Collectively Customer Contact Panel (CCP) have a lot of experience in contact centres and CX. However, as things are changing rapidly in the world of AI, we met with CCP to discuss some of the broader considerations, including what technology we could deliver as an alternative view of what could be our probable future reality with the support of AI – we agreed we would share the output.
The art of the possible?
We can talk about the pace and the tone of this piece, however the reality is that with appropriate questions raised and some boundaries that we included (some for our amusement) the content within this 10 minute AI generated “BotCast” not only demonstrates the capabilities of AI, but raises some interesting questions and considerations as to how CX evolves and what guard rails need to be in place.
Click here and have a listen, and of course, if you want to discuss we’d be happy to deploy some of our humans.
Say it quietly if you like, but businesses are grown and maintained through increases in customer numbers and/or customer value. Undoubtedly cost management is also a critical factor, but ultimately sales and retention activity that provides topline growth is critical to ongoing success and business value.
We all know that the chances of winning or retaining a customer are increased when you provide a great product or service. And that those who deliver, not just on price but perceived value, are in prime position to pick up customers from competitors when they do not.
Yet many businesses are focused on the potential cost savings that could be achieved through AI and automation. Have they have lost sight of the potential benefits of delivering a personalised service and those golden opportunities to encourage a customer to buy more or stay for longer?
Are you getting the best sales through service opportunities from AI and automation?
There are two key scenarios that could be playing out for many organisations, both B2B and B2C. Either of which could be limiting sales success:
1. The technology is doing great stuff
Customers are getting the service that they need in the moment they need it. Which means the brand is working on the assumption that because they’re well-served, they will come back to buy more. However, they are not engaged with these customers, they are simply dealing with their admin when they need to and as a result are being passive in their habits. This may work for on a number of levels, and it is reducing the cost to serve. However, is this a step away from brand bypass, as ultimately a gap in the connection with customers will result in them moving on when they see a better offer?
2. The technology isn’t hitting the mark
Customers are trying to resolve their issues, but are struggling. The automation or self-serve models don’t provide the right options and/or have no ‘way out’ for customers and as a result they become frustrated. So at the first opportunity, they are going to look to an alternative brand.
The examples are out there in key sectors.
Ofgem March 2024 data
Harder to contact and less satisfying to deal with?
Despite and improving picture, the latest Ofgem data shows that 16% of customers find it difficult to contact their supplier, up from the low of 10% in Q1 2019. Meanwhile, the same Ofgem data suggests that overall satisfaction with customer service across the energy industry currently sits at 66%, down from the peak of 74% seen in Q2 of 2020.
What’s more, the latest UKCSI data shows utilities performing the poorest with a score of 69.8. Telecommunications and Media brands are doing a little better at 73.3 (though down from January’s 74.7), but are still some distance short of the podium positions achieved by Retail (non-food) at 80.4, Tourism at 79.3 and Banks & Building Societies at 79.3. However, we can see drops in satisfaction across the board.
Could automation be contributing to those less satisfying experiences?
UKCSI data from earlier in the year tells us that for 53.7% of automated contacts, the customer still needed to speak with a human being.
Equally concerning, though, was that neither AI/chatbot or customer service employees are managing to resolve customer queries more than 54.2% of the time, as seen in the January results. Quite the damning indictment.
Consider also that 45.4% of customers would avoid using an organisation again due to poor use of technology.
Clearly there is work to be done.
Companies with higher customer satisfaction show stronger growth
But what is the impact of this on a brand’s fortunes? Is the 2-point drop in score for Telcos material?
Research in the UKCSI report from January 2024 shows that between 2017 and 2023 “companies with customer satisfaction at least one point higher than their sector average achieved stronger revenue growth”.
With c.80% higher compound revenue growth, 6.6% higher EBITDA, more than double the operating profit margin and a whopping £283.9k – more than half as much again – revenue per employee on the table for that increase of just one point, the importance of customer satisfaction to both the topline and the bottom line is stark. On the other side, the virtual lack of revenue growth and much reduced operating profit margin for 1-point lower puts into context the plight of Tourism, Leisure, Insurance, Public Services and the rather more beleaguered Telcos.
The same report highlights that 27.6% of customers who score an organisation 9 or 10 out of 10 for overall satisfaction will look to buy other products or services from them, whilst 20.8% of customers scoring 1 to 4 will spend less with the organisation and 41% scoring them at 1 to 4 will avoid dealing with the organisation again in the future if possible.
