20 Excellent Use Cases for a Contact Center Virtual Assistant

Discover how contact centers are leveraging virtual assistants to support agents, supervisors, and managers

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20 Excellent Use Cases for a Contact Center Virtual Assistant
Conversational AIInsights

Published: January 15, 2025

Rebekah Carter

The contact center virtual assistant has evolved, supporting customer service teams in various new ways.

Additionally, they are smarter than ever, leveraging machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), generative AI, and advanced algorithms to make contact center teams more productive and efficient.

As such, it’s no wonder that around 80 percent of contact centers are using AI-powered technologies, such as AI assistants, to revolutionize customer service.

Indeed, leveraged correctly, they can cut long waiting times, track customer sentiment, increase sales, and offer service teams live coaching.

As these tools continue to evolve, thanks to the evolution of agentic AI technologies, the possibilities widen further.

Yet, before getting too carried away, let’s consider 20 use cases virtual assistants are capable of performing today.

Contact Center Virtual Assistant Use Cases for Agents

While virtual agents may automate many contacts without a human-in-the-loop, human agents are those who handle the complex, emotionally charged queries that make or break customer loyalty.

As such, the success of any customer retention project still hinges on human professionals who can creatively solve problems, empathize with customers, and build relationships.

However, AI can augment these agents in a range of ways, streamlining tasks and boosting productivity on a massive scale.

Here are some of the top contact center virtual assistant use cases for agents.

1. Bringing Context to Customer Conversations

Virtual assistants can collect information about a customer in the call queue, summarize it, and hand it over to an agent before they begin a call.

Moreover, it can collect complementary information from CRM systems and knowledge base articles, ensuring agents have everything they need to address an issue quickly.

Think of this use case as the old-fashioned contact center screen pop on steroids.

2. Surfacing Valuable Information in Real Time

According to one McKinsey report, employees spend around 1.8 hours daily searching for information. In the contact center, even a few minutes spent looking for answers to a customer’s question can cause frustration.

Thankfully, a contact center virtual assistant can recognize the keywords a customer says in an initial conversation, identify their “intent”, and surface relevant information from trusted sources in real time.

As a result, live agents can address issues faster and stay focused on the conversation.

3. Crafting Customer Responses

Crafting highly personalized responses to queries across digital channels takes time, but a virtual assistant can help. Leveraging GenAI, they can immediately suggest a response to a question, which an agent can then review, edit, and send in seconds.

To do so, the virtual agent can leverage insights from various knowledge sources, such as knowledge bases, CRMs, and web links. All the agent needs to do is ensure the response is relevant, and accurate before clicking “send”.

4. Simplifying Note-Taking with a Contact Center Virtual Assistant

Note-taking is important in the contact center. After all, it helps the agent stay focused on key aspects of the customer’s story, aiding the resolution process.

However, taking notes throughout every customer conversation can drag an agent’s attention away from what matters, the discussion at hand.

As such, some virtual assistants can automatically take notes when a customer talks for the agent, so they can keep track of critical topics throughout a discussion.

Additionally, these notes can accelerate the post-call wrap-up process, as they may automatically filter through to the CRM.

5. Providing Real-Time Coaching

Contact center virtual assistants can be valuable coaches and guides for team members, gathering extensive live data and using it to provide real-time training to every employee.

For instance, it may recognize specific terms that the customer says that suggest an excellent opportunity for upselling or cross-selling.

Such actions can help agents achieve their goals and targets faster, and increase sales and revenue for companies, too.

6. Monitoring Customer Sentiment Signals

Sentiment analysis is becoming sophisticated, aiding companies as they look for ways to learn more about customers and what drives loyalty and retention rates.

However, insights into customer sentiment can also provide agents with insights into where they can proactively improve.

With a contact center virtual assistant identifying signals that indicate positive or negative sentiment, agents can see in real-time when they might need to adjust their tone of voice and take a different approach to de-escalate a situation or improve customer satisfaction.

7. Enabling Real-Time Translation

Globalization is happening at an incredible pace in virtually every industry.

In the past, companies that wanted to scale into new geographies would have to spend a fortune hiring multilingual customer service team members.

Now, a contact center virtual assistant can instantly bridge language gaps, translating conversations in real time.

This ensures agents can deliver the same quality of service to customers from different locations.

While this use case is usually reserved for digital channels, some contact center virtual assistant providers are taking steps to translate voice calls, thanks to the GenAI advancements.

8. Automating Desktop Processes

The faster a live agent can address a query, the quicker they can move on to the next conversation in the queue, improving efficiency.

Yet, during certain conversations, mid-discussion tasks can take up a lot of time, like entering details into a form, copying and pasting information, or initiating processes like refunding customers.

A contact center virtual assistant can handle these tasks automatically, populating forms with information given by a customer and even completing tasks like scheduling an engineer to visit a client’s home.

9. Streamlining Transfers and Escalations

While intelligent routing tools increase the chances of a customer being connected to the right agent straight away, there are still times when a conversation might need to be transferred or escalated to another professional.

A contact center virtual assistant can simplify this process by summarizing the conversation so far and ensuring that the summary passes through to the next person talking to the customer.

In enabling this transfer of context – across channels – virtual assistants can support the development of an omnichannel contact center.

10. Tagging Interactions with Disposition Codes

During post-contact processing, virtual assistants can automatically tag each customer’s conversation with a disposition code. This code classifies the reason why the customer reached out.

Traditionally, contact centers have had problems with live agents manually entering the codes, as they may select the wrong code or skip past the problem.

