WTF?! If you’re a call center agent whose mother’s virtue has been called into question by a customer for the third time today, you’ve still got eight hours left of your shift, and your boss has just informed you that all holiday leave is cancelled, it’s likely to cause quite a lot of unhealthy stress. A company is using AI to monitor employees’ stress levels in cases like these, and it will try to calm them down by showing a video montage of family members set to calming music.
That Black Mirror-sounding scenario is being used by First Horizon Bank as a way to keep its stressed-out call center agents dealing with angry and abusive customers from quitting.
The system uses Cisco’s Webex Contact Center AI model, writes American Banker. It’s trained to analyze agent behavior for signs of stress, taking into account customers’ survey data, time spent waiting in queues, time spent in an interactive voice response system and number of times the customer has called back. The system comes up with a stress score for the agent, and Cisco says it does not retain any of the collected data.
Aruna Ravichandran, senior vice president and chief marketing and customer officer at Cisco, said it’s also possible to determine an agent’s stress level based on the language they use in calls and chats, with their tones becoming slightly harsher.
Ravichandran said that different people have different breakpoints. Before an agent turns into Michael Douglas from Falling Down, the system runs what is unironically called a Thrive Reset. This is a montage of personal photos, such as vacation and family photos, set to music. There are even inspirational posts at the top and breathing bubbles at the bottom to hopefully stop workers from going postal.
The videos are produced by Arianna Huffington’s company, Thrive Global – hence the name – and agents get to choose their own photos and songs.
It might sound like the sort of thing that could finally push a stressed-out worker over the edge, but Thrive Reset apparently works. In nine-week tests involving 30 workers, the bank saw a 13% reduction in burnout levels, a fourfold improvement in handle times, and a 2% improvement in customer satisfaction scores. Burnout levels were reduced by 20% in a second, six-week trial involving 160 agents and 14 supervisors.
While it’s fair to look at this technology as sad illustration of what call center workers go through every day, it does appear that Thrive Reset is helping. Maybe not as much as fewer hours, better pay, and improved working conditions, but it’s better than nothing. And at least this isn’t a case of AI taking jobs, a threat that looms over call center workers more than those in any other industry.
Rather than using AI to calm abused call center staff, Softbank is using the technology to alter a caller’s voice if they begin shouting at customer service workers, making them sound less threatening.