Generative AI is transforming how we work. McKinsey found that 40% of companies increasing their investment in AI are doing so because of the advancements made in generative AI. Plus, 22% of employees say they’re already using gen AI tools in their work.
In the contact center industry, companies are developing a variety of AI-enabled solutions to enhance the customer experience. In fact, 80% of employers believe generative AI will help them increase revenue and profits by enhancing relationships with customers and boosting customer satisfaction scores.
However, the potential application of generative AI reaches far beyond just the customer experience. It can also be a valuable tool for supporting, engaging, and empowering agents within contact centers.
Since improving the contact center agent experience has a direct impact not just on CX scores, but business profitability and growth, it’s worth examining the various ways generative AI tools can enhance agent workflows.
Here are 10 ways generative AI will change agent experiences in contact centers.
1. Eliminating Repetitive Tasks
For years, AI and automation have proven to be valuable tools for minimizing the mundane and repetitive tasks that consume employees’ time. Generative AI has the potential to handle even more tasks on behalf of omnichannel contact center agents, from summarizing calls, to transcribing and translating conversations.
With fewer repetitive tasks to focus on throughout their workday, agents have more time to handle complex inquiries, and ensure they are delivering a personalized experience.
2. Enhancing Data Analysis
Generative AI tools excel at data analysis, using pre-built algorithms to sort through and understand data. The right tools can sort through huge volumes of data, surfacing valuable insights into customer journeys, purchasing decisions and even ways to improve employee performance.
Intelligent AI tools can even be used to automate the process of collecting data. For example, AI chatbots can ask customers questions and extract contextual insights before transferring a conversation to an agent. They can automatically send surveys to customers via voice, IM, and email too. This allows companies to keep their finger on the pulse of CSAT (customer satisfaction) scores, and customer sentiment.
3. Transforming Customer Routing
Connecting customers to the right agent quickly isn’t just important for improving customer experiences. It’s also essential to ensure agents don’t have to waste time navigating calls and transferring them to the right agent.
Generative AI solutions built into an IVR system can collect valuable customer information and use that data to assign calls to agents based on skill sets, availability, and customer preferences. Some AI solutions can even address customer issues immediately, reducing call queues.
4. Reducing Contact Volumes
Around 90% of global customers expect companies to have self-service options in place so they don’t always have to wait for a live agent. Generative AI tools allow companies to build intelligent bots that are equipped to address a range of customer needs.
Not only does this mean that customers can receive answers to their queries faster, but it also reduces the number of customers agents need to assist. This reduces the strain on your workforce and allows agents to spend more time delivering personalized assistance to customers.
5. Improving Hiring and Onboarding
Rapid turnover is all too common in the contact center space. To ensure agents remain productive, companies need an effective way to quickly recruit new employees. Generative AI can help with this in a number of ways, such as helping to create job descriptions for new hires.
AI can also assist in improving the onboarding journey for new hires.AI bots can deliver valuable onboarding information and training to new team members, reducing the strain on supervisors. With step-by-step guidance, and the ability to answer questions in real time, the AI bots have the potential to rapidly accelerate new hire training and onboarding.
6. Supporting Agents During Calls
Even after the onboarding experience, generative AI bots can provide valuable support to agents throughout their workday. These bots can be equipped with knowledge from your business database and CRM, allowing them to present relevant articles and guidance to agents when they need it most.
Generative AI bots can offer step-by-step coaching to employees, responding to changes in customer sentiment or intent. They can also handle things like instantly collecting and transcribing calls, so agents can focus exclusively on the customer conversation.
7. Enhancing Employee Training
Employee training and development has always been important in the success of a contact center. Regularly supporting your workforce with the right education helps to keep them engaged and ensures they can cultivate the skills they need to thrive. Generative AI can once again help in this area.
Generative AI can help supervisors determine where employees need extra help handling and managing calls and create training resources to ensure agents have the expertise to address a customer’s problem. Plus, they can auto-score agents as part of the agent performance management strategies, offering insights to supervisors on where agents may need more training and support.
8. Streamlining the Search for Information
Tracking down information in real time is often essential to contact center employees, whether they’re dealing with administrative tasks or connecting with a customer. Unfortunately, workers spend around 3 hours a day (on average) simply searching for the right information.
Generative AI tools can make it easier for team members to find the information they need. All they need to do is enter a simple prompt into a chatbot and the system will do the rest, such as surfacing FAQs, reports, documents, and articles. They can even help agents personalize experiences with behind-the-scenes insights into customer purchase histories and preferences.
9. Simplifying Content Creation
Generative AI models like ChatGPT have already proven their ability to quickly generate content in a natural human language at scale. In the contact center, a generative AI chatbot can be used to suggest rapid responses to messages across different channels like social media, email, and SMS.
The same solution can analyze previous interactions with customers and suggest follow-up messages to improve customer relationships. With access to business information and CRM data, these tools can personalize content to suit your audience, and even adapt to your brand’s tone of voice.
10. Transforming Productivity and Efficiency
Perhaps the biggest impact Generative AI will have on agents in the contact center involves enhancing their productivity and efficiency levels. AI tools can automate repetitive tasks, reduce call queues, and simplify processes like analyzing data or transcribing calls.
They can also transform workflows in other ways. Generative AI tools can offer supervisors suggestions on how to schedule teams and make the most of their internal resources. They can instantly pull action items from conversations and meetings, helping teams to get more done in a shorter amount of time. They can even assist organizations in designing workflows that empower their teams.
The Power of Generative AI for Contact Centers
Generative AI is becoming one of the most powerful tools for the contact center. It not only improves customer experience, but also has the ability to enhance agent experiences. Companies can use these tools to automate repetitive tasks, empower agents with the right training, and even simplify content creation.
Bernie Lee, VP of Product Engineering at ComputerTalk, adds:
“With agent assist, contact insights and other capabilities enabled by generative AI, ComputerTalk is committed to delivering AI features that help boost agent performance and equip managers with actionable analytics.”
Learn more about ComputerTalk’s AI-enabled ice Contact Center platform.
