Offshoring operators are switching to AI. Intelcia Ia, Outsourcia Lab… call center robots are operational… Is the profession undergoing a major transformation?
It was last February that AI officially began to threaten the call center profession with a crucial decline in the shares of the global call center giant: “Teleperformance”, due to new fears about competition from artificial intelligence. A rising value on the Parisian market during the pandemic, to the point of joining the leading CAC 40 index, Teleperformance’s shares peaked at more than 400 euros in early January 2022, but have lost almost three-quarters of their value since the emergence of direct competition from a new player that relies on AI services to address its offer.
Where Teleperformance’s strength lies in being able to mobilize thousands of operators in various languages to power customer support services, Klarna, the new competitor, boasts of being able to do so thanks to artificial intelligence. Today, faced with this new reality, many players have decided to make AI an ally. According to a survey by the expert Devoteam, nearly 30% of companies base their customer experience on AI. In Morocco, for some time now, the leaders of the call center ecosystem have started to prepare the ground. The first to launch its AI offering was Intelcia barely a month ago. Called U&AI, its solution was developed by E-voluciona by Intelcia, the Group’s consulting and innovation division.
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“In concrete terms, U&AI delves into the heart of the Voice of Customers of brands on different contact channels to identify #irritants with greater precision and provide appropriate responses. It also allows customer advisors to be better engaged by freeing them from low added-value tasks so that they can focus on essential aspects such as #empathy, solving complex problems and establishing “unique” relationships with #customers. Its disruptive environment thus guarantees a smooth and efficient customer experience on a daily basis. Developed internally by the E-voluciona by Intelcia teams, the U&AI platform strengthens Intelcia’s position as a #leader in a rapidly changing outsourcing sector,” explains the group.
Towards a 4.0 customer experience!
Just a few days after the release of Intelcia, the Outsourcia group has launched a laboratory dedicated to AI for an augmented customer experience. OutsourcIA Lab adopts a structured approach to the implementation of self-learning and scalable pilot solutions. The main objective of OutsourcIA Lab is to change the approach to customer relations by optimizing the use of AI to complement and enrich human interaction rather than replacing it. Our experience has shown that installing robots can handle up to 25 to 30% of requests at most in the best cases if they are perfectly configured and enriched daily by humans. This is why brands prefer to trust outsourcers who are the most expert in the use of these robots that they have been using themselves for several years for their customer advisors, who are now called “augmented agents”, explains Youssef Chraibi, CEO of Outsourcia.
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The CEO of Outsourcia, however, qualifies everything by recalling the crucial role of humans in the chain despite the risks of replacement. “But the real question is not so much whether or not it is possible to automate but rather to ask customers whether or not they prefer to talk to a robot. All studies show that there is not a shadow of hesitation: customers prefer to interact with advisors who guarantee active listening and a personalization of the relationship that makes all the difference today. Finally, brands have understood that even if it were possible to automate certain interactions, they had every interest in taking advantage of each interaction with their customers to get to know them better, advise them, build loyalty, sell them additional products and services, retain them by managing their potential dissatisfaction, all value-creating actions that a robot cannot manage in such a relevant way. Contact centers are no longer cost centers but have become extraordinary levers for value creation. The most powerful and long-lasting brands have understood this very well by investing massively in the customer experience.
Chatbot, callbot, the era of robots in customer relations…
According to the 2023 Customer Service Observatory by BVA Xsight, the chatbot only receives a 52% satisfaction rate. This is 2 points less than in 2022. Indeed, with the chatbot, it is the human advisor who is augmented. When the chatbot is put at the service of the advisor, it becomes his new companion, a technological assistant who offers the customer advisor new “powers”: rapid and almost unlimited access to the company’s information and knowledge bases. The augmented advisor is an opening towards the management of complex processes that will require both in-depth, up-to-date and sourced knowledge, and a listening ability and sensitivity specific to human beings. After conversations, bot or human, we are also seeing a deployment of generative AI on the back office operations of customer relations. With pre-trained AI capable of generating content, it is process automation that becomes augmented. Automation applies to increasingly complex processes such as document identification, analysis and validation of supporting documents, routing of files but also the generation of email responses. Augmented automation is certainly this extended complexity, but it is above all a more precise, more relevant and more secure management of robotic back office processing.
