Contact Centers at Crossroads
Agents in contact centers across sectors are struggling to deal with burgeoning call volumes and irate customers impatient with long wait times and the need to repeat themselves. Frantically navigating multiple screens or applications to access different channels/databases, agents are hard-pressed to deliver swift, first-call resolution. The result? Burnout and attrition. It is not unusual to see 50 to 75% turnover in a contact center over one year.
How can contact centers empower agents and improve their experience? After all, agent experience is directly tied to customer satisfaction.
Next-Gen Contact Center = AI+HI
To ease the load on overburdened human teams, contact centers need the help of intelligent agent-assisted solutions that can improve agent performance, reduce churn, and improve CX metrics. [24]7.ai has found a way to strike the perfect balance between human insight and machine efficiency, reducing the cost per resolved interaction and turbocharging the customer experience. Here are some ways it enables the synergy of artificial intelligence and human insights:
- Improve first-call resolution by giving the agents a unified view of the customer’s history that allows them to pinpoint the problem.
- Enable swift query resolution by helping agents identify customer intent and get the right information collated from multiple sources in real time.
- Bring new agents up to speed with AI-led guided interactions, personal chatbot support, and recommendations for the next best action.
- Reduce average time to handle with smart prompts that agents can quickly edit and share with the customer.
- Improve performance by analyzing feedback to focus on responses that worked best.
Elevate Your Agents to Super-Agents
Leveraging AI capabilities has the potential to transform your contact center staff into a formidable force of super-agents equipped with unwavering confidence to address most customer issues swiftly and effectively.
While automation technologies bring efficiency and unparalleled convenience to agent productivity, human agents can combine them with the invaluable elements of empathy, creativity, and critical thinking to make the customer say, “Wow!”
While contact centers are rapidly embracing intelligent automation, most also expect to see increased human-assisted service. This combination of AI and human assistance in the contact center demands a reexamination of the way Business Process Outsourcers (BPOs) operate. How will we factor in the human and digital workers working in tandem? What would it mean for job satisfaction, purpose, and progress?
Contributing author: Shaun NewKirk, Client Vice President at [24]7.ai
