The Landscape
For the last few years, the drive to implement robots and automation into customer service (CS) has increased, along with the hype surrounding it. In 2018, it’s very easy to find articles about AI and automation being the future of CS right alongside articles vilifying it as a stealer of jobs; a risk to the CS job market. Implemented correctly, automation in customer service can offer companies huge savings (at Gnatta, we’ve saved just one client £3.2M a year). And it can also increase efficiency during the customer care journey and, thereby, improve the customer experience.
In February, Gartner predicted that 25% of companies would adopt bots or virtual assistants by 2020, up from 2% in 2017. They even go so far as to predict the use of virtual realities — to create immersive solutions for customers — within 2 years. So, it’s safe to say that automation and AI are here to stay. But is it ready to take over the industry and remove the human operator from the equation?