THE (CALL) CENTER WILL NOT HOLD
It’s a race that no one running
really wants to win. And while we continue to say that rapid, technology-driven
change is accelerating in virtually every industry and that speed kills, the
truth is that, in certain sectors these days (many comprising principally what
I would call the “nuts and bolts” low paying jobs), the trend is readily
apparent, but the pace of “progress” is painfully slow and it’s a little bit
like watching a slow-motion, multi-car pileup on a black-ice covered highway.
There’s 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 of how to stop it. Massive
job losses – whole lines of work which 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 – it’s pretty hard to focus on much of anything else.
And, as the
media monitors and regularly reports on the latest slow and soul-crushing slide
of some industry sector into oblivion, we also know that we’re talking about major
structural and fundamentally irreversible changes which 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 simply 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.
Consumers’
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 8 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 call volume, huge physical facilities were built in certain parts
of the country (and eventually in other parts of the world) which housed
thousands of operators.
But today, no
one wants to spend more time sitting on their phone waiting for an answer for
anything and most cellphone 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 the call centers in
this country (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 rows after rows of
desks, chairs and monitors and no one sitting there to answer the calls which
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 whichever
sector sinks more quickly, we know that it’s simply 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.
Just some other
simple examples – self-service machines and automated checkout aisles at the
grocery store (not to mention online shopping and automated fulfillment
programs) are killing the gum/candy business (and the sleazy tabloids as well)
which depend greatly on the impulse purchases we make to reward ourselves for
standing patiently in line while Mrs. McGreedy scans her 46 coupons at the
supermarket.
Why would
anyone go see the doctor for a flu shot at his offices in the big old hospital
building when you can get the job done at your neighborhood drugstore faster
and for little or no money and at your convenience?
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 bitcoin and the ideas around distributed everything are only the tips
of the iceberg of decentralization which we will see changing 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.