will be killed by bots, but can humans still thrive in this new age of technology? Contact centres are a large part of interacting with customers at scale and have typically been a necessary cost for organisations offering a service. Modern approaches to support customers involve interactive voice response, virtual agents and robotic process automation, but do these approaches benefit the customer or the organisation or both? The best of organisational intent focus on Customer Experience (CX), but how close do we really get to treating customers as individuals? How should organisations think about interacting with their customers, and how does this impact their employees? It’s been said that AI will be the contact centre killer, when in fact it might be the reinvention of the industry, taking the customer and employee experience to new levels. Tim Broome talks to Kelly Owens, Accenture’s Customer Insights and Growth lead for Australia and New Zealand to explore this concept further.