How AI Improves Agent's Performance Significantly For Better Customer Service?

One of the finest ways of running a contact center is by empowering your agents. No amount of strategy will yield results if your agents are getting confused and burnt out. But does this mean you hire beyond your budget? No. You just invest in the right tools. 

Artificial intelligence has been a raging topic for a while now. We all know how AI is pervading our lives and it is changing for the better. This same technology can be modified and used to assist your agents. You relieve them of communication barriers and bring access to information to their fingertips. Not only will your customer service speed up, but the quality will also improve by far. 

Artificial intelligence is responsible for lots of progress in the contact center. As data science becomes more and more valuable, AI will grow to become the center stone of every business. Not only does it automate processes, but it also collects and learns in real-time. This allows any AI-driven solution to generate reports, create analyses and create a cognitive understanding of each interaction. 

If you ask any contact center solution owner, you will learn that most of them have similar problems. Most of the centers are plagued with high volume calls leading to lengthy queues, diminished service quality, poor first call resolution, and more. If you look closely, you will recognize that these issues can be resolved easily when your employees are no longer powerless. Buzz your agents up with AI-driven bots, an AI-driven knowledge base, real-time sentiment analysis, and historic data. 

Now, every contact center wants to shrink its costs while increasing its operational capacity. However, this cannot be achieved as long as you keep looking back at your drawbacks and try to improve and predict. Opportunities need to be seized in real-time and this is only possible when you invest in artificial intelligence for your contact center.

Let’s find out how that works!

Agents have a lot of room to struggle when dealing with customers. While managers are pressuring them to reduce call time, they are trying their best to ensure quality service. Then how do we make our agents more productive? You can assist them with intelligent routing. Through smart call routing, the AI will direct calls to the right agents based on intent, previous agent preferences, conversation context, and more. In the end, the agent is rightfully chosen by the algorithm to assist the customer. This selected agent is best suited for the job, eliminating any room for friction. The agent also doesn’t struggle much and the first call resolution is also improved. 

Sentiment analysis is very important to ensure that your customers do not have to keep calling back. Through speech recognition or text analysis, AI tools can decipher unmet customer needs. It can show real-time feedback on what the customer is worried about or feelings in regards to the service or the product. These will allow your agents to respond better, offer assurance, and engage your customers. Not only is the experience elevated, but your agents also find confidence in performing their tasks. Agents no longer have to figure out what to say next. They can discover what the customer is experiencing and communicate accordingly. Such operational ease also improves the employee experience and, makes your agents more capable and confident about their work. 

Chatbots are advanced enough to handle most customer concerns. Customer-facing chatbots can assist them with every mundane issue like delivery status, flight status, product information, product refund, sharing feedback, clearing debt, and more. These tasks are straightforward and don't need agent interference. However, without automation, you will be bothering your agents with such mindless tickets. Instead, tune your chatbot to deal with these tasks and learn more about your customer’s needs. Meanwhile, your agents can focus on more important and dynamic tasks. They will have much more free time to learn, excel and grow than they would without self-service or automated support. 

Virtual agents are a tad bit different than chatbots. Virtual agents will help you to identify all sorts of opportunities such as sales, support, or upsell. To facilitate omnichannel communication, leveraging virtual agents is wise. It helps to serve customers on their preferred channels like Facebook, Website, or even Messenger. For example, if you visit our website, our virtual agent Zeni will greet you and offer you options that will assist you. In the process, no agent is bothered, yet all leads are collected and pushed down the funnel. However, any customer can choose to speak with an agent or schedule a callback. These AI-driven bots can also assist the agent to answer prompts, product information, and more, all in real-time. 

Believe it or not, agents bust their brains thinking of the right opener. During the holiday season or any day with high volume calls or messages, agents might not have the bandwidth to respond or initiate conversations. In those moments, real-time speech analytics will assist your agents with prompts, suggestions, links, and more. These help your agents by reducing average handling time and improving their performance. On the other hand, it also improves first call resolution, matches the customer with the right content, and closes all the tickets as soon as possible. With reduced customer dissatisfaction you avoid churn and improve your operational efficiency. 

AI-capabilities are taking over all sorts of tasks in contact centers now. From HR to agents, everyone can benefit from them. Artificial intelligence demands only a one-time investment which is better than hiring over and over again or spending money. Moreover, now that most contact centers are undergoing a digital transformation, they need more automation. Customers are always communicating with brands on social media, and it's difficult to offer human-based support all the time. Instead, deploy chatbots or virtual agents to these channels and rest assured. 

Once you empower your agents with these tools, they are relaxed, paced, and perform better on dynamic tasks. They grow well, stay loyal and improve your customer service by a scale. To learn more about how to assist your agents, contact our industry experts.