“Robots are 5 years away from taking all the jobs in customer service.”

The first time I heard that statement was 20 years ago at the start of my career in customer service. At the time I was just looking for a way to pay bills, but it was meant to be. I fell in love with call centers.

“All these jobs are going to be done by computers within 5 years.”

I soon realized how profoundly mistaken this statement was & how it would herald some of the greatest and most overlooked challenges of customer experience design.

Self-service technology has made service industry jobs more difficult than ever before, and we’re doomed if we continue to ignore it.

Bots haven’t completed their takeover of our customer service jobs yet, but in the last 20 years bots have taken specific tasks in an incremental megatrend which stands poised to accelerate exponentially in the era of ChatGPT & other generative AI technologies.

When I started my customer service career, one entire floor in our building was dedicated to  directory assistance. We had another team where customers could dial “123” and ask any question (Google, anyone?).

Robots obviously replaced those jobs. My employer offered these folks richer, more fulfilling, & challenging roles, like supporting the new mobile internet & the iPhone.

As bots take over the simple, easily automatable tasks, the people in our customer service teams are left with ever more complex and emotionally taxing work. The more we automate, the more challenging the exceptions and escalations must necessarily become.

The increasing emotional labor of customer service work takes a toll on our people. The tension between client-centric, financially viable services and protecting the wellbeing of our team has no single obvious solution. Despite a cooling job market, there is a 1.7:1 vacancy to job seeker ratio today; most vacancies in the service industry. As we take easy tasks and give them to bots, no wonder we’ve made it difficult to attract and retain the best talent.

Starting with empathy in order to understand the CX problem or opportunity is the most fundamental building block of service design. Is generative AI such as ChatGPT panacea to problems of labor shortages,  budget pressures, and service levels? Unlikely. AI will get better faster than any technology we’ve ever seen before so this post will age like milk (but I’m hoping for fine cheese).

Bots might have a place in your organization’s service design so long as it makes sense for your client (for which you need human centered design). More than ever it is critical to design the aftercare for your customer service teams - bots make their jobs more difficult. Techniques based in human centered design, like our service blueprint, can help you surface and understand the intersections and points of friction that you will inevitably create.

Does your organization use empathy in service design? What about in your change management?