Thankfully, with this process automated, agents have one less task to complete across every contact. Moreover, the contact center can more accurately track customer intent and implement better customer contact strategies.

Contact Center Virtual Assistant Use Cases for Supervisors

Agents aren’t the only professionals in the customer service team who can benefit from access to an intuitive contact center virtual assistant.

Supervisors can leverage such an assistant to gain improved team performance insights and better manage their resources, as evident in some of the following use cases.

11. Identifying Trends in Agent Performance

Keeping track of all agents’ performance metrics in a contact center can be time-consuming and complex. A contact center virtual assistant can help supervisors by alerting them to positive recognition and coaching opportunities.

This can help supervisors ensure they constantly recognize and reward high performers and offer the right assistance to agents with issues.

Some solutions, like the AWS Manager Assist tool, can even generate suggestions, like telling supervisors when an agent could have offered a customer a discount or expressed more empathy.

12. Pinpointing Conversations for Manual Review

Nowadays, a lot of contact center platforms allow supervisors to automate things like “quality assessments” and scoring. However, sometimes, it’s important to manually review conversations that potentially hold the biggest lessons for the customer service team.

A contact center virtual assistant can identify which conversations are most likely to hold the most insights for training purposes.

Additionally, it can even show supervisors which conversations they need to review to ensure compliance guidelines are being followed, reducing risks.

13. Alerting Supervisors to Agents in Need of Instant Support

Even the most highly trained and professional contact center agents can struggle with difficult conversations. Sometimes, a supervisor stepping in and offering support is the best way to stop an issue from escalating or reduce the risks of customer churning.

Contact center virtual assistants can identify when conversations are beginning to go downhill, identifying negative customer sentiment or specific keywords in real time.

From there, the assist can advise supervisors on when they need to “barge in” to a call or “whisper” advice to their team members.

14. Identifying Negative Agent Sentiment

Negative customer sentiment isn’t the only thing that contact center supervisors need to worry about. When an agent’s mood suffers, perhaps as the result of a difficult conversation or high periods of stress, this can create well-being and performance issues, too.

Moreover, long periods of poor employee sentiment could indicate a risk of burnout, disengagement, or frustration that could affect customer experiences.

With a contact center virtual assistant, supervisors can get alerts for signs of negative employee customer sentiment and proactively step in to address the issue. They could even offer agents the option to take a break, reducing the risk of dissatisfaction that may lead to absenteeism or turnover.

15. Improving Workforce Management

Contact center workforce management can be difficult to navigate, particularly as employees value more flexible schedules.

Supervisors need to give agents the freedom to improve engagement and satisfaction levels, but they can’t risk approving shift swaps and time off if it means that customer experiences and team morale will suffer.

Contact center virtual assistants can evaluate requests for schedule changes by reviewing workforce management data and demand trends, helping supervisors make better approval decisions.

Contact Center Virtual Assistant Use Cases for Managers

Just like supervisors, contact center managers can benefit greatly from access to an intuitive contact center virtual assistant. Here’s how.

16. Highlighting Automation Opportunities

Automation is incredibly useful in the contact center, and the development of agentic AI will soon make it much more accessible.

Indeed, as contact centers start applying automation, they can boost efficiency, enhance employee experiences, and improve customer satisfaction. However, it can be difficult to identify which tasks to automate.

A contact center virtual assistant can help business leaders determine opportunities to improve performance and minimize disruptions with automation.

To do so, the virtual assistant may help analyze previous customer interactions to suggest process improvement opportunities and automation strategies a manager might have overlooked.

17. Defining Troubleshooting Steps

By assessing previous successful conversations and processes, virtual assistants may soon outline an effective troubleshooting strategy.

For instance, the Flow Modelling system by Cresta can determine “troubleshooting paths” for specific challenges based on the impact steps will have on business outcomes.

This not only gives agents better step-by-step processes to follow but also ensures that business leaders can develop stronger onboarding and training solutions for new employees too.

While this may be too much for a virtual assistant alone right now, it’s a possible future use case.

18. Enhancing Knowledge Bases

Knowledge bases are critical to the contact center. They enable customer autonomous self-service strategies and provide agents with the information they need to resolve problems, sell products, and handle various types of customer interactions.

A contact center virtual assistant can collect information from conversations to determine “gaps” in a knowledge base.

For instance, it might find that customers regularly ask about return policies and that a return policy document isn’t available for team members. A virtual assistant may then create this necessary content and even translate it into different versions for agents and consumers.

19. Identifying Customer Feedback Trends

Contact center virtual assistants can leverage large language model (LLM) technology can process huge volumes of information, converting countless reviews, testimonials, and other feedback forms into concise takeaways. This is extremely useful for contact center managers who need to identify “trends” in customer feedback to help them make better decisions to improve service.

A virtual assistant available to managers in their voice of the customer (VoC) platform may be able to ingest feedback from conversation transcripts and surveys to generate a “trend overview”.

20. Recommending Intraday Management Practices

Even with the best scheduling and workforce management (WFM) strategy, the contact center can be unpredictable. Sometimes, spikes in contact volume happen without warning, and business managers need to make quick decisions to handle an influx of requests.

Contact center virtual assistants in WFM systems can rapidly assess situations as they occur and recommend intraday management practices to boost team efficiency. They can suggest how to distribute resources between teams and contact center channels. Or they can switch up scheduling strategies in real-time to minimize the risks of understaffing or overstaffing.

Eager to explore more AI-powered advancements in contact center innovation? If so, check out our article: 25 Use Cases for Generative AI In Customer Service

 

 

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