A factor for the whole industry would be the potential fallout from the final Brexit deal struck by the government. Morrell said retail-related jobs were the most at risk as the cocktail of rising store costs and the growth of e-commerce triggered the closures of high-street stores and company closures and also has an impact on back office operations amid a widespread culture of cost-cutting. “In the south-east they are more expensive to run, so the big ones are in Scotland, Wales and the north-east.” So when they close job losses are significant: Virgin’s Swansea site had 792 staff while the closure of Tesco’s Cardiff call centre in February eliminated 1,100 jobs.“The further you get away from London, the bigger the contact centre will be because of the salary differential,” explained Steve Morrell, managing director of ContactBabel. The majority of customer-service workers are concentrated in a few hundred large operations around the country, each employing 250 staff or more. “The government should be thinking urgently about how we respond to these changes, especially if job losses are concentrated in particular communities or regions.” “Call centres are an example of a sector that looks set to be changed dramatically by with traditional jobs potentially being lost,” he said. Last year, deputy Labour leader Tom Watson set up the Future of Work Commission to look at how the workforce would be affected by automation. “But with advancements in AI … we can now create new voices in just a few weeks and are able to capture subtleties like pitch, pace, and all the pauses that convey meaning.”
CALLCENTER PEOPLE SOFTWARE
“Up until now, creating a new voice took hundreds of hours in a recording studio,” said Scott Huffman, one of the Google software engineers working on the project said last week.
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Widespread automation could be decades away but Google’s virtual assistant is an example of a technological leap that will soon be taken for granted by consumers. Scott Huffman of Google at the I/O developer conference last week: ‘With advancements in AI … we can now create new voices in just a few weeks and are able to capture subtleties like pitch, pace, and all the pauses that convey meaning.’ Photograph: Stephen Lam/Reuters Without giving a timescale, it suggested that middle-income jobs such as call-centre staff, secretaries and factory workers were likely to bear the brunt. The study said 44% of UK jobs could feasibly be automated, equating to more than 13.7 million people who together earn about £290bn. Last year a study by the IPPR thinktank warned that jobs generating a third of annual pay in the UK were at risk of being automated.
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The digital revolution is also expected to affect utility companies, with 11,000 jobs expected to go as challenger brands such as Lumo offer cheaper gas and electricity deals to customers willing to manage their accounts via an app. Nearly 13,000 jobs are expected to go as banks and insurers reconfigure their businesses. The prediction for the finance sector – which with nearly 230,000 staff is the biggest customer-service centre employer – is also grim. Of those, 20,000 are projected to go from the 168,000 employed to handle customer relations by high street retailers and distribution firms, as shoppers increasingly buy and interact online. But that workforce is increasingly finding itself facing the vanguard of structural change in important sectors such as retail, as companies and consumers embrace the new digital technologies that firms such as Google are pioneering.ĬontactBabel, the customer-service centres expert, predicts that 45,700 jobs will disappear from the sector between now and 2021.
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There are currently about 6,200 customer-service centres in the UK employing nearly 1.3 million people. “There are people who have built their lives and employment with the company.” “I am absolutely devastated for my city,” said Harris. Carolyn Harris, the Labour MP for Swansea East, said that the loss of a prominent employer was a blow to the local economy that, over the years, has become reliant on call-centre jobs.