2019 is an exciting year for the customer service industry as innovations and key markets continue to grow. While technologies transform and become more sophisticated, few things stay the same in the customer service industry- customers consider a company’s customer service before buying or getting a service. Likewise, they still prefer human interaction when they encounter problems.

Not long ago, the people’s preferred mode of communication is through personal face-to-face interaction. If you have issues with your bank, you visit them personally and talk with the manager. If you bought a defective item, you bring the item back to the store and argue with the supervisor.

Technological disruption continues to emerge today as the economy enables scalable and collaborative networks such as Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba, Netflix, and Google that prove that delivering high value to customers is possible even with near to zero marginal costs.

In the national budget released by Singapore for 2019, the Dependency Ratio Ceiling (DRC) for the services sector will be reduced from 40% to 38%, before further cut off to 35%. This means that companies in many industries will have to hire fewer foreign workers.

Globally, the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry was valued at 88.9billion in 2017 and is projected to grow to USD$262.2 billion by 2022. 8.5% of that growth is expected to come from the Asia-Pacific region, where BPO is fast becoming the main contributor to employment and economic growth.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is expected to change the workforce, but is this new form of technology here to increase or lessen job opportunities?