Sky cuts 2,000 call centre jobs to "focus on AI and online"
From an article in The Times of London today:
About 2,000 jobs will be cut at Sky as it replaces more of its customer call centre positions with online and artificial intelligence. Three of Sky’s UK call centres, in Stockport, Sheffield and Leeds, will be closed and another two, in Newcastle and Dunfermline, will be cut back. The move could reduce its workforce by about 7 per cent.
I think we'll see a lot more of these types of headlines ongoing. Anecdotally I've been seeing Sky make a lot of use of chatbot and conversational AI technology recently.
This is a particularly telling paragraph:
It comes after Sky canvassed 10,000 customers, who said they wanted flexibility in how they contacted the company, with the majority of people preferring digital tools for day-to-day tasks such as paying a bill or managing a contract.
I have been a customer of Sky for quite sometime, in some way – and most recently with their NOW TV service that the children really appreciate. I haven't spoken to a human at Sky since I've had the subscription – I haven't needed to.
This is one of those seminal headlines that is useful to point to when your customers and clients are wondering about what's happening in the marketplace. It's also an indication of what we're likely to see ongoing across many industries and markets that have historically employed thousands of contact centre teams. There will still be a need for human service (as the article does reference) but in vastly reduced numbers.
