Why The (Call) Center Won't Hold
Our increasingly decentralized
economy will usher in vast changes for some industries. The bad news is that
millions of jobs are at stake. Don't blame technology for all these seismic
shifts. It's us, too.
It's a race that none
of the runners really wants to win. Rapid, technology-driven change is
accelerating in virtually every industry. Speed kills, but in certain sectors,
including what I would call the "nuts and bolts" low paying jobs, the
pace of "progress" still seems painfully slow. It's a little bit like
watching a slow-motion, multi-car pileup on a black-ice covered highway.
But there remains an
oppressive air of inevitability because we all know it's coming; we've all seen
this movie before, and sadly no one has the faintest idea how to stop it.
Massive job losses - whole lines of work that will no longer be relevant or
economically viable - and millions of people looking for a better life, but
lacking the skills needed to get them and their families there. I realize that
you can't spend your whole life preparing for future catastrophes, but that
doesn't keep many of us from worrying as we look ahead at a very uncertain
future. It's like sitting on a bed of tacks - pretty hard to focus on much of
anything else.
And, as the media
reports on the latest soul-crushing slide of some industry
sector-- trucking, retail, manufacturing-- into oblivion, we also know
that we're talking about major structural and fundamentally irreversible
changes that will adversely impact the livelihoods of tens of millions of
employees. And while everyone is happy to blame the technology boogie man, no
one is suggesting any concrete solutions to offset the coming displacements.
And, to be brutally
honest, it's not just the technology that's causing the trouble. The main
driver of many of these seismic shifts isn't the implementation of new and
powerful combinations of big data, technology and automation; it's also the
fact that we're seeing that the center will no longer hold.
Consumer behaviors and
expectations continue to change at an accelerated rate and the need to push the
delivery of everything to the perimeter - all part of the "right now"
economy - makes it increasingly clear that there's no longer a need to be
"there" wherever "there" used to be. Today, to compete,
you've got to be everywhere all the time or you're nowhere.
In more and more
cases, strategies based on concentration, centralization, and critical mass
mean less and less because, through connected combinations of technology and
mobility, we can distribute and decentralize functions in ways that are more
localized, far more fluid and flexible, easier to staff, and considerably
cheaper than trying to bring zillions of people together in overlit, sterile
and sweaty places to spend eight hours staring at a screen and trying to sound
cheerful on the phone.
Call centers largely grew out of a single invention--the 800
number--which enabled national, toll-free, inbound calling that didn't become
ubiquitous until around 1980. You could basically call anywhere for
"free" if you had a question, needed service, or wanted to buy
something from a mail order catalogue. At its peak, there were several hundred
million 800 calls being made every day. To handle the volume, huge physical
facilities were built in places like Omaha and Salt Lake City and eventually
other parts of the world.
Today, no one wants to
spend more time sitting on their phones waiting for an answer for anything.
Most mobile phone users don't even understand the concept of a long-distance
call. Just like we no longer want to waste any time standing in a line at the
bank or supermarket. Everyone's in a hurry today. And it's clear that the race
is on. Who really wants to talk to a human when you can text? And who
needs a teller when your phone's a wallet and an ATM?
I'm not sure whether the first victims at scale will be those
millions of retail cashiers who may have largely disappeared by the time we
start to see U.S. call centers (yes, they are back in this country, but that's another
story) become empty shells of themselves. Or it could be that it's the call
centers that will fold first. We'll have big sheds with row after row of desks,
chairs and monitors and no one sitting there to answer the calls that no longer
come. The big credit card companies are already reporting that inbound calls
now make up less than 10% of their daily inquiries.
But whatever sector
sinks more quickly, we know that it's not good news for anyone and that the
unforeseen consequences of these changes may be even more draconian and have a
far wider impact than we expect. Self-service machines and automated checkout
aisles, not to mention online shopping and automated fulfillment programs, are
killing the gum/candy business, which depends greatly on the impulse purchases
we make to reward ourselves for standing patiently in line while Mr. and Mrs.
McThrifty scan their 46 coupons at the supermarket. (It's not all bad: the
sleazy tabloids are getting hammered as well.)
Who needs to drive out
to the suburban auto mall when there's a Tesla dealership sitting on the main
high-end luxury strip, right between Tiffany's and Tommy Bahama? And
frankly, who wants to go to the mall at all? This is why 90% of the malls in
this country are in trouble and why a small number of extremely well-located
ones represent almost all of the valuable real estate.
The bottom line is that the
ideas around distributed everything are only the tips of the iceberg of
decentralization, which will change every part of our lives as the growing
centrifugal forces generated by the promise of constant connectivity and
limitless mobility conspire to pull whole worlds apart.