Customer service: toward a new, very different agenda

Customer loyalty? The whole idea is past its sell-by date

BACK IN 1950, the British computer scientist Alan Turing devised his famous Turing Test. Machines, Turing speculated, might one day play what he called the “imitation game,” generating text answers to questions in ways indistinguishable from a human being’s text answers.

Then, in 1993 — 25 years before today’s furor about “fake news” —The New Yorker magazine took up Turing’s theme, publishing its most reproduced cartoon ever: two dogs behind a computer, with the caption ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.’

Altogether, we can be confident that by 2030 clever chatbots and online channels will generally make it tougher than ever for customers to distinguish online dialogues and machine operators from human ones. (1)

This development will have two consequences. It will make customers even more skeptical about large organizations than they already are. And it will ensure that customers, especially older ones, still value service delivered by real people.

So, even in 2030, with all the new technology, we’ll still be in the human age.

As we look ahead, we expect many online “conversations” with customers to be robotic, though you might not know it. However, those exchanges will differ from old Turing’s Test. They’ll entail not just text responses, as machine voices, machine visuals and developing machine personalities will work more accurately and engagingly than those of today.

Will that be real Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Customer service in 2030 will certainly rely greatly on machine learning, deep learning and deep reinforcement learning. In retail outlets, it’s expected that augmented reality will convey product information and more to customer. But all this technology will provide the appearance of intelligence, not the real thing. It will still require human programming an intervention to achieve positive outcomes.

Sophisticated software will augment the intelligence of customers and customer service representatives alike, making interactions faster and richer. Technology will allow staff to take customer service tasks on whenever and wherever they are — and technology will automate some tasks completely, while helping to grow jobs in contact centers by 50 percent, perhaps. (2) But algorithms won’t be able to make judgements the way humans do.

IN THE WORLD OF WORK, ethical and overall policy judgements already show signs of becoming more charged. This is true in several areas, including the use of technology at work. By 2030, it’s expected that organizations will have to offer staff, as much as customers, clear guarantees about privacy, cyber-security and ethics. (3)

Technology, robots and artificial intelligence will remain a human creation, not just technical magic. For technical reasons alone, each will advance at its own pace. For instance, among companies, data visualization has made great progress, while speech may turn out to be “the dominant user interface for the Internet of Things.” But in both work and consumer contexts, technologies such as virtual reality still have a long way to go.

While a lot of technological advances are coming from the Western world, Asia will also do much to define the future of customer service. In Japan, where language translation is ever more vital to business, big efforts are being made to glean the meaning of facial expressions. In Cochin, Kerala, the government-owned State Bank of India has launched a giant financial services shop for the country’s diaspora – at 16 million, the world’s largest. As for China, its global position in consumer mobile payments and travel booking is complemented by ambitious plans to lead the world in AI by 2030.

Back in the West, management orthodoxies about lifelong learning and the war for talent at work, like those about customer loyalty, customer experience and personalised marketing, are already 20 years old or more. Therefore, by 2030, the world can look forward to a new, very different agenda in customer service. Businesses will have to think again, and human beings, not robots, can expect to initiate the necessary reappraisal.

Footnotes and references

1. By design, human beings already treat chatbots ‘as if they were social beings and living entities’. See the useful discussion by Gina Neff and Peter Nagy, ‘Talking to Bots: Symbiotic Agency and the Case of Tay’, International Journal of Communication 10 (2016), pp4915–4931, http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/89/2016/10/NeffNagy.pdf

2. US government statisticians suggest an increase in employment at contact centres of 36%, 2020-2026. Bureau of Labor Statistics, ‘Customer Service Representatives: Job Outlook’, Occupational Outlook Handbook, 24 October 2017, https://www.bls.gov/OOH/office-and-administrative-support/customer-service-representatives.htm#tab-6

3. After all, in Natural Language Processing (NLP) for text and speech, ethics is already a hot issue: see Jochen L Leidner and Vassilis Plachouras, ‘Ethical by design: ethics best practices for Natural Language Processing’, Proceedings of the First Workshop on Ethics in Natural Language Processing, pp8-18, Valencia, Spain, 4 April 2017, http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W17-16#page=20