And so, it is easy to see why investment in customer service is critical to the success of an organisation. Why an organisation should be – and hopefully is – highly focused on it. And why a pure cost-reduction focus for automation or AI is short-sighted.
While these numbers tell quite the story, let’s assume things are the right side of the line service-wise, whether through AI or not. The next question then is, are you following up with the appropriate sales activity to effect further topline growth?
Are you ready to pick up the sales baton?
Effective sales operations depend on 7 key factors for growth, the same apply to both sales team and those required to deliver sales through service:
- Access to the best people with the necessary sales and communication skills,
- Clear reward and recognition structures with incentives, creating a culture and environment which encourages growth,
- Appropriate product knowledge and ongoing team development, ability to handle objections effectively and to share learning to advance the performance of the team,
- Effective technology which the team can leverage to access customer insights, understand which are the best customers to be contacted, when to contact them and what solutions to offer,
- Practical approaches to sales compliance, which provide clear guidelines but can be managed without excessive burden to managers, allowing sales to be signed off effectively and if necessary, learning applied in a timely manner,
- Ability to manage data and reporting to maximise sales opportunities which benefits the organisation, the sales agents and also the customers through ensuring access to right information at the right time,
- Understand market conditions, customer behaviours and how your team needs to react to these.
If just one of these seven isn’t working too well, sales will suffer. But so may customer service or perceived value. For example, an intrusive offer in the middle of a customer complaint is likely to occur as unempathetic and may see the customer running for the hills. A well-handled complaint can increase value – or at least maintain it.
A colleague described a recent interaction about a problematic return with a well-known retailer, where mid-conversation they were invited to look at product that may interest them. Unsurprisingly, their reaction was not to immediately head to the link to browse, but instead to give a sharp retort – and then tell anyone who cared to listen how annoyed they were.
Not only did the retailer not make the sale, they likely turned the customer off. An excellent example of numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 and 7 (at least) not working. Not only was it bad scripting and a lesson in not what not to do, it may speak to overly aggressive reward structures and an environment that favours sales over growth. The nuance of which is important and why point four is critical – this was not the best customer to be contacted in this way at that time.
The same colleague similarly experienced rather odd service (from a Telco…) in store recently, where a service conversation without a satisfactory outcome turned to an attempt to upsell on a different product, followed by a recommendation to leave the brand for the product where the service outcome was unsatisfactory. Quite the rollercoaster! And no doubt an experience driven by a particular sales focus that the brand’s managers would be horrified to learn they have – let’s hope – inadvertently incentivised.
Picking your moment to turn service into sales is critically important and relies heavily on the skill of the individual, their training and incentivisation, supported by culture, technology and management.
With so much focus on customer service, do you have the need, will and capacity to optimise sales?
Great agents who can both serve and sell can be hard to find, and can be even harder to retain..
The use of technology and automation is increasingly expected for customer service – and rightly so, simple service issues don’t need complex solutions. But they do need human intervention when the service question isn’t simple, or the automated response fails. Or perhaps when a sales opportunity requires a more personal service.
The ability to deal with customers, their nuanced needs and when selling, their objections, still has a high level of dependency on human interaction.
Yet the data from Ofgem and UKCSI both illustrate that customers are frequently frustrated by both automated and agent interactions. Service delivery in many sectors is still some way short of previous highs, meaning there are still gaps to fix in customer service before you can even think of perhaps selling.
And to some extent, when improving customer experience can deliver increased revenue, getting the basics of service right first is a significant route to growth and building value – whether you agree or not about whether they ought to be, measures such as revenue growth, EBITDA and revenue per employee are important to investors and share price.
How you achieve optimised service, then layer on sales through service or even pure sales activity is a significant question. Each have their own challenges, but successful outcomes add up to an organisation that both sells to and retains customers optimally.
AI and the march to automation is a hot topic right now, with much being made of the gains that can be made through AI handling enquiries.
But the benefits of technology are perhaps being primarily considered in the context of larger operations, where the costs of servicing customers are easy to see.
What about the hidden contacts that organisations may be managing? The ones that are increasingly challenging to manage, that AI – for now at least – can’t deal with?
