We all understand that a vast swath of current customer service jobs will be lost to artificial intelligence. So, how should organizations plan for these job changes, and how should they reskill and upskill current staff? I see many leaders underestimating the work that it will take to plan for the future.
Here are five points to consider:
- Plan for jobs to change at different rates and to different degrees. Not all jobs will be impacted in the same way. And new jobs dedicated to creating and optimizing AI will emerge. Of course, lower-tiered customer service representative jobs will be the first to be automated. However, like their human counterparts, AI agents will need continual coaching, making management jobs more complex and less subject to reduction. Operational and knowledge management roles will continue to be of value. Yet AI will allow them to scale their workloads and, as a result, managers might not need as much talent as they do today. Conversation intelligence and insight roles will become more strategically important as they use AI to uncover product and process issues that impact the business. IT roles will broaden. Companies will need AI agent builders, testers, and CX optimization specialists who blend business savvy with low-code development skills.
- Redefine, develop, and hire for essential skills of the future. As staff responsibilities shift from directly engaging with customers to managing the quality and accuracy of AI outputs, customer service skills must evolve. Data analytics skills, business judgment, assessing the quality of AI outputs, and relationship management skills will become more important. Teams will need collaboration skills to work across teams and with AI agents. Being able to master these more sophisticated skills will define customer service success more than today's measures of efficiency and productivity.
- Craft an essential skills assessment and development plan. Many of today's customer service employees will be able to transition to new roles by learning new skills. But this transition means you must identify essential skills of the future and develop a plan to transition your workforce to have these skills. This plan will depend on your business needs, your rate of adopting AI, and the maturity of AI use within your organization. You will have to lean into your quality assurance and workforce management insights to actively track how skills are changing and which skills gaps emerge when you're introducing AI agents.
- Invest in continuous learning for all your talent. Upskilling and reskilling your staff is not a one-time event. It's a journey. Since most adult learning occurs experientially and on the job, customer service management must design safe environments to help people learn and apply their skills. You also must develop an organizational competency in continuous learning. This means adopting a continuous practice of detecting skill needs, closing skill gaps, and evaluating how well your staff learns these new skills. You must also lean into incentivizing and encouraging behavior change, since behavior change is at the core of learning.
- Gracefully manage staffing changes. Customer service organizations already experience high annual attrition rates of 60 percent or more. Use that situation to avoid abrupt layoffs by letting natural attrition run its course and not backfilling those roles. Over time, your teams will shift to smaller, more specialized talent without the disruption of large-scale reductions. This evolution also opens up opportunities to reskill and promote top talent, elevating seasoned reps into new roles and creating good will in your organization.
Managing this evolution of your workforce is often much harder than introducing new technology. Start planning for this transition now.
Kate Leggett is a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research.