There’s no denying the phenomenal impact artificial intelligence is having on the contact center landscape. However, AI doesn’t just give companies an opportunity to streamline customer experiences with self-service bots. Real-time agent assist tools can also enhance staff performance.
Agent-assist solutions can boost contact center efficiency by analyzing conversations in real-time, surfacing valuable information for team members, and automating common tasks.
These tools can augment the customer service team, making them more productive, creative, and effective at completing various tasks. If you’re considering implementing conversational and generative AI into the contact center, you should consider agent-assist tools.
1. Real-Time Agent Assists Boosts Efficiency
Efficiency is crucial in the contact center, particularly as interaction volumes increase. Teams need to be able to rapidly resolve problems, to avoid long waiting times and queues for customers. Real-time agent assist tools can significantly improve efficiency in a range of ways.
First, they reduce the time agents need to spend on less valuable tasks, like transcribing and summarizing conversations or searching for relevant data. The right tools can use AI to recognize words spoken in a conversation and surface relevant information instantly.
Agent assist solutions can also share real-time insights with agents, providing information on customer sentiment or suggesting creative ways to resolve tasks. This can lead to higher first-contact resolution times and faster issue management.
2. Better Employee Training and Onboarding
Real-time agent assist tools offer employees a convenient way to access consistent coaching and support throughout every interaction. Rather than waiting for a supervisor to be available to provide guidance on a call, agents can use these tools to get actionable feedback on their performance as they work on complex conversations.
AI-powered solutions can recommend intelligent responses to customer questions, provide instant insights into performance metrics, and gradually improve agent skill sets. They can even score interactions and performance metrics in real time, allowing supervisors to access insights that help them build more effective training programs.
What’s more, in a fast-paced environment like the contact center, agent assist tools can streamline onboarding for new staff members. Rather than spending weeks learning scripts, new employees can use agent-assist tools to learn best practices as they work.
3. Real-Time Agent Assists Reduces Operational Costs
While AI-powered agent-assist solutions don’t eliminate the need for human employees, they do help contact centers accomplish more with less. As mentioned above, these assistants can automate common tasks like transcription or performance tracking, saving teams crucial time.
Agent assist tools can help employees address issues faster, allowing companies to maintain high service levels as they expand without exponential increases in employee overhead. Plus, agent assist tools reduce the need for supervisors and managers to spend excessive time on training.
This means contact center leaders can focus more on improving contact center operations. In some cases, real-time agent assist tools can even unlock additional revenue for companies, helping to boost the chances of conversions by suggesting when agents should try up-selling or cross-selling tactics during sales calls.
4. Improved CX with Hyper-Personalization
Around 71% of customers expect companies to deliver hyper-personalized experiences across every channel. Unfortunately, delivering highly personalized experiences can be difficult as your contact center scales and grows. AI agent assist tools ensure team members can customize every interaction with immediate access to customer insights.
They can integrate with customer relationship management tools and customer data platforms to surface information about customer preferences, previous purchases, and requirements in an instant. With machine learning, these tools can become more effective over time, learning which interactions positively and negatively affect customer sentiment and retention rates.
Some solutions can even use predictive analysis to provide agents with insights on when they should follow up with a call or reach out to a customer about a technical issue or new product. All of this helps to enhance the customer experience, increase retention rates, and boost revenue.
5. Real-time Agent Assist Improves Business Insights
Data is crucial to running a successful contact center. The more data you have about customer sentiment and preferences, employee performance, and even your contact center technology, the more effectively you can differentiate your company from the competition.
Agent assist tools have the power to gather endless information from conversations. They can help improve a company’s customer journey mapping strategy with insights into the various touchpoints customers use for different requirements. They can help businesses develop better call scripts based on sentiment analysis and conversion data.
The right AI tools can even automatically score interactions, and use speech analytics to provide the insights businesses need to mitigate friction points and inefficiencies in the workplace. Plus, they can help companies more effectively allocate human resources based on changes in contact channel preferences and call volume.
6. Greater Compliance Adherence
Preserving high compliance standards in the contact center isn’t easy, particularly as consumer concerns about data acquisition and usage continue to increase. Keeping track of what agents say during a call, sensitive data collected, and potential compliance breaches can be challenging.
Fortunately, real-time agent assist tools can help businesses to reduce their risks. These tools can use AI to analyze everything said in a conversation, alerting supervisors and managers when risks emerge. They can even provide guidance to team members during calls, reminding them to ask for permission when a call is being recorded or used for training purposes.
AI assistants can consistently coach agents on how to avoid compliance issues and even guide them through the process of using specific tools for data protection and redaction.
Invest in Real-Time Agent Assist Solutions
Real-time agent assist tools are excellent for improving the productivity and efficiency of your customer service team. They can also be incredible resources for gathering useful data, enhancing customer experiences, and even reducing compliance risks.
As AI advances, these tools become increasingly more powerful for contact centers that want to accomplish more with less. If you want to take your team’s performance to the next level, now’s the time to invest in agent assist tools.