Information is power
Customers are better informed than ever before. They just need to spend a few minutes online to arm themselves with what they need before contacting you. From looking up reviews to seeking advice from social media groups on how other customers escalated a given complaint, or checking how regulations apply to your sector and how they should be applied in the context of their situation.
They may even know more about complaints to your organisation than some of your management team. Which means your responses need to be on point now more than ever.
Yet if former Dragons Den investor Piers Linney is to be believed, most contact centre activity will be automated by AI five years from now.
“There are undoubtedly times when speaking to a person is the only thing that will do.”
Realistically, nobody is denying that there are use cases that can be automated with better outcomes for customer, agent and organisation alike. Win-win. However, there are undoubtedly times when speaking to a person is the only thing that will do. And therein lies the risk of creating hidden contact centres in this futuristic AI-driven world. Indeed, they already exist.
What is a hidden contact centre and why do I need to worry about it?
In many organisations, contact centres already exist informally, even when they have bona fide real ones.
Groups of non-contact centre people are engaged in dealing with customers through calls, e-mails, chat or webforms, perhaps as part of their wider role. They are likely disbursed across multiple site locations or functions, handing off customers to each other and collaborating to resolve those queries.
Customers may be end users, other businesses or internal customers. The thing that unites them is that the queries are likely to be complex. And because it’s not their day job, everyone works a little harder to get the job done, sometimes at the risk of their other core tasks being delayed until the demand has passed.
Of course, none of this means these teams are doing a bad job in serving the customer. Processes may not be documented well, with best practice held in the heads – or languishing on the desktops – of team members, so they’re the best people for the job.
“The trouble with informal contact centres is that they aren’t set up to be responsive. Or have audit trails.”
But the trouble with informal contact centres is that they aren’t set up to be responsive. Or have audit trails. During holiday seasons cover may be limited and there is unlikely to be out of hours support for the customer. Reporting on contact volumes and contact types may not exist. Feedback loops for potential process improvement is probably dependent on the capacity in that team on a given week. And when servicing internal customers, inefficiencies may be magnified.
However, there may be limited opportunity for automation and self-service.
So maybe it is better to stay hidden?
Perhaps for some, ignoring all of this could be appealing. Especially if there are several “fractional” resources who are supporting and spreading the load. However, if those people are being taken away from their core roles, the decision (or lack of) not to address this could be a costly error. Those resources could be expensive for dealing with what in some cases may be low level queries. And not just in the time it takes them, but also unrecognised costs of double handling of queries, opportunity costs and even lost customers or lost revenue.
The first step is understanding if you have hidden contact centres. Speak with your people to understand what may be preventing them from getting core tasks done. If customer contacts, queries and complaints are part of that workload, perhaps it’s time to review and consolidate work to specialist staff who are set up to deal with these contacts.
Four red flags to watch out for:
- Team attrition – perhaps because they’re not getting opportunity to do the role for which they were employed?
- Customer attrition – are you seeing customers leaving you or not putting additional business in your direction?
- Non contact centre customer contact handling – do you have a group of people who you may not term as contact centre, but they are all consistently doing a role dealing with customers?
- Customer service levels aren’t matching your ambition – is it aligned to your values? Does it feel like a cost/burden?
If any of those resonate, then perhaps it is time to take time out and review whether you do, knowingly or otherwise, have a “contact centre” that could benefit from review or consolidation. To consider how this may benefit your people, your customers and ultimately your business.
What can you do about it?
First up, talk to people who understand the risks and opportunities of hidden contact centres. They’ll help you to decide on the approach that’s right for you, potentially with solutions you hadn’t considered. Whether you still want to keep activity within your team, or whether you need some additional help to provide increased coverage or flexibility.
For example, additional support and flexibility, including potential out of hours coverage, could improve services. You may not need dedicated resource, but the availability of someone to engage with your customers in conversation and support them at the right point in time may reduce the burden on your team during core hours.
If recruiting contact centre staff is a challenge for you, and managing and developing them is a further item on your worklist that you struggle to get to, it’s almost certainly time to seek guidance on how to address that.
And if you want to keep your ‘hidden contact centre’, it could be a smart move to examine your technology set up. Is it making it as easy as possible for your team? That doesn’t mean that everything could or even should be automated. However, implementing systems that enable omni-channel support – so that all details of the conversation can be easily linked and customers can skip across channels – will make it easier for both you and your customers.
