AI Agent Assist Will Transform the Contact Center Forever

Automating the Post-Call with AI Agent Assist

Data entry is no one’s favorite part of the job. Unfortunately, it’s also essential. Customer data needs to be kept up to date, and stored securely. There’s no excuse to neglect it. That said, when post-call data entry tasks can drive up Average Handling Time by nearly a third, automating what elements of data entry you can is a wise strategy.

Generative AI can help here. One of generative AI’s most useful capabilities is in summarization; the ability to convert long documents into shorter, digestible pieces; giving you the highlights without the effort. Provide generative AI with an interaction transcript, and it will pull out the key issues and present them in a summary.

And this extends to more than just summarization. Generative AI can identify key pieces of data, such as customer name and identification, topic, and whether or not their inquiry was resolved. This data can be entered into post-call forms automatically. By the time the agent completes an interaction, the post-call form is filled out and ready to be uploaded. All that remains for the agent to do is to proofread, sense-check, and click confirm.

The result is an agent who’s radically more efficient. The third of their time once dedicated to data entry is automated, leaving them free to deliver outstanding experiences to customers. This, in turn, makes their job more fulfilling. Agents can focus on doing the thing they were hired to do: that is, helping people.

And it’s not just in the post-call that AI transforms the agent experience. It can offer support in real-time, too.

Real-Time Support with AI Agent Assist

Once you’ve cut down on data-entry tasks and transformed the agent’s post-call experience, you can start optimizing agent performance during an interaction. Because even the best agents sometimes suffer from human error, get worn out, or become flustered when faced with a challenging interaction. In this moment, you need to give your agents course-correction strategies; ways to take a step back, assess how an interaction is progressing, and take measures to get it back on track.

• The first AI agent assist technology of value here is real-time sentiment analysis. This allows AI to listen in on interaction, and monitor the tone and language of both customer and agent. Both participants are assigned a score, visible to the agent, allowing them to gain a valuable second perspective on an interaction.

• This sentiment score is also made available to supervisors. Through a single, unified, reporting interface, supervisors gain visibility across the entire contact center, and can be notified when interaction sentiment drops too low. Supervisors intervene proactively to support an agent during a difficult interaction.

• The result of both these processes is a laser focus on agent success. Both agents and supervisors received a comprehensive overview of their performance, letting them work in real-time to course correct. Generative AI can even be used to offer script suggestions or ‘hints’ to agents, to guide them through a challenging interaction.

Every agent faces challenges; every agent makes mistakes and learns from them. Not every agent has a hands-on supervisor who can provide personalized feedback to guide their development. That’s where AI agent assist comes in.

Hyper-Personalized AI Agent Assist

Every customer interaction is an opportunity for an agent to improve; to learn something that they’ll take with them into future interactions, to deliver an outstanding customer experience. These lessons aren’t always obvious, however. Sometimes, we all need someone to point out where we went wrong, and give us a clear plan of action before we can really start to improve.

• AI agent assist can go beyond real-time script suggestions; it can assemble tailored feedback for agents after every interaction. That’s like giving every agent in your contact center their own personal performance coach. And that’s a training revolution just waiting to happen.

• When trained on your organization’s material, a generative AI agent assist tool can offer feedback tailored to the needs of your business. The AI can cite its sources; linking agents to knowledge articles to clarify the points they make.

• These feedback sessions are hyper-personalized; that means they can make reference to actual interactions, and actual mistakes the agent has made. They go beyond typical training materials, to help the agent overcome the unique challenges that arise day-to-day.

The potential of AI agent assist, then, is limitless. But understanding its potential doesn’t help with implementation. It’s a long way from here to the AI-powered future. To make it there, you need an AI partner with the experience and knowledge to support your journey.