The way your company manages customer issues can mark the difference between failure and success. We know how important it is for consumers to feel heard by the brand they’re dealing with. Unfortunately, call centers and their agents can be hit with low employee morale and productivity when customers hang up on them. This creates a difficult cycle for companies to break.
This doesn’t have to be the case. What if there was a technology that could assist your agents in issue resolution, efficiency, and empathy in real-time? Meet your new customer service AI: agent-assist.
What is agent-assist technology?
In an ideal world, human agents would spend less time searching for customer information and more time providing quality customer service. Nobody—customer or agent— wants to sit on a call in silence while a contact center associate frantically tries to find an order history.
Agent assist technology is a tool that helps call center agents with those technical details during customer service calls. It carries out manual tasks and finds relevant customer information so agents can focus on building relationships, providing satisfactory resolutions, and generating sales opportunities.
How agent-assist technology works
Agent-assist technology typically uses NLP (natural language processing) and NLU (natural language understanding), as well as conversation analysis and real-time transcription to contextualize the conversation. When a contact center agent answers a call, the agent-assist may spotlight relevant CRM (customer relationship management) data.
As soon as the caller mentions the issue with their order, the customer service AI will provide the agent with a list of previous purchases made by the caller. Throughout the conversation, agent-assist technology can surface information from other databases and tools to streamline the discussion.
When the conversation is finished, the customer service AI can automatically record important information, store notes within your company’s system, schedule a callback when needed, and create a call summary. This technology not only reduces the average handle time of a call but also makes the agent’s workflow more efficient.
How agents benefit from agent-assist technology
Agent-assist technology analyzes real-time conversations, a customer’s past interactions with your brand—chats, calls, and social media posts—and insights from historical data of other customer interactions. It combines all that data to diagnose the customer’s specific needs and makes predictions to help the agent resolve a case accordingly.
This real-time feature of customer service AI benefits call center agents. Agent-assist technology can recognize when to deliver in-call reminders and guidance to a contact center agent. This can happen when the agent goes out of compliance or off-script. Customer service AI can even prompt the agent with the optimal discount, offer, or other appeasement to satisfy a displeased customer.
Why agent-assist technology benefits your business
Helping human agents with real-time prompts and data retrieval isn’t about replacing people in contact centers. It also isn’t about automating customer service work or depersonalizing the call center experience. The goal is the opposite. Agent-assist leans on the strengths of AI to supplement the strengths of the human agent and build a first-class customer experience.
A recent HubSpot study cites that 93 percent of customers are likely to make a repeat purchase from companies that have outstanding customer service. As the front line of a brand’s customer support, call center agents often face high levels of attrition and burnout. With streamlined workflows and guidance, immediate access to customer information, retention tools on hand, and automated call summaries, your agents will feel more supported than ever.
Evolve your contact center with customer service AI
If you’re interested in delivering more efficient customer service with lower operational costs, agent-assist technology may be a good fit for you. Global trends indicate that AI-powered agent-assist technology is the future of contact centers. Learn more about how Laivly can transform your contact center without re-platforming by requesting a demo.