“Technological developments over recent years mean that you could be able to improve life for your people and your customers.”
Contact centres take all kinds of forms. They can be managed in many ways and no one size fits all when it comes to dealing with customers. That’s why there are big in-house contact centres, hidden contact centres, and many different specialist outsourcers who deal with specific sectors or tasks – and often in ways that can give a competitive edge. Knowing which approach will help you to gain your competitive edge is critical.
Importantly, technological developments over recent years mean that you could be able to improve life for your people and your customers, reducing the impact on your business and the cost of servicing your customers. But wholesale automation is not the answer for all. And may never be, five, ten or many years from now.
Want to chat further?
Drop us a line. A problem shared is a problem halved and we love to share our expertise, whether you’re a client or not.
Traditionally, contact centres have relied on a somewhat impersonal approach to assigning agents to clients. This method, often arbitrary and based on immediate agent availability, overlooks the potential of personalised interactions. Such a lack of customisation can result in missed opportunities for both agents and clients, leading to inefficiencies and general dissatisfaction. Personally, I think it’s time to move beyond this one-size-fits-all strategy and embrace the uniqueness of every individual involved.
Embracing the power of AI and Human connection
The integration of AI into your contact centre offers a promising solution. By analysing vast amounts of data, including historical interactions and behavioral patterns, AI can intelligently match clients with the right agents. This strategic pairing goes beyond mere transactions, aiming to create meaningful relationships where both parties find value and understanding. It’s about rekindling the human element in every conversation, ensuring that each interaction is not just efficient but also genuinely engaging.
A smarter approach
Technology should enhance, not diminish, human connections. Every individual has a unique mosaic of needs, desires, and dreams. Our mission is to foster meaningful work by appreciating and understanding this individuality By acting as matchmakers, we ensure that agents find joy and meaning in their work, leading to more positive and successful engagements with clients.
For agents, this approach transforms each workday into an opportunity for meaningful interactions. For clients, it ensures a more personalised and less stressful experience. And for leaders, this synergy between well-matched agents and clients not only streamlines workforce management but also enhances team engagement and success, contributing to the overall achievement of organizational goals.
The competitive advantage: valuing people
In a market where differentiation is key, the unique personalities of our people, combined with innovative matching technology, stand out as the competitive advantage. This focus on positive engagement and deep human connections within the corporate environment leads to enhanced profitability and a distinctive market position.
Final thoughts
The contact centre industry is poised for a significant transformation through the integration of AI, with a focus on enhancing human connections. By moving away from impersonal assignments and embracing a more strategic, data-informed approach, we can significantly improve agent satisfaction, client experiences, and overall success rates. Our commitment at Bestpair is to lead this change, ensuring that every interaction is not only successful but also truly enjoyable, reaffirming the undeniable value of meaningful connections in the modern workplace.
If you’d like to find out more, get in touch.
AI has begun to come of age – the last couple of years in particular have seen an explosion in AI opportunities.
In our new whitepaper, we explore the use cases and human considerations of implementing AI in contact centres.
The content was drawn from our round table discussion with a number of contact centre leaders from multiple sector across travel and leisure to utilities, subscriptions, lifestyle and wellbeing. We decided to sort the hype from the reality, chat about the risks and share reflections and learnings.
It was clear that the human component of customer interaction still has a key role to play, especially when dealing with customers who can’t or won’t engage digitally, are vulnerable or at a vulnerable time in the customer journey.
We hope that capturing our conversation gives a wider audience plenty of food for thought as we all get to grips with the opportunities AI brings.
9 steps to AI success
In the paper, you will find our 9 steps to AI success and our key takeaways from the day, where we covered:
- the importance of the ‘why’ of technology
- the diminishing role of voice and what happens when we make voice channels more available
- data responsibility
- how AI can support frontline staff and employee experience, and
- how AI can support the customer experience.
Are you ready for AI?
The whitepaper is free to download and immediately accessible below. We hope you find it useful and would love to hear your experiences too. Follow us on LinkedIn to share your thoughts.
I often think that managing your contact centre performance on a day-to-day basis is like standing on a sandy beach watching the waves come in. Without fail going in, out and always, always, dependent on the weather. Sometimes it’s so monotonous you can drift off in the sun, waves lapping at your feet, then suddenly find you’re floating. Then there are those grey stormy days when it feels like we are going to drown, freezing from head to toe, no wetsuit, now fleecy towel.
