Agentic is a type of artificial intelligence that is designed to act autonomously, making decisions and taking actions towards a specific goal. Agentic AI is the next frontier in customer service – providing numerous benefits in contact centers to deliver seamless, efficient interactions for customers.
Agentic AI is addressing a range of bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the contact center, including:
- Staff shortages and high employee churn rates
- Rising customer expectations
- Inefficiencies in traditional CX approaches
By providing more human-like interaction, agentic AI heralds an era of meaningful interaction with digital agents. Rather than threatening to replace humans’ jobs, agentic AI will actually evolve the role of the call center operator and help ease some of the more mundane tasks through automation.
As Sebastian Glock, Director of Product Marketing at Cognigy, explains: “AI will take over simpler tasks, allowing human agents to focus on more complex problems. In the short term, this shift will push agents to develop new skills. Over time, as their roles become more valuable and specialized, it could lead to lower attrition rates and potentially higher wages, reflecting their growing importance to business success.”
Here we explore how AI and human agents can complement each other in customer service, highlighting both the opportunities and the challenges of their collaboration.
Job roles: AI and human agents
The jobs of both human and digital agents are set to evolve as agentic AI is rolled out in contact centers. Striking a balance between optimal use of the two types of agents includes their abilities in areas including:
-
Task Automation vs. Complex Problem Solving
AI Agents: AI will take over or continue to assist with routine, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks such as answering common customer queries, managing simple transactions, and handling initial customer interactions. The AI agent will use pre-defined processes and data-driven decision-making to autonomously resolve routine issues, such as checking account balances, delivery statuses etc.
Human Agents: Human agents will be responsible for complex problem-solving, handling escalations, and managing emotionally charged or high-stakes interactions.
There will be a warm handover from AI to human agent if required. This ensures the human agent can take over a call with a full background of the customer and the issue – so the customer doesn’t have to repeat themselves and a resolution can be quickly achieved.
“The AI can help them [human agents] by preparing data and providing context before the agent even speaks to the customer. This helps the customer feel heard and understood, improving both customer satisfaction and agent experience,” emphasizes Glock.
An AI agent will increasingly understand when to handover to a human agent, such as recognizing via sophisticated sentiment analysis when a customer is angry or upset. If a customer asks a question that the AI cannot handle, it will flag the interaction for human input.
-
Autonomy and Decision-Making
AI Agents: Agentic AI is goal-oriented and capable of making autonomous decisions. It can decompose a customer’s request, assess context, and decide the best next steps without human intervention. However, it operates within certain guardrails set by human managers – so, for example, it could be authorized to offer a certain level of discount to a customer. If the customer requests more than that, the AI would deliver a warm handoff to a human.
Human Agents: Humans will retain the final say in situations that require deep empathy, ethical considerations, or nuanced decision-making. For example, they may authorize a higher-level discount than the AI is able to. When dealing with escalations, they will handle situations that demand creative problem-solving, understanding unique customer needs, and providing resolutions that align with company values and policies.
AI can help a human agent find a much faster path to resolution, because the AI does not follow a script. The AI can look at all the contextual data and consider other information about the customer, the signals in a database, their previous website visits etc. As Sebastian explains, “All of this together can enable the agent to find a much shorter path resolution than a fully prescriptive process might. And that makes the experience much better.”
Most organizations are transparent about whether a customer is speaking with an AI or a human but may not always be legally obliged to be so. Cognigy urges total transparency – asserting that, “ethically and also legally, it’s mandated that the first thing an AI agent should do is disclose itself as an AI instance.” There is also confidence in the CX community that the border between the AI and human interaction will become increasingly blurred. AIs will become adept enough at handling human-like exchanges and any required handover to a human will be warm and seamless.
The integration of agentic AI into contact centers marks the dawn of a new era in customer experience, where the boundaries between human and machine work seamlessly together to deliver exceptional service. By automating routine tasks, agentic AI allows human agents to focus on complex and emotionally nuanced interactions, creating a more efficient, dynamic, and human-centric service environment.
This evolution doesn’t herald the end of the human in contact centers – it will instead elevate their role to a more empathetic, empowered agent engaging in higher-level problem solving. The real power of agentic AI lies in its ability to learn, adapt, and make decisions autonomously, while remaining under the guidance of human oversight to ensure alignment with ethical standards and customer expectations.
The future of customer service will be defined by a powerful collaboration between AI and human agents. The interplay will improve operational efficiency and enhance the customer experience – elevating enterprise contact centers to deal with the ever-increasing demands of customers. In this new landscape, both AI and human agents will play indispensable roles, ensuring that customer service is faster, smarter, and more empathetic than ever before.
Find out more about Cognigy’s agentic AI here: https://www.cognigy.com/product-updates/introducing-agentic-ai