“Watson
pulls up stuff that an agent wouldn’t because it is looking for semantic links,
not just doing text-matching based on keywords,”
General Manager of IBM
Watson Solutions, Manoj Saxena
Readers
of my personal blog and my commercial writings on the Geezam blog know I really don’t like AI (Artificial
Intelligence). I marvel at its capacity to learn; I fear it takin’ over. So I'm
quite perturbed to announce that IBM’s Watson may also be coming to take away Customer Service Agent’s jobs as per the
article “IBM's
Watson Now A Customer Service Agent, Coming To Smartphones Soon”,
published 5/21/2013 @ 12:01AM, Forbes
Magazine and “IBM's
Watson Is Now a Customer Service Agent”, published May 23
2013 By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, Mashable.
In
fact, Watson has an official job title many CSA’s (Customer Service Agents) or TES
(Technical Engagement Specialist) as they are called on the SHARP Account
answering AQUOS TV Calls may find familiar: Watson Engagement Advisor as
reported in the article “IBM
Watson on smartphones to make customer service bots less annoying”,
published May 21 2013, 10:09am EST by Jon Brodkin, ARS Technica.
The
level of interconnectedness of Powerful supercomputers with NL (Natural
Language) Learning capabilities such as IBM’s Deep Blue and Deeper Blue, who
defeated Gary Kasparov in Chess back in 1997 as chronicled on the Geezam blog
in the article “IBM
and the Watson” is troubling. IBM supercomputer Son,
dubbed IBM Watson, defeated the top Champions in Jeopardy in February 2011 as
per my blog
article entitled “IBM
Watson on Jeopardy and AI's Future - The Matrix meets The Computer Wore Tennis
Shoes”.
More
recently IBM Watson was used as diagnostic tool to diagnose patients thanks to
a partnership between IBM, Memorial Sloan-Kettering and WellPoint. 90% of
Nurses trusting IBM’s “Google”-esque prowess at making accurate diagnosis of patient’s
conditions as reported in the article “IBM's
Watson Gets Its First Piece Of Business In Healthcare”,
published 2/08/2013 @ 2:22PM by Bruce Upbin, Forbes Magazine.
This
planned use of IBM Watson as a Customer Care Agent isn’t much of a surprise,
based on the performance of Watson on Jeopardy in February 2011. I’d already
noted in my blog
article entitled “NTT
DoCoMo introduces Free Real-Time Language Translation App - A Siri-esque Looper
for Increased Business International Calling and Local Advertising Revenue”
that advance AI powered NL was already in use in Japan to translate languages
among business people in the Far East.
Basically
IBM Watson, the brains, will be deployed be a few good clients that are clients
for a Call Center. A quick snapshot of them includes:
1. Australia’s
ANZ Bank
2. Nielsen
3. Celcom
4. IHS
5. Royal
Bank of Canada
The
main channels for interaction with the clients will be the newer ones that
involved text based interactions:
1. Web
chats
2. Email
3. Smartphone
4. Apps
5. SMS
IBM’s
Watson may be coming to a Call Center near you, fellow Call Center Agents at
ACCENT Marketing, most likely as an extra Transfer option for very difficult
calls added to the Call Flow Procedures, possibly codenamed “Ask Watson”. So
stop fretting; it’s not going to replace you, at least not just yet.
Just
like calling the Translator whenever you receive a call in Spanish or French, “Ask
Watson” most likely will be an option introduced FIRST among Call Center Agents
to use to find information after having collected information from the
customer. Queries by Customer Service Agents may be via Text initially, like a
Google Search Engine, but eventually may become Voice Search capable via a
partnership with Siri or Nuance.
Once
fully tested by Call Center Agents, it’ll be rolled out for direct interaction
with customer for the clients to be monitored and assessed on the same
parameters like any Customer Service Agent. Based on how it performs and
whether or not it’s more cost effective to employ IBM’s Watson as a Watson
Engagement Advisor, job cuts among CSA’s at that point may become inevitable.
By 2020, the CSA may become another job taken away by Automation and Artificial
Intelligence.
Granted,
none of the clients listed above are a known part of ACCENT Marketing’s
Client Listing, Fullgram Solutions Client Listing or
even Xerox’s Client Listing, based both on their Websites as well as friend who
still work in these industries. Still, my sources, both in the form of websites
and friends may be out-of-date, having not been update for quite awhile or the
Call Centers are keeping the information close to their Chest, hoping not to
spook the CSA’s into thinking their being replaced by a machine that can
understand them.
So
the possibility is still up in the air that the new Call Center being built by
ACCENT Marketing and other Call Centers in the Montego Bay Free zone as mentioned
in my blog
article entitled “How
to find work in Jamaica at Call Centers - Job Agencies, Applications with
Proposals and Reading the Sunday Gleaner for Fast and the Furious 6 Tips and
Tricks” may end up being a guinea pig tester for the new
Transfer option codenamed “Ask Watson”.
This
latest development in the Call Center World is really a case of the US playing
catch-up with the Asians and their NL Voice Translation techs, which usually
required a Call Center Agent who “translate[s] everything you say and keeps it
confidential”.…..again.
Still
it’s impressive technology, I must give it that much.
Harnessing
Watson’s super fast search skills, it’ll help the US$112 Billion dollar Call Center
Industry handle calls that usually go unresolved, roughly about 135 billion inbound
and outbound calls. Eventually Watson may replace the entire Call Center itself,
as it can do everything thanks to its natural language capabilities.
Thus the handling of Calls, both inbound and Outbound at a Call Center may eventually be handle by Servers in much the same way it’s already being done in the formal Telecoms Sector, where ISDN and POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) Switches for Landline and MSC (Mobile Switching Centers) Switches in Mobile handles the routing of calls with little human intervention.
It’ll
help reduce customer churn due to “Bad customer Service” by finding pertinent
information 40% faster on average and still updating and closing out Case file
at the same time, thanks to Watson’s ability to access to multiple Databases
simultaneously. These are the same databases I used at ACCENT while I was a TES
(Technical Engagement Specialist) on the SHARP Account:
1. Catalogs
2. Training
manuals
3. Product
disclosures,
4. Terms
and conditions of Service
5. Emails
(called blurbs or blurblets at on the Amazon account at ACS-Xerox)
6. Customer
forums,
7. Call
Center Logs (we call them Casefiles on the SHARP Account at ACCENT Marketing)
Internet
resources such as Reviews from places like Amazon and technical support
communities aka forums are also used as well, but sparingly so, as customers
are expected to read. But with Watson slated to do some of that reading for
you, “Ask Watson” may be the new catch phrase both among Customer Service
Agents who get to test drive the services and then eventually Customers who’ll
eventually use it in real-time conversations.
The
IBM Watson Engagement Advisor is The Internship (2013)
that heralds The
World’s End (2013) for Customer Service Agents.
No comments:
Post a Comment