So, what should be the first thing in the ‘beach bag’ to make sure we don’t drift off in the sun and don’t freeze our bits off when it gets stormy? The answer – Something that shows us our quality of performance, whatever the weather. Quality is the one baseline that we can use, whatever the weather. Properly defined, it can be our deckchair, sunshade as well as our wetsuit and fleecy towel. Get ‘quality’ right and there is no sunburn, no more shivering, chilled to the bone.
Technology should be looking at everything we do
In a contact centre technology world now dominated by AI and multiple customer engagement channels, it’s essential that whatever we use to measure quality is looking at everything we do, all of the time. It’s also desirable that whatever we deploy to help us understand and manage quality can help us perform to the best of our potential and make the very most of the people we have at our disposal.
Whether those people are internal or outsourced, it’s our day to day / hour to hour performance that drives us, whatever our resourcing model, however performance is defined. In simple terms, performance is always a multifaceted measure, made up of different time and process-based outcomes delivered to our desktop by the tech’ that enables our everyday customer engagement. Think of those performance outcomes as the ‘what’, then quality is all about the ‘how’. Keeping track of ‘how’ effectively provides us with the tram lines of what is acceptable / not acceptable to the customer and defines the boundaries of what is ‘on brand’ and what is not.
Look at easy-to-deploy applications
Keeping performance ‘on brand’ is something that contact centre managers (inhouse or out of house) have high on their ‘to do’ lists, whatever the beach, whatever the weather. And in our experience, quality is the one area where we see AI driven applications having an immediate benefit. Easy to deploy on a SAS model with usage-based costing models available, these applications can watch every wave, every temperature and air pressure change. Providing you with an early heads up to get off the deck chair and start putting on your wet suite.
Certainly, nailing quality monitoring is the smartest way I can think of as an entry point to deploying an AI strategy. Whilst the landscape may look confused, given that all vendors say the same thing, what we know is that the ‘best in class’ applications are easy to deploy (with ‘out of the box’ CRM / CCaaS integrations) giving you immediate insight and potentially freeing up valuable resources. We have even seen applications providing individual coaching programmes to save additional time and effort for your managers and training teams.
It worked in the 80’s
All of this somehow reminds me of that Bananarama song…. “It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it”. For those of you who are much too young to remember, Bananarama are an English female pop band who have had success on the pop and dance charts since 1982. Rather than relying on harmony, the band generally sings in unison, as do their background vocalists. Although there have been line-up changes, the group enjoyed most success as a trio made up of lifelong friends. In the 1980s, Bananarama were listed in the Guinness World Records as the all female group with the most chart entries in the world, a record which they still hold.
If quality is a record that your organisation wants to hold, then get in touch. Let us help you with your AI conversation and provide some additional insight on what’s out there in the world of tech’ so you can have a relaxing time on the beach!!!
In the past 12 months we have seen rapid acceleration of automation and AI solutions. However, when it comes down to dealing with customers, human relationships still have their place.
We are all customers and there are times when we just want to get something done quickly. In banking terms that may be a balance or transaction check, give me the information that I need fast and simple. It could be a renewal of your insurance or to check where an order is.
But what if the balance isn’t what you expected or you have a duplicate transaction? The renewal price has changed dramatically, or the order isn’t arriving today after all, and you’ve taken a holiday day to wait for it? Well, you probably want to speak with someone, you want understanding and empathy. Another human to say to you it has all been sorted and there is nothing to worry about, to apologise – and mean it.
So, it is likely there will always be some form of need for human intervention in the process.
People determine the processes
AI can determine when a customer is likely to need to make contact based on analysis of various data points and the creation of insights. It can run tasks/journeys to make proactive contacts at the right times based on customer lifecycles.
However, it has not reached the point of autonomy yet where it can decide what the CX should look like, it can give the tools but you still need to direct the effort, so people remain key.
Are your automation objectives aligned?
Few outsource providers have the technology inhouse to satisfy the needs of their clients directly, few clients have the experience to implement AI themselves. As an outsource community of CX specialists you have the opportunity to shape the service delivered and the enable your clients to deliver better outcomes for their customers, differentiate their brand and help them either grow their business or reduce costs.
There is no point putting your head in the sand; this change is here, it is happening now. To say “it’s coming and we will get to it” is too little, too late.
