Industry
How bots are changing job profiles at call centres
Summary
- With bots increasingly handling basic communication and transactions, the profile of BPO workers that companies seek is changing rapidly.
India Inc's dependence on call centres is changing rapidly as the first level of calls is increasingly being handled by bots. This means companies are now looking for employees who can speak several languages, understand complex financial processes, upsell products, and work across platforms.
"The bots help with first-stage, transaction-level communication with customers, and are taken over by people when the processes become more complex," said Arjun Ramaraju, chief executive of Conneqt Business Solutions.
The digital IT and business process management services provider employs about 30,000 agents, up from 20,000 three years ago.
Interestingly, the push to recruit more agents is coming in from non-metro towns and cities. "Tier 2 and 3 towns are the prominent drivers of the growth of call centres as people from these places still want to interact with customer service in regional languages," Ramaraju added.
R. Swaminathan, chief people officer at business process management company WNS, said call-centre agents now need domain knowledge to handle complex questions from customers.
"Query management has changed and resolutions are no longer binary. B2C (business-to-consumer) startups now use both bots and agents to handle their customers," he said.
At WNS, while revenues are growing at about 12% annually, hiring has risen by 5-6%.
Among WNS's prominent clients are companies in the banking, financial services and insurance, or BFSI, sector, and their customers, especially those from small towns, need to be able talk to agents for equities-related queries that bots can't handle, Swaminathan pointed out.
The tug-of-war between bots and human employees at call centres is due to digitisation across profiles as companies look to become more cost-efficient.
For instance, HDFC Bank has compiled reasons why a customer might want to reach out to the company, and allows customers to perform more than 200 types of transactions over WhatsApp. It has about 10 million customers registered on WhatsApp banking.
"Customers now tweet, send a text message, WhatsApp or call phone-banking staff. We have now unified these customer-care channels, and through WhatsApp banking, one could have a more meaningful conversation than before," Anjani Rathor, chief digital officer of the bank, said in an earlier interview with Mint.
Another issue at call centres is that while the number of jobs at the lower end is growing quickly, senior roles are petering out, which could affect career transitions.
"Automation technologies are reshaping the BPO industry, impacting contact centers and call centers globally. Robotic process automation (RPA), natural language processing (NLP)-powered chatbots, machine learning (ML), intelligent data processing (IDP) and cognitive virtual assistants (CVA) are some of the automation tools disrupting the outsourcing world," said Ritu Sethi, partner, technology practice, at recruitment firm ABC Consultants.
Mint reported last week that a wider deployment of AI technology by India Inc would likely make 15,000-20,000 jobs across sectors redundant this year, as a large number of coding profiles, system maintenance and support functions at junior levels would become automated.
"Amid widespread fears that automation will wipe away repetitive roles in the BPO industry, it has been observed that technology has in fact helped increase productivity and efficiency, thus augmenting the performance of employees," Sethi added.
