Automation has become the Holy Grail of the customer experience domain in contact centers. Since the rise of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems in the mid-1980s through to today’s chatbots, the promise of automation has always been the same: keep customers away from talking to agents, reducing the need for people, ultimately lowering costs.
Some vendors have dubiously added one more message – customers actually prefer an automated interaction – implying that if given the choice we’d rather use a chatbot instead of chatting with a human agent. (This survey validates my skepticism.)
