Service automation involves the removal of human intervention in a series of defined steps. Just as manufacturing automation might involve robots to paint a car, service automation uses pre-defined scripts that can be applied to all.
Types of Service Automation
Straight Automatiom
Service automation takes many forms:
- automatic call distributors (“ACD’s”) that route calls to either computer-assisted data bases with interactive voice response (“IVR”) and, if all else fails, to a human agent.
- Internet websites from which a customer can fill in forms that gather data relevant to a customer transaction, such as the purchase of consumer goods (or even business or industrial goods and services).
Partial Automation
To make the customer relationship more interactive, enterprises (including governments) can offer a semi-automated method of communications that takes advantage of the Internet and international telephone services. Thus, call centers and in-store contacts might be supplemented by help desk support available via the Internet. Such support is classified as interactive non-voice communications. The customer might not know who is providing the support, but the customer does get support. Assuming the customer is comfortable with typing and computers as networked telecommunications devices, semi-automation can provide important benefits to the enterprise, supplementing local staff, reducing costs, spanning the global time zones on a “7×24” basis, and gaining access to technical skills in large, scalable quantities as an enterprise’s sales ramp up.
Retail customers susceptible to reputational risks of dealing directly with foreign service providers might be best serviced by offering Internet-based online support.
Back-Office Process Redesign
Where customer interactions are required, outsourcing has developed to the point where the customer interaction might be managed by a project leader or relationship manager, where the services are delivered in a back office somewhere else. This is not service automation, since the customer interaction remains based on interpersonal relations. However, it may be process automation at the back end, where computer-assisted “agents” (people) perform manual work under a pre-defined process. Textile sewing, manufacturing and, increasingly, knowledge-based industries are following this approach.
Impact of Service Automation
Redefinition of Customer Relationships and Morphing of Industries
Customer self-service has resulted in a redefinition of entire industries, such as travel agencies, where a substantial number of consumers has been funneled into self-service arrangements. Today, many consumers regularly book airline tickets online without human assistance. As industries seek new means of communicating with their customers via the Internet, traditional industries dependent on human intervention — like travel agencies — must either restructure, merge or die.
Redefinition of the Value Chain
Service automation can move up the value chain and result in disintermediation of skilled individuals performing traditional functions that were not automated.
International Business on a Daily Basis
As service automation enables faster interaction, it also enables transfer of those interactions to a global enterprise, whose employees or outsourced service providers could be anywhere in the world. On a daily basis, individuals and business are thus buying goods and services from global enterprises, supported by foreign employees and foreign outsourcers.