The best thing that you can do is ensure that you have the right partners to enable you to deliver the changes that your client needs and the right commercial agreement with your client to ensure that your business is sustainable.
“If you aren’t talking to your clients about AI and automation someone else will be.”
Those who simply try to protect their headcount will find that they are on the losing side when it comes to contract renewal. Don’t wait until renewal comes along to talk to clients about innovation and cost saving, they will see straight through this!
There are benefits to automation that can support your business
We have seen massive change through homeworking during the pandemic, increased attrition, increased salary costs due to inflation and pressure on clients to manage costs as a result of reduced customer spend due to a hardening economy.
We have seen increasing amounts of work being placed offshore, however there remains the risk that other labour markets become increasingly competitive and then costs will start to rise again.
Customers expect automation for certain tasks, they crave it, so you need to be able to provide solutions for your clients.
“Choosing the right technical partner could be critical to your future success”
As a business you need to ensure that you have:
- Sustainable solutions that work for you
- Alignment of objectives with your clients
- Technical delivery partners that you can rely on and trust to deliver on your behalf
Remember you get out what you put in. Be sure to properly resource any implementation project, scope realistically, ensure you have a clear business case, deliverables, testing and sign off processes, choosing the right solutions is only half of the story.
Want to know more?
Join Us for our webinar on September 14th, when we will be discussing in more detail the opportunity that AI offers to the outsource community.
We’re all told that necessity is the mother of invention, but today it’s probably equally true to say that headcount reduction commitments are the mother of innovation.
Over the past couple of weeks, both BT and Vodafone have announced plans for massive job cuts – 10% of the workforce for Vodafone and a whopping 40% (55,000 jobs) for BT. These cuts will take place over years, not months, and many will be on the back of natural attrition, will include the non-retention of contractors and will no doubt be eased by some attractive voluntary redundancy terms.
It won’t come as a bit surprise that both the firms themselves and the media has made much of claims that the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) tools and techniques will be a big enabler of falls in headcount. For some, this has been a very positive illustration of the game-changing benefits AI can bring. For others, it’s a chilling harbinger of an AI-driven jobs cull.
There’s no part of the economy in which the mass adoption of AI won’t have massive potential impacts and even the true AI experts don’t pretend to know what these impacts might be; what roles and processes will be changed, upended – or just ended.
The contact centre world is far from unique in the impact that new technologies has and will have on people, but it’s way ahead most because so many AI solutions (or solutions that claim to use AI) have been deployed in the customer service and customer experience world. Bots – whether they rely on defined logical rules or have genuine AI, self-learning capabilities – have already had a massive impact on contact centres and their customers. Ultimately, the applications of AI techniques and insights in contact centres will go far wider than assisting and automating interactions with customers, but for many struggling centres they can be a great start. When applied correctly.
One of the real world examples that has contributed to the recent – understandable – clamour of concern and excitement over the impact of AI on work and jobs comes from Octopus CEO, Greg Jackson. He has gleefully revealed that that AI solutions are saving the work of 250 customer service advisors, while delivering better quality scores than humans (though head to LinkedIn and you’ll find that not all customers agree).
Ofgem figures have revealed that energy customer contact volumes have increased up to 300% through the energy price crisis. So Octopus – like all energy providers – will have had a compelling reason to seize the benefits of technology, especially in customer service.
What is maybe of note, though, is that Octopus has started with the automation of emails. A relatively low-risk, text-based, asynchronous communication channel. To do so is sensible and shows a degree of understandable caution, allowing a controlled roll-out of new technology through which quality and customer impacts can be monitored and assessed. No doubt if the achievements Mr Jackson describes are sustained then Octopus will embrace AI still further, but it seems to be doing so in the way you would hope it would any new solution; in a managed and measured way.
We’re all told that necessity is the mother of invention, but today it’s probably equally true to say that headcount reduction commitments are the mother of innovation. If you want to see an organisation rapidly seeking the productivity benefits promised by AI, then find one whose executive team has already committed to reduce headcount. Then the real organisational challenge is how they go about realising those opportunities.
The profound business and employment changes that BT and Vodafone anticipate over the next few years will obviously stretch far beyond customer service and bots. But, at its best, the contact centre world can potentially prove a useful example of how AI can be implemented in a measured, balanced way – ideally with customers and colleagues at the centre of use cases and decision making.