AI is coming for call centres — and customer service jobs
David Jones and Country Road are among Australian brands that have brought artificial intelligence into their call centres. Expect more to follow.
If you asked Daniele Iezzi about bots in customer service five years ago, he would have scoffed at the idea that any machine or algorithm could replace the human touch. But that began to change in 2019 when he was tapped to integrate artificial intelligence into David Jones and Country Road customer service operations.
David Jones and Country Road, both owned by the South African retail giant Woolworths at the time, were planning to outsource their customer service. Iezzi, then the general manager for customer service working on both, didn’t like the sound of that. He feared outsourced teams wouldn’t be as effective in flagging and fixing the many issues customers were then experiencing with David Jones’ website.
“We did some exploration and identified technology, and in particular AI, could help us by automating a lot of the more common customer intents that we were dealing with at the time,” said Iezzi, who finished up with David Jones and Country Road in January and is now working in consulting. “We saw an opportunity to use natural language processing and bots to deliver a personalised automated process.”
That began the process of working with Amazon and Salesforce to create an AI bot that could converse with customers on the phone. Within the narrow purview of figuring out what problem a customer had and determining whether it could be solved by bot or needed human intervention, it was like a smarter version of Alexa or Siri.
