Looking to the future

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Dr Nicola Millard heads customer insight and futures for BT’s technology, service and operations global innovation team. She has been with BT for 25 years, in roles ranging from user interface design, customer service and business consulting. Millard worked on BT’s first application of intelligent systems in its call centres, and its initial experimentation with home working.

IMPACT: Which came first, an interest in technology or an interest in behaviour?

Nicola Millard: An interest in technology – I had a ZX81 at computer club at school; I coded and made up games. I liked making up stories and writing, and did the same with games – but I was also fascinated by people. I hate being boxed as a scientist or an artist, and I became aware that I could work with both together. It’s intriguing when you bring more creative and social stuff together with technology.

IMPACT: How did your career path progress within BT?

NM: I joined BT in 1990, as part of what was then the largest industrial human factors unit in Europe. There were a lot of us – an eclectic team of social scientists, mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists, designers – it was a really interesting time as a multidisciplined creative community. I did one of the first European trials of expert systems in contact centres. I was working with our international customer service centre doing very complex fault diagnostic – so we put in an expert system to help the advisers ask the right questions.

I then got involved in a project, in the mid-90s, looking at BT’s work-style transformation – at homeworking and how to change the way people work completely. It was looking at the implications of technology untethering us. I ended up doing some consulting around contact centres. Now, this is a hybrid role to pull in academic research and our own studies within BT’s research and development (R&D), and working with large corporate clients to see how it can change the way they work.

IMPACT: What do you think is the most important/least recognised aspect of technology and human adoption?

NM: Why people adopt tech boils down to the 3 Us – useful, usable and used. No-one will adopt technology if it’s not useful to them. Then, is it usable? This is about design and user-centred design – Apple set the standard around beautiful interactions. But even if it’s useful and usable, it isn’t always used. That’s about who else is adopting it – are my peers using this? Social networks are a prime example. With any communications tech you have to have critical mass.

Context is important as well. In the area of the future of work, culture is highly dictating. Tech has untethered us, but commute times are going up not down, because – even if tech means you don’t need to be in the office – culture often holds us back: ‘if we’re not seen we won’t get promoted’, and the social side of work.

IMPACT: You’ve talked about the importance of the ‘enjoyment of use’ – something Apple has been ahead of the competition on; but how easily does that apply to less customer-focused tech?

NM: My PhD was on motivation technology and why people adopt or reject in the first place. In a work context, motivation is typically extrinsic because I’m being paid. It’s different with the consumer side; I choose to use that tech, so my motivation is intrinsic. However, the evidence points to a lot of consumer expectations being brought into the workplace now. That’s pushing IT departments to think about usability and enjoyment of use.

We’ve done a lot of work on how to create more pleasurable interaction with technology in the work context, which will increase the 3 Us – so you reach a critical mass of use and make people more productive as well.

IMPACT: What processes do you go through to ‘look into the future’?

NM: I do more ‘soonology’ than futurology. Three to five years is a very long time in a corporate, and that’s the timescale I’m focused on. It’s looking at trends, gathering data, working with R&D people and academics, to spot where these themes are going and then extrapolate. We have our own lab, at MIT Media Lab in Boston, and we rely on them for more radical trends.

IMPACT: How do you incorporate research into your projects – are you doing this internally or using external agencies?

NM: It’s a mixture. We go outside to do the big pieces of market research; the core one is the autonomous customer we do with Davies Hickman. That’s a very large, global research project on customer behaviour. We also work with academics to pick out some of the trends; for example, web chat came out a couple of years ago, so we look at how consumers are relating to it and whether it is something that’s taking off.

IMPACT: What’s your favourite bit of tech?

NM: My robot vacuum cleaner – it saves me a lot of hassle.

IMPACT: What are you most proud of in terms of tech introduced/strategy change around tech that you have been involved with at BT?

NM: I’m proud of everything I’ve done since the initial work on expert systems. It has come around, as I work on artificial intelligence (AI) for contact centres again.

There is a lot of chat right now about robots taking our jobs. If you’ve got an iPhone, you have Siri, so these chat bots are already in our back pockets. In terms of customer services, we’re experimenting to see if you could switch seamlessly from a chat bot to a human if the machine couldn’t cope with the conversation. Chat bots are not empathic and they can’t make creative or instinctive jumps.

My attitude is to use technology to take away the stuff we don’t want to do or to enhance the things we do; and to emphasise skills that make us uniquely human. I like to think the tech revolution might make us value human skills more.