Dealing with irate customers can be extremely stressful for call center workers, but SoftBank thinks it has a solution: artificial intelligence software that softens the tone of customers’ voices.
The country’s third largest telecom provider wants to test the technology internally and externally in the coming year and launch it on the market by the end of March 2026.
“We are working on developing a solution that can convert the customer’s voice into a calm conversational tone and deliver it to our employees using AI-enabled emotion recognition and voice processing technology,” SoftBank said in a press release on Wednesday.
“With this solution, we want to maintain good relationships with customers through good communication and at the same time guarantee the psychological well-being of our employees.”
Japan prides itself on its high standards of customer service, but the issue of harassment of staff working in the service industry has received increased attention in recent years. The government is exploring legislation to strengthen worker protections.
About half of the roughly 33,000 respondents to a survey this year by UA Zensen, a union for workers mainly in the service and retail sectors, said they had experienced harassment from customers in the past two years. The incidents included verbal abuse, intimidation and in some cases even demands from customers for employees to kneel and bow in apology.
More than a hundred respondents said they had sought psychiatric help as a result of the harassment.
