Customer Care Supply & Demand: Unbalanced

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second excerpt from the Humane Customer Care white paper.

Click this link to download the full white paper.

In our bizarre 2021 labor economy, customer care operations lost many of the agents they once employed, and now can’t hire nearly enough to replace them.

The Customer Care Crisis is due to a terrible mismatch between the demand for customer care and the supply of customer care agents. In our bizarre 2021 labor economy, customer care operations lost many of the agents they once employed, and now can’t hire nearly enough to replace them. The result is hell for everyone, customer and agent alike.

Oh, yeah, one other thing. Many of the engagements that human agents handle are beneath them. We’re talking soul-sucking robotic response stuff. Hence, agents hate what they do because it is repetitive, yet must be performed quickly and flawlessly.

Performing robotically, quickly and flawlessly in the face of often angry and frequently clueless customers, while being monitored 100% of the time, is an inhumane expectation.

If this were a movie, it would be the 21st century remake of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Instead of an industrial worker wrestling a giant gear or trying to keep up with a speeding conveyor belt, customer care agents must keep up with a tsunami of routinized engagements and wrestle with endemic boredom.

Now go to AI Rescues Customer Care, the third excerpt from Humane Customer Care.