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The future of telephone helplines and call centres

Ian Pearson, BTexact Technologies

February 2000

Almost one in fifty people work in a call centre or telephone helpline. The kind of work varies from highly automated routine calls, through to calls where the operator is giving advice on major life problems to distressed callers on a telephone helpline. Recently, there has been some debate whether interactive voice response (IVR) would eliminate many of the routine jobs and create unemployment as a result. I believe it will automate much of the routine work, but won’t result in unemployment. Certainly, many simple routine enquiries such as enquiries on billing, train times etc, can be dealt with by computers, but many calls are more complex and need people to be involved. As our lives get more complicated, we need more assistance more often, and being able to get almost instant response for routine enquiries enabled by IVR will make people more likely to use call centres. When they do call, even if the computer can't help them on its own, experts systems and general artificial intelligence will enable the operator to give much better assistance. This is the key. Increasing computer intelligence allows even a relatively unskilled operator to do what used to be a more highly skilled job, moving them up the value chain. When used correctly, computers up-skill people.

The other effect of computer intelligence taking over routine enquiries is that the dull component of the work can be reduced, making the job less stressful and more rewarding. People would deal with those enquiries that require more intelligence than the computer can provide, more fuzzy enquires that need more human skills, or deal with those enquiries that are more human contact oriented. They will offer the human value add to what would otherwise be a mechanistic response. By automating the routine, we stop treating people as cogs in the machine. Instead, we force people to deal with those parts of the interaction that are inherently human. We humanise the person, and let machines do the machine bit. People working in some call centres today are over-supervised, with performance monitoring software ensuring that they achieve their targets. This must make such centres stressful places to work. But as work becomes more people oriented, such performance monitoring will be less appropriate, with measures of customer satisfaction becoming dominant instead. Humanising these jobs will reduce worker stress and improve their job satisfaction while giving callers a more enjoyable and satisfying experience. Everyone wins.

Such an effect takes place not just in call centres, but right across the board, and leads us gradually into the care economy, which will gradually replace the information economy as computers take over increasing quantities of information work. The smarter machines become, the more the care economy will dominate. Routine transactions will vanish first, then clerical functions, then professional roles. People who have a strong education but little human skill will find it hard to make an impact in this new world. Computers will provide the intelligence, people provide the human contact, personality, warmth and care. It may seem an alien concept today, but we may see top consultants in hospitals largely automated by smart computers and sophisticated robots, while the nurses will still be needed. We could argue that since nurses can’t be automated and consultants can, the nurse may be worth more in a very fundamental way. We are seeing a short term trend that is sending nurses off to do degrees and making them into cheap doctor substitutes, but this will reverse in due course. A nurse ultimately makes a patient recover faster by providing care. Any knowledge that the nurse has can easily be substituted by an expert system in a portable device.

And of course, the same is true of the telephone helpline end of the call centre sector too. Callers who need some help might just have a simple query that can be dealt with by a machine, but often, they have a basic human need to talk to someone who understands them and cares how they feel. We can synthesise some aspects of personality in a computer, but it will not be the same, and people will not respond to synthetic personalities as they do to real human ones.

Some technology does make it easier to offer this caring function though, and to meet the basic human needs of the helpers too. For example, much of the work can just as easily be done from home. This suits helpers who need to balance work with home life, others who can't easily travel, who are disabled, or simply live too far from the centre to make it economic to commute. Computers can easily redirect calls to people in such ‘virtual call centres’. Most people aren't confined to home and want to go out to work, to meet other people and avoid getting cabin fever. However, they will not necessarily have to go to a particular office. Future telework centres will be equipped with hot desks that enable people to use an office building close to their home and telecommute to an office anywhere, or to a virtual office. They will get the social contact, though the people sharing the same telework centre may work for completely different companies. Another relatively new technology allows people to get help from a call centre just by clicking on a button on a web page. They can choose to be called as soon as an operator is free, or pick a time to be called. This enables a relatively seamless integration between the computer based utility of the web page, and the human interaction offered by the call centre.

In the near future, some automated functions can be enhanced using synthetic talking heads, backed with synthetic computer personalities, but in an imaginative virtual environment. Voice recognition and synthesis, with other natural language technologies will make for a much more natural interface to the computer world generally. These synthetic personalities may never catch up with people in overall sophistication, but in some applications, people may prefer dealing with a synthetic person rather than a real one, just as they prefer to use machines to withdraw cash at banks. We clearly don’t always want human contact.

Finally, the internet also offers many user groups, allowing people to support each other directly, and these have helped a great many people get support in times of crisis from others that have been in the same situation. The difference between these chat rooms and telephone helplines is mainly that the people in chat rooms are just ordinary people, with no training, so they can’t fully substitute for helplines, where people can get professional help. The two can beneficially co-exist. Overall, the future of call centres, and in particular telephone helplines, looks very secure, probably more secure than almost any other sector. Helpers will be humanised by future technology, not made redundant, up-skilled instead of being made obsolete. The only thing that their staff should expect to disappear will be stressful working practices.