Contact center agents face high expectations from customers and managers. Customers often call about complex or emotionally charged issues and want to speak to an agent who can confidently solve the problem. Managers want their agents to meet average handling time (AHT), first-call resolution (FCR), and survey score-based goals.
If that wasn’t stressful enough, contact center agents often must navigate five to six different systems to find the information they need during customer interactions. And if they’re struggling to meet their goals or efficiently resolve customer issues, they may not get as much coaching support as they need. The average contact center only reviews 1-2% of calls through manual QA, which means agents are only coached on a handful of calls each week or month—leaving plenty of room for performance insights to fall through the cracks.
Contact centers must do more to set their agents up for success. When agents lack the resources and coaching they need, the customer experience suffers and churn risk increases. 73% of customers say they will abandon a brand after just one negative experience.
The best way to help agents succeed is to serve them the information they need the moment they need it, which is exactly what intelligent guidance does.
What is intelligent guidance?
Intelligent guidance is a technology that assists agents in real time using insights from historical conversation data. As an agent navigates a live conversation with a customer, contextual prompts appear and guide the agent to a resolution. For example, suppose a customer mentions they recently lost their job and are thinking of canceling their account because the monthly subscription fee is too high. In that case, the agent helping them might see a prompt about offering to put the customer on a deferred payment plan. They would receive that prompt based on data from similar conversations showing the deferred payment plan was the offer with the highest success rate.
By leveraging data from previous interactions, intelligent guidance gives agents the tools to resolve more customer interactions successfully and efficiently.
How it works
Intelligent guidance involves two types of contact center technology:
- Conversation intelligence—Software that uses machine learning and advanced analytics to identify key events and behaviors in conversations based on the words and phrases uttered. Conversation intelligence helps contact centers understand how factors such as agent behaviors, call reasons, and sales offers impact the outcomes of their customer interactions.
- Real-time agent guidance—Software that combines AI and logic-based workflows to guide agents step by step through customer conversations. Features may include dynamic checklists, next-best-action sequences, and contextual coaching prompts, all of which are designed to help agents work efficiently, stay in compliance, and deliver great customer service.
Conversation intelligence helps contact centers identify what’s going well and what they need to improve. By automatically analyzing every customer interaction, it can uncover trends and opportunities that manual QA misses. Contact centers can apply these insights to real-time guidance to ensure their agents are as successful as possible. For example:
- If a contact center discovers a large percentage of agents are failing to set proper expectations for field service appointments, they could add a real-time prompt reminding agents what to say when setting those appointments.
- If conversation data reveals the way agents phrase a specific offer (e.g., “Do you want to enroll in paperless billing?” vs. “I’ll enroll you in paperless billing unless you prefer to opt out”) has a significant impact on the acceptance rate, they can prompt agents to use the more successful phrasing.
- If a contact center finds that many of their agents are struggling to answer a specific customer question, they could add a real-time prompt or workflow step that walks them through the best answer.
5 reasons to use intelligent guidance
Save time spent onboarding and coaching
Onboarding new contact center agents can be time-consuming and expensive, especially considering the average contact center employee turnover rate is 30-45% per year. Inexperienced agents may also struggle with solving problems or using soft skills that experienced agents are more comfortable with, negatively impacting metrics like AHT, FCR, and customer satisfaction. Managers can use coaching sessions to address these issues, but the more time agents spend in coaching sessions, the less time they spend helping customers, which drives up operational costs.
Intelligent guidance reduces the need for extensive onboarding and coaching. Conversation intelligence software lets contact center leaders see what their best agents are doing well and share that information with new agents via real-time coaching prompts. Not only does this reduce training costs, but it also helps prevent errors or negative behaviors that previously would only have been addressed retroactively in a coaching session.
Remove subjectivity from coaching
Manual QA and coaching involve a certain amount of subjectivity, and it’s easy for agents to dismiss feedback if they think their manager is biased or looked at a non-representative sampling of calls.
