The grim prediction comes from K Krithivasan, head of Indian IT giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). The second-largest company in India by market cap, it has more...
I build software that’s used in call centers and have therefore been in several of them, including 2 in India. My team builds things that help with voice and chat.
I can’t stress enough two things: the aim is and probably always will be to deflect away things that people could have Googled themselves. LLMs, if trained on the right stuff and not hallucinating, would genuinely be good on this.
Secondly, CCs and telecoms in general have not escaped the business cultural shift in the last 10 years to the frantic obsession with g r o w t h. So yes, they definitely are trying to sell you something on every call. However this really depends on the human personality involved, and any near-future LLMs would definitely struggle to sell you anything. Some of these people are magical at talking you into buying stuff. Do j mean scamming? No. The easiest thing to sell is the thing you’d probably benefit from, the hurdle being that you didn’t know about it or aren’t in the mood to buy because you called to complain about coverage. For European telecoms at least, there are severe penalties for misselling, too (that’s part of what our software tracks).
So in summary, LLMs might replace the link you’re sent to the FAQs page or the bit where you confirm who you are. But they are at least many years away from replacing the agents who can do what telecoms currently want them to do - turn the call into a sale.
Most of them are not good at selling anything. That’s why they give them a script to follow, which also restrains the good salespeople in a callcenter. If they change the way of their offers - maybe custom generated deals based on available customer data by an AI that management trusts more than people - they might sell better than Pajeet ever did.
I build software that’s used in call centers and have therefore been in several of them, including 2 in India. My team builds things that help with voice and chat.
I can’t stress enough two things: the aim is and probably always will be to deflect away things that people could have Googled themselves. LLMs, if trained on the right stuff and not hallucinating, would genuinely be good on this.
Secondly, CCs and telecoms in general have not escaped the business cultural shift in the last 10 years to the frantic obsession with g r o w t h. So yes, they definitely are trying to sell you something on every call. However this really depends on the human personality involved, and any near-future LLMs would definitely struggle to sell you anything. Some of these people are magical at talking you into buying stuff. Do j mean scamming? No. The easiest thing to sell is the thing you’d probably benefit from, the hurdle being that you didn’t know about it or aren’t in the mood to buy because you called to complain about coverage. For European telecoms at least, there are severe penalties for misselling, too (that’s part of what our software tracks).
So in summary, LLMs might replace the link you’re sent to the FAQs page or the bit where you confirm who you are. But they are at least many years away from replacing the agents who can do what telecoms currently want them to do - turn the call into a sale.
Most of them are not good at selling anything. That’s why they give them a script to follow, which also restrains the good salespeople in a callcenter. If they change the way of their offers - maybe custom generated deals based on available customer data by an AI that management trusts more than people - they might sell better than Pajeet ever did.