The Past, Present & Future of the Contact Centre & AI Dr Nicola J. Millard, Head of Customer Insight & Futures, BT Global Services Innovation Team, nicola.millard@bt.com @DocNicola DebateScape

1. Autonomous Customers, Super Agents
& the Rise of the Robots
The Past, Present & Future of the Contact Centre & AI
Dr Nicola J. Millard, Head of Customer Insight & Futures,
BT Global Services Innovation Team,
nicola.millard@bt.com @DocNicola

2. 2
From East Coast to West: the Story Starts Here in 1990.

3. 3
A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence in BT....
Expert Systems for Customer Facing Environments (ESCFE) – 1990-93
Userinterface–multimediamixedinitiativedialogue
Inferenceengine–neuralnet&NLP
Communications–retrieval&input
Product/service knowledge
Process knowledge
Policy/Regulation
Customer care
System knowledge
More
accurate &
consistent call
handling
Quicker access
to expertise,
regardless of
skill level of
customer or
advisor.
Thanks to Dr Tony Houghton, Mike Ward & Dr Michael Gardner.

4. 4
Accommodating different levels of expertise in customer & staff.
Dialogue created dynamically
according to information from
customer and/or from database.
A comms expert might offer
information which is entered
directly into the form window.
Has any testing been done?
Automatically eliminates certain
questions based on the answers
to previous ones.
Form window allows customer
to offer information when they
want – rather than sticking to a
rigid script – and dialogue paths
are modified accordingly.
OR: the advisor is guided by the
dialogue window as to what
questions to ask a less expert
user.
Can you locate the modem?
Enters information from
dialogue into multiple databases
on the back end.

5. 5
A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence in BT....
Epsilon, 1993-1995, Newcastle & Thurso.
Userinterface–pushdialogueand
navigationlinktopage
Inferenceengine–neuralnet&NLP
Communications–retrieval&input
Product/service knowledge
Process knowledge
Policy/Regulation
Customer care
System knowledge
Push dialogue
& links to
back end
information
Advisor gets
quicker access
to relevant
information.
NaturalLanguageVoiceanalytics

6. 6
The next generation…HUBBUB:
Engineering a peer-to-peer self service community, 2008.
Business Objective :
- Customer co-creation.
Customer knowledge in Social Networks
- A managed community
that produces knowledge.
- We retain the query.
- We decide how
queries are answered.
- The system categorizes
questions : not the users.
• 4,655 messages posted
• 376 ratings from other users
• 76.5 full days spent online
reading over 155k messages and
helping our customersThanks to Dr Simon Thompson .

7. 7
To present day…
Managing Social Networks with DebateScape.
Thanks to Dr Simon Thompson .

8. 8
24
54
4
6
8
4
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
Inbound, transactional
complex problem solving
cross sell/upsell
proactive outbound
complaint handling
Other
Primary Function of Contact Centres
20
48
22
1
7
2
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
Product/service expertise
Communication skills
Analytical/problemsolving
resilience
empathy
other
Agent Skills
28
9
25
3
34
1
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40
Easy/effort
Net promoter
Right first time
call handling time
customer satisfaction
other
Primary Measures
36
4
40
7
11
2
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45
Phone
Email
webchat
video
social media
other
Core Channels
SuperAgent 2020: The Future of the Contact Centre.
Source: SuperAgent 2020: The Future of the Contact Centre (2014), Millard & Alcock, BT White Paper. Copyright BT Global Services, 2016

9. 9
24
54
4
6
8
4
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
Inbound, transactional
complex problem solving
cross sell/upsell
proactive outbound
complaint handling
Other
Primary Function of Contact Centres
20
48
22
1
7
2
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
Product/service expertise
Communication skills
Analytical/problemsolving
resilience
empathy
other
Agent Skills
28
9
25
3
34
1
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40
Easy/effort
Net promoter
Right first time
call handling time
customer satisfaction
other
Primary Measures
36
4
40
7
11
2
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45
Phone
Email
webchat
video
social media
other
Core Channels
SuperAgent 2020: The Future of the Contact Centre.
Source: SuperAgent 2020: The Future of the Contact Centre (2014), Millard & Alcock, BT White Paper. Copyright BT Global Services, 2016

10. 10
Key technologies 2020.
Source: SuperAgent 2020: The Future of the Contact Centre (2014), Millard & Alcock, BT White Paper.

11. 11
Smart Agents Plus Smart Machines
or the Death of the Contact Centre?
“Hollowing out” &
“Uberisation” of work
Pattern matching &
unstructured problem solving,
e.g. Watson, Digital Genius.
Chatbots, e.g. Siri, M, Cortana,
Amelia and many, many more.
Robot customer service –
e.g. Pepper, EMIEW3
Robotic Process
Automation.

12. Thank You.
Dr Nicola J. Millard
Head of Customer Insight & Futures
BT Global Services Innovation Team
nicola.millard@bt.com
@DocNicola