In this article, Creovai’s Chief Product Officer, Geouffrey Erasmus, shares his thoughts on the future of real-time contact center technologies and how they will continue to improve customer service standards.
Contact centers are under pressure to deliver a faster, but more personalized service as customer expectations increase across all industries. One solution that’s helping contact centers to meet these demands is real-time agent assist technology. Agent assist augments agent activity with real-time insights and support during customer interactions. This powerful tool enables businesses to blend human empathy with the precision of AI to transform how contact centers operate—and it’s shaping the future of customer service.
Over recent years, the adoption of AI has become more prevalent, and the contact center industry has accelerated the deployment of intelligent tools. Agent assist technologies use AI to help today’s contact centers overcome historical resource challenges including excessive handling times, repetitive admin tasks, and delivering extensive agent training.
Real-time agent assist isn’t replacing the agent role; humans aren’t going anywhere. But it does empower agents to be more efficient and empathetic. They can focus their full attention on the customer, while agent assist keeps them on track and guides them through the interaction.
What is real-time agent assist?
For those new to this type of technology I’ll quickly recap the key elements.
Real-time agent assist enables every agent to be a top performer and makes it easier to manage interactions. It keeps them on track with dynamic action checklists, can automatically generate summaries, and serve best-practice rebuttals if the need arises..
The technology heavily leverages Generative AI, listening in real time, capturing and transcribing audio directly from the agents’ desktop with no integrations required. It identifies intent based on what the customer and agent say and coaches the agent through the conversation.
Agent assist adapts dynamically to the flow of conversations. It provides access to the most relevant guidance, regardless of the complexity of the interaction and delivers instant access to the information agents need to navigate customer interactions, simplifying their workflows and reducing stress.
The benefits of agent assist technologies
Real-time agent assist delivers measurable benefits helping contact centers to deliver the service customers expect, the environment agents need and the results targeted by the business.
Increased customer satisfaction
Agent assist listens to every interaction to identify the customer’s needs and guide agents to the best outcome. Agents are empowered and confident navigating even the most complex workflows. They can efficiently resolve issues and seamlessly follow compliance requirements.
Real-time agent assist increases customer satisfaction by providing:
- Customizable intent analysis
- Intent-based dynamic checklists
- Keyword-triggered alerts for agents and supervisors
- AI-powered knowledge base lookup
Customers benefit from shorter wait times, fewer misunderstandings, and faster issue resolution. This improves the customer experience and builds long-term loyalty leading to higher Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and customer retention rates.
Improve agent well-being and retention
The role of a contact center agent can be stressful, and this is reflected in the high agent turnover rates that many businesses struggle with. Agent assist technologies alleviate this pressure by giving agents instant access to the information they need to navigate customer interactions, simplifying their workflows and reducing stress. This intelligent technology also takes care of routine after-call work and handoffs, so agents can take more calls without feeling stressed.
Real-time agent assist improves agent well-being and retention by providing:
- Automatic data capture
- Auto-generated conversation summaries
- Auto-generated responses to questions about interactions
- Auto-population of fields in scripted workflows based on what the customer says
Agent assist technologies create a more supportive work environment. Agents feel more confident and less overwhelmed. Hiring and training costs decrease and contact centers can retain top-performing employees for longer.
Improve contact center performance
When agents have the information they need at their fingertips and receive in the moment coaching, they’re empowered to resolve queries more efficiently. As a natural by-product, average handling times decrease without impacting customer experience, first-contact resolution rates increase, and contact center operational costs reduce.
Real-time agent assist improves contact center performance by providing:
- Real-time coaching and objection handling with data-backed coaching prompts based on the context of the conversation
- Flexibility to add custom coaching prompts based on business needs
- Objection coaching to overcome customer concerns
- Save offer coaching to reduce customer churn
- Process coaching to keep all agents on track
Real-time agent assist helps contact centers scale operations without compromising on service quality or placing unnecessary pressure on employees.
What to look for in real-time agent assist solutions
If you have decided to explore real-time assistance for your agents then selecting the right technology is vital to ensure a high quality experience for employees and customers. Leading agent assist software solutions combine intelligence gathered from previous customer interactions to inform best practice.
Conversation intelligence software listens to and analyses every customer interaction, whether it’s a call, email, or chat, delivering actionable insights that improve the quality of future interactions.
Many agent assist solutions rely solely on layering AI over knowledge bases to source information. Although knowledge lookup is an important resource, its effectiveness relies on the accuracy and relevance of the data that’s been stored. If the knowledge base contains incorrect data, the AI is at risk of presenting the wrong information and guidance to the agent.
The most advanced agent assist technologies surface actionable insights from conversation intelligence and use them to shape agent guidance, rather than solely relying on knowledge bases. Conversation intelligence identifies common contact reasons, typical resolutions, product mentions and the most successful rebuttals and recommends proven approaches via agent assist during live interactions. Past interactions analyzed through conversation intelligence inform agent assist, creating a continuous improvement loop.
The future of customer service
Even though the use of AI-powered solutions is accelerating, the need for human agents will always remain. Customers value empathy and personalized interactions. Tools like real-time agent assist have become a partner to agents, augmenting their capability and giving them the ability to focus solely on the customer and deliver a memorable experience for all the right reasons.
Conversation intelligence analyzes every conversation so that real-time agent assist can use the insights to coach agents live through interactions in the future. Every call, email, or chat becomes an opportunity to deepen the understanding and relationship with the customer and the performance of the agent.
This combination of conversation intelligence and real-time agent assist redefines what exceptional customer service looks like.
