Key Takeaways

  • According to research released last week by Forrester, as AI takes on a larger role in contact centers,the customer service labor market is contracting。
  • Indeed Hiring Lab data from the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) shows that in the U.S.,customer service job postingshave fallen about 10% below pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, overall job postings remain above pre-pandemic levels.
  • Forrester predicts the customer service labor market will shrink further over the next five years, but "it really varies by job type," Vice President and Principal Analyst Kate Leggett told CX Dive. "Lower-level roles—those that can be automated—are disappearing. However, AI is freeing up more knowledge work, creating new types of roles that didn't exist before."

Deep Dive

AI has begun to impact the customer service workforce—but the impact across the broader labor market is uneven.

Forrester predicts that by 2030, AI willhalve the number of customer service jobs, with retail and administrative support services hit hardest.

Leggett noted that these industries require less specialized knowledge from customer service representatives. For example, retail customer service reps often answer common questions that are easy to automate, such as: Where is my order? How do I process a return?

"Compared to mining, these jobs require far less knowledge work—in mining, even those in customer service roles may be highly educated individuals," Leggett said.

Customer service compensation is also changing—depending on the job content and industry. While Forrester found that pay for customer service representatives has stagnated, the analysis only covers frontline customer service staff. The firm expects new customer service management roles to emerge that will require overseeing both AI and human employees.

"You'll need people who, for example, build AI frameworks, monitor AI frameworks, strategically extract insights from customer interactions—whether automated or human-assisted—and turn them into actions for process improvement or product improvement," Leggett said.

But in Leggett's view, the most noteworthy aspect of the report is the decoupling between customer service staffing and service volume.

"The key change is that it's decoupling customer service inquiry volume from staffing growth—you might maintain the same staffing levels, but customers don't have to wait 20 or even 40 minutes to get through (such as with United Airlines' customer service), and instead receive immediate service," Leggett said.

AI is giving companies the ability to resolve customer issues and engage with customers at a higher level, but to achieve this, companies must prioritize customer experience over merely focusing on cost savings.

Even so, automation is not inevitable across all enterprises.

"Some contact centers may never reach the predicted level of automation because they lack well-labeled, machine-readable knowledge bases, lack integration with backend systems, or their business processes have too much variability," Leggett said. "So there's a lot of operational friction, which isn't a problem with the AI technology itself."