Embedding AI into the workflows of your customer service team isn’t about replacing human agents or automating the crucial relationship-building work that these employees do. Instead, agent-assist software augments and supplements the strengths of your contact center team.
Studies show up to a third of agents believe they don’t have the tools to perform effectively in the contact center. Plus, more than 69% of high-performing agents actively search for more AI-powered tools in their day-to-day work.
With intelligent agent assist software, companies can elevate customer and employee experiences, reduce costs, and increase revenue. The question is, how do you choose the right agent to assist with solutions for your needs?
Here’s your step-by-step guide.
Step 1: Examine Your Current Contact Center Technology
The first step in choosing the right agent-assist software is examining your current technology stack. First, look at the channels you use to interact with customers. Excellent agent assist tools should be able to support your employees regardless of where they’re interacting with consumers.
They should be able to process information shared in multiple formats, from videos and images to text and speech. If you’re running an omnichannel contact center, make sure your agent assistant tools can continue to coach and support team members as they move from one channel to the next.
Secondly, it’s important to ensure that your software can integrate with the right technologies outside of your central contact center tools. The best agent-assist solutions should be able to draw data from customer relationship management tools and help desks.
They should integrate with your workforce management and training tools to ensure you can coach agents effectively. They may also need to integrate with quality assurance solutions.
Step 2: Identify Essential Agent Assist Software Features
Once you’ve examined your contact center technology stack, the next step is thinking about the features that will have the biggest positive impact on your team. All agent-assist software should be able to provide step-by-step guidance to team members and surface information from different environments to streamline customer interactions.
However, some advanced tools can also use generative and conversational AI to rapidly create personalized responses for agents to give during a conversation. Some solutions feature dynamic scripting tools, which can help shape the flow of a discussion based on contextual insights.
Some agent assist tools come with real-time quality assurance and monitoring capabilities built-in, allowing them to create scorecards for team members, track adherence to compliance standards, and notify supervisors or managers when issues arise.
There are even tools that can analyze customer and agent sentiment in real time. Consider what you want to accomplish with your agent assist tools, such as boosting efficiency, hyper-personalizing customer experiences, or streamlining training.
Step 3: Prioritize Customization Options
Customization is crucial when embedding artificial intelligence into the contact center. When choosing your agent-assist software, it’s important to ensure that you can adapt the technology to meet your specific needs. For instance, you should be able to create automated workflows (preferably with a low-code or no-code solution) that help guide agents through different conversations.
When comparing your AI-powered options, consider whether you can feed your brand guidelines and other best-practice documents into the system. Also, consider how you can adjust the guidance offered to your agents to ensure you remain compliant with industry regulations and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
It’s also worth examining the machine-learning capabilities built into these technologies. Agent assist tools that can learn from interactions over time and become more effective at coaching and supporting agents will drive better results in the long term.
Step 4: Look for Secure Agent Assist Software
Another key factor to consider when you’re evaluating different agent assistance solutions is how secure and compliant these technologies are. Agent assistance tools gather information from every conversation, which means they need to process and store data securely.
Look at how much control you’ll have over where agent-assist tools store things like conversation recordings and transcriptions. Check for end-to-end encryption services for every type of interaction, and consider whether you’ll need your tools to automatically redact certain types of information.
If you’re experimenting with the latest AI-powered agent assist solutions, think about how you can ensure your AI systems are ethical. The ability to train or fine-tune these tools over time should help you avoid problems with things like unconscious bias.
Step 5: Remember the User Experience
Just as it’s important to ensure your AI-powered tools are easy and convenient for customers to access, you also need to take the same approach when choosing agent-assist software. If the software you use is complicated or difficult to interact with, your agents probably won’t use it.
Ensuring your solution integrates seamlessly with the resources your employees already use for customer service is a good first step. However, it may also be helpful to select software that each employee can customize to suit their specific needs.
For instance, agents in the sales team might want their solution to offer advice on when to upsell customers or cross-sell relevant offers. In the customer service landscape, your agents might want to keep track of specific metrics on a real-time dashboard, like customer satisfaction scores.
Step 6: Look for Valuable Analytics Features
Finally, the right agent-assist software can significantly improve team performance and reduce operational costs. However, its impact on your company will depend on how many useful insights it can provide. Cutting-edge solutions can give supervisors and agents real-time insights into KPIs and metrics, from customer effort scores to churn rates.
This can help businesses identify opportunities to improve customer service strategies, enhance agent training experiences, and unlock additional revenue. Some solutions can even create scorecards for employees in real time, track call quality, and provide customized training based on an employee’s performance metrics.
Choosing a solution with robust analytical capabilities will ensure you can increase the ROI of your intelligent solutions over time and accomplish more with your team.
Choosing the Right Agent Assist Software
Agent assist software is quickly becoming a must-have for many contact centers. These tools can optimize the performance of your teams, eliminate unnecessary costs, and even enhance onboarding strategies. The key to success is choosing the right solution.
An agent assist tool that integrates seamlessly with your existing resources, offers exceptional ease of use, valuable analytics tools, and embedded security features will help transform the results of your contact center.