Intelligent guidance removes human emotion and bias from coaching. The technology automatically analyzes every agent interaction based on consistent and objective criteria, allowing contact centers to build data-backed coaching prompts and workflows into their real-time guidance. This helps agents understand what they can do better and potentially course-correct in the moment, leading to better customer service.
Deliver a consistent customer experience
Customers’ experiences with a company can vary widely depending on which agent they speak to. When customers speak to an inexperienced agent, there’s a higher likelihood that they’ll be placed on hold or transferred to a more experienced agent—with the context of the call lost along the way.
Intelligent guidance helps contact centers deliver a consistently high-quality experience whether customers speak to a new or seasoned agent. Conversation intelligence can uncover best practices from experienced agents—everything from the specific language they use to the way they solve complex problems—that might never have surfaced otherwise. The contact center can then build those best practices into real-time prompts, scripts, and workflows so every agent benefits from the knowledge of top performers.
Combat agent burnout and attrition
Agents regularly face highly emotional calls, complex customer problems, and pressure to improve on metrics like AHT. Unsurprisingly, 87% of contact center workers report experiencing high stress, a main contributor to burnout.
Stress can be especially high for newer, less experienced agents. “Contact centers typically throw new agents out on the floor after a few weeks of training, and they suddenly start getting calls about things they weren’t trained on (or don’t remember they were trained on), and that becomes overwhelming,” says Don Davey, Creovai’s Senior Director of Customer Success (and a former contact center leader). “But now you can give them real-time guidance about the steps they should take, the rebuttal they should give, the advice you want them to share with the customer. That’s going to make the agent more confident.”
Giving agents data-backed guidance during their interactions reduces stress and enables them to focus on the customer instead of scrambling to find information. This creates a better work environment—and lowers the risk of burnout and attrition.
Improve business outcomes
Intelligent guidance also helps contact centers improve on the outcomes that matter most to the business. For instance:
- A sales-focused contact center could increase its win rate by using conversation intelligence to identify the most effective rebuttals to customer objections, then build them into real-time scripts or prompts.
- An operational leader could reduce costs by using conversation intelligence to identify agent behaviors unnecessarily driving handle time up, then add coaching prompts to help agents avoid behaviors that increase the call length.
- A CX team could reduce customer churn by using conversation intelligence to find the most successful save offers on cancellation calls, and then prompting agents with those offers in real time when customers say they want to cancel.
Contact centers have a wealth of unstructured data in their interaction transcripts—it’s just a matter of tapping into that data to find valuable insights. Intelligent guidance lets contact centers not only access those insights but also put them into action during customer interactions.
Intelligent guidance sets your agents and business up for success
The need for human agents in contact centers isn’t going away anytime soon. In a 2025 study, 68% of customers said they still prefer to talk to a live agent versus using digital self-service. The businesses that gain or maintain a reputation as customer experience leaders will be the ones who invest in the success of their agents.
Intelligent guidance brings together conversation intelligence and real-time agent assistance technology to help agents achieve the best possible outcomes for their customers and company.
Top takeaways
1. Intelligent guidance empowers agents with data-backed insights. By leveraging historical conversation data, intelligent guidance provides agents with contextual prompts that help them resolve customer issues efficiently and confidently.
2. By coaching agents in real time, intelligent guidance can reduce onboarding and training time. Intelligent guidance reduces onboarding and coaching costs by analyzing successful agent behaviors and delivering real-time coaching prompts, ensuring agents get continuous support without excessive manual intervention.
3. Intelligent guidance makes service delivery more consistent and improves the customer experience. By embedding best practices from top-performing agents into real-time workflows and prompts, intelligent guidance ensures every customer receives a high-quality and consistent service experience.
4. Agents experience less stress when armed with intelligent guidance. Providing agents with real-time support during complex interactions reduces stress, increases confidence, and fosters a better work environment, ultimately helping to lower turnover rates.
5. Intelligent guidance doesn’t just improve agent performance—it also drives better business outcomes. Intelligent guidance helps contact centers improve upon key performance metrics such as customer retention, sales conversion, and operational efficiency by using conversation insights to refine agent behavior in real time.
