Rise of the robots could cut 40% of call centre jobs

40 percent of all call centre jobs could be lost to new technologies within the next five years.

Advances in voice recognition technology will account for significant savings for companies, and the promise of making such huge savings will further speed their introduction, says OTR Group, a communications consultancy.

Market analyst Datamonitor predicts 480,000 people in the UK will be employed in call centres by 2002, spread across 5,000 locations. OTR says the technology to deal automatically with calls already exists and will be used in around half of the UK's call centres by 2004.

I-FM asked a spokesman for OTR whether the technology to replace human telephone operators was really capable of working. "At the moment," he said, "proven voice recognition software is being tested in many call centres across the world. Voice recognition has been something of a joke in the past, but recent advances make it a viable, cost-effective alternative."

Would it be possible to entirely replace ALL telephone staff in the future? "No. At the moment we anticipate the system to replace simple tasks, such as account queries, statement issuing etc. Human operators with detailed technical knowledge will still be needed to handle 'tech' problems."

The annoyance of being put on hold is one thing, but how will callers react to being dealt with by a machine? "Exactly the same way as people now react to using cash-point ATM machines in the high street," says OTR. "It presents a quicker, more convenient method of dealing with your affairs."

Gary Cutlack