You’ve had this happen a hundred times. You need to make a call or chat to somebody, whether it’s your bank, the auto repair shop, or your insurance agency. You pick up the phone to make the call or open the chat and suddenly, someone – or rather something – picks up and answers. It’s a call center automated phone system (IVR) or a chatbot flow, maybe an AI in the backend. Whatever machine it is, you immediately either exit, hang up or dial 0 to get to a human operator, someone who really understands your problem.
As our world becomes hyper-connected and e-commerce blurs the lines between geographical markets, customer support is facing a paradigm shift in the way it has structured its business processes and its approach to technology.