Dive Brief:
- The customer service workforce is contracting as AI takes a larger role in the contact center, according to Forrester research released last week.
- U.S. customer service job postings have dropped about 10% below pre-pandemic levels, according to Indeed Hiring Lab data published in the US Federal Reserve Economic Data. Meanwhile, overall job postings are still above pre-pandemic levels.
- Forrester predicts further contraction in the customer service labor market in the next five years, but “it’s really variable depending on the job type,” Kate Leggett, VP principal analyst, told CX Dive. “Lower-level jobs are going away, those that can be automated. However, AI is unlocking more knowledge work, different types of jobs that didn't exist before.”
Dive Insight:
AI is already hitting the customer service workforce — but the impacts aren’t being felt the same throughout the labor market.
Forrester predicts AI will slash the number of customer service jobs in half by 2030, hitting industries like retail and administrative support services the hardest.
Those industries require less expertise from their representatives, Leggett says. Retail customer service representatives in retail, for example, often answer questions that can easily be automated, such as: What's my order? How do I do an exchange?
“There's much less knowledge work that you need than in like the mining industry, where you may even have highly educated reps doing that work,” Leggett said.
Even customer service pay is shifting — depending on the work and industry. While Forrester finds that representatives’ pay has stagnated, it only analyzed the pay of frontline agents. The analyst firm expects new customer service manager jobs that require managing AI and humans.
“You're going to need people that, for example, build your AI frameworks, that monitor your AI frameworks, that strategically pull insights out of customer interactions, whether they're automated or human assisted, and do something with them in terms of process changes or product changes,” Leggett said.
But to Leggett, the most salient part of the report is the decoupling of headcount from service.
“The most important thing that's doing is it's decoupling customer service inquiry volume to headcount growth, where you can keep the same headcount, perhaps, but then you can, instead of waiting 20 minutes or maybe 40 minutes to get through to, for example, United Airlines, you get that instant service,” Leggett said.
AI is giving companies the ability to resolve and interact with customers at a higher level, but companies need to prioritize the customer experience and not just cost savings to actualize that.
Even so, automation isn’t a given in every company.
“Some contact centers may never reach the level of projected automation rates because they don't have well labeled machine readable knowledge, they don't have integrations into back office systems, they don't have, they have processes that are too variable,” Leggett said. “So there's a lot of operational friction that is not a reflection on the state of AI technology.”
