Talkdesk Launches Talkdesk Agent Assist
Cloud contact centre company Talkdesk has launched its Talkdesk Agent Assist product that claims to help call centre agents with some built-in artificial intelligence features.
The new assistant uses Talkdesk’s iQ native artificial intelligence (AI). This provides information to call agents in real time. The firm said that as a customer states their needs, agents are provided answers or supporting information immediately to expedite the conversation and simplify tasks.
It pulls in information from a knowledge base or CRM as a suggested action in real-time. It claimed this would significantly reduce handle time and improve customer experience. Additionally, information captured within the agent interface can be automatically added to account profiles or work item tickets, within the CRM, without any additional agent effort.
Rather than using third-party technology, Talkdesk Agent Assist is natively built and fully unified within the agent interface while keeping all data internally protected from third-party sharing.
“Giving agents next best actions in real-time and removing the burden of tedious data entry will allow them to stay focused on the customer, instead of worrying about the technology,” said Dale Sturgill, vice president of contact center operations at EmployBridge, in a statement. “We see Talkdesk Agent Assist as a game-changer for achieving our goal to reduce agent and customer effort while driving customer satisfaction.”
In an interview with UC Today, Cathal McGloin, CEO of ServisBOT, said that AI, such as the Talkdesk solution, is playing an increasing role in enabling contact centre agents to respond with more accurate knowledge at speed.
“However, the true value of conversational AI is in transforming the traditional contact centre”
“The power of natural language solutions and chatbots has matured to levels where bots can handle many of the routine requests in the contact centre, and can do so with increasing context, across multiple channels, 24/7,” he said.
He added that as AI and bots enable further automation of routine customer service tasks, the role of human contact centre agents will shift, allowing them to deal with more complex customer issues and business workflows that require more abstract problem-solving skills.
“My own view is that current enterprise AI strategies need to rapidly evolve beyond simple chatbots handling basic inbound queries, to harnessing AI in the form of intelligent bots, that perform specific tasks to support customer service teams across a whole range of inbound and proactive outbound processes, such as on-boarding new customers; filing claims; managing complaints; handling renewals, and providing proactive status updates,” he said.
Patrick Joggerst, CMO and EVP of Business Development at Ribbon Communications, told UC Today that too many engagements are still disjointed, for example when you’re calling a contact centre to ask about your phone bill.
“Generally you’ll have to type in or verbally provide your details and if at some point during the call you get transferred to another agent or department you’re forced to go through the same process again, which can be both time consuming and frustrating,” he said.
“But once you bring real-time comms and AI into the engagement, a customer enters their information once, gets their first questions answered by a chatbot, and is seamlessly escalated to a live agent only if necessary”
“Since the human agent already has all of the information in front of them, the conversation flows more smoothly, the customer saves time, and the entire quality of the experience has gone up.”