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Table of Contents
Introduction
For contact center agents, speed and accuracy play a huge part in providing an excellent customer experience. To achieve high levels of customer satisfaction, contact center leadership will actively search for ways to boost agent performance and reduce the frustration of their customers, all while streamlining their operational processes. One modern tech solution that contact centers have seen a lot of success with in recent years is AI agent assist. With agent assist, contact centers can provide their agents with AI-driven support on live calls, simplifying agent workflows and making it simpler and easier to provide an excellent customer experience.
Key takeaways
- Agent assist tools gather key data from the interaction in real-time, and offer instant prompts, knowledge retrieval, and contextual suggestions to simplify the process, improve agent performance, and provide a better customer experience.
- Unlike chatbots, agent assist tools are meant to augment the skills of human agents and work hand in hand with them, not act as a substitute for human involvement.
- Some of the top benefits of agent assist tools include faster onboarding, higher CSAT scores, lower AHT, improved regulatory compliance, and reduced agent burnout.
What is agent assist?
In the simplest terms, agent assist refers to a handful of AI-powered tools that provide customer service agents with assistance in providing support to customers during live interactions. These tools function by offering real-time suggestions to agents, listening in and working in the background to retrieve relevant information and resources, and delivering contextually aware prompts that aid agents in responding to customer concerns with greater speed and accuracy.
The core capabilities of agent assist tools include:
- Real-time suggestions that take customer intent into account.
- Automated knowledge retrieval drawn from your internal databases, FAQs, and CRM platforms.
- Contextual prompts that encourage and aid agents in following your best practices and policy guidelines
READ MORE: How AI is Transforming Contact Centers CX: 5 Innovations You Need to Know
Difference between agent assist and chatbots
Chatbots are designed to handle simple customer queries on their own, autonomously, before escalating or handing off the query to a human agent if the issue becomes complex enough. Agent assist, on the other hand, works hand in hand with the human agent, augmenting the agent’s knowledge and abilities to help maintain control of the conversation with speed, accuracy, and empathy to provide greater customer satisfaction and a higher quality of customer experience.
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How agent assist works in real time
For a better understanding of the utility of agent assist, it’s helpful to understand the way it works during a real call. Far from just reacting to the customer, agent assist technology can anticipate your customers’ needs by integrating seamlessly with your core systems, such as CRMs, call scripts, ticketing systems, and more, to glean insights on the particular customer’s history and draw accurate conclusions based on established patterns and previous results.
These integrations allow agents to have real-time access to vital information, like relevant product info, service policies, and the outcomes and sentiments of previous interactions, all without switching to other screens and disrupting the flow of the conversation.
Additionally, agent assist makes use of actionable data gathered through machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), which analyzes live conversations through speech analytics, makes note of important keywords and context, and delivers precise, timely assistance to agents in real-time based on how the conversation is flowing.
READ MORE: Call Center Sentiment Analysis
Benefits of agent assist for call centers
Agent assist can act as a powerful catalyst for change across many of the different axes of your contact center’s operations. Here are just a few ways that agent assist can affect your contact center results for the better.
Faster training and onboarding
Traditional onboarding processes for new agents are often costly, both in terms of time and money. That’s especially true for high-turnover centers. However, agent assist can shorten that learning curve dramatically, giving agents real-time coaching and step-by-step prompts that help the process feel more intuitive, and therefore easier to master.
Higher CSAT and Lower AHT
Though they may seem at odds, efficiency and customer satisfaction are closely tied. Agent assist benefits both by providing agents with the best answers to customer queries (which boosts CSAT scores) and doing so quickly and accurately, allowing for shorter average handle time (AHT) and improved first call resolution (FCR) rates.
Better compliance and reduced errors
Some industries have strict regulatory requirements with heavy fines and high stakes attached. In those cases, agent assist can provide a compliance safety net, offering well-timed reminders and dynamic prompts whenever risky language is used, nudging the conversation back on track with the approved procedures and away from common missteps.
Empowering agents, reducing burnout
Decision fatigue and information overload are real, so to decrease the risk of burnout, agent assist can help alleviate the repetition and tedium by automating some of the smaller steps, offering some answers and resources instantly, and providing context when needed. These small but important details can go a long way toward further empowering agents to help customers and reducing burnout risks in the long run.
Agent assist in action – Real-world use cases
Though the benefits of agent assist are easy to conceptualize, it’s even more valuable to understand them from the tangible, real-world scenarios where the rubber hits the road. Here are a handful of different industries and use cases where agent assist can be particularly useful.
BPOs scaling global CX teams
Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) providers will often manage large teams that serve customers across the world. Agent assist allows those to provide consistent service with standardized knowledge access to their entire customer base, even while scaling the service capacity they can handle. Agent assist is one of the many tools that allow great BPO providers to maintain a high-quality customer experience, even at scale.
Financial services handling compliance
For financial institutions like banks, insurers, fintech companies, and others, regulations can be strict, and stakes can be high. In these industries, agent assist is a major help, providing regular script adherence and regulatory compliance checks in real time, guiding agents through the potentially complex procedures, and steering the conversation to ensure that the interaction stays safe and reduces data security risks.
READ MORE: How BPO Financial Services Drive Real ROI for Banks and Credit Unions
eCommerce businesses managing high-volume peaks
Call volume spikes for online retailers can often be intense, cropping up during promotions, product launches, and during the holidays. Agent assist can be an excellent tool for these high-pressure times, making onboarding for seasonal agents faster and more seamless and ensuring that product info is close at hand when it’s needed the most.
Choosing the right agent assist tool
There are so many AI-powered agent assist tools on the market today, so it’s vital to select one that integrates well with your specific workflows, supports your agents in the ways that they need, and delivers a tailored, high-quality customer experience that fits your customers perfectly. Careful evaluation of your available agent assist tools will ensure that you settle on an option that aligns best with your goals, CX strategy, and current tech infrastructure.
The best agent assist solution for your contact center should be evaluated on a few different factors, including:
- How well it integrates with your current tech stack: Specifically, see how well it works with your CRM, helpdesk, and knowledge base platforms.
- Accuracy and responsiveness: The AI models used in your chosen agent assist solution should hold up well to scrutiny, especially in real-time scenarios, where a good agent assist is most useful.
- Implementation support: A good tool is nothing without good support behind it, so pay attention to what kind of implementation support, training resources, and customer service each agent assist vendor offers.
The future of agent assist in CX
Agent assist is expected to continue playing a vital part in the future of the customer experience, empowering agents to get better results and better CX from every interaction. As agent assist continues to evolve its capabilities, the technology is expected to provide:
- Predictive assistance that anticipates agent needs. Agent assist is predicted to get better and better at anticipating customer needs based on historic data, behavioral patterns, and context clues, giving agents real-time insights into how they can better serve customer preemptive care before problems grow.
- Customer journey mapping that evolves in real time. With direct integration with customer journey analytics platforms, future agent assist technology will enable more customized support based on where the customer is in the customer lifecycle.
- Voice and video support that adapts across channels. Customer communication channels will always be evolving, so it only makes sense that agent assist will evolve too, providing richer data to pull from to better inform the support that agent assist provides.
Are you ready for a better contact center solution? Global Response provides outsourced contact center solutions enabled with agent assist technology. Talk to one of our representatives to see how you can get CX with faster, smarter, and more human conversations.
