What is Agent Augmentation in a Contact Centre?
Data leads to better experiences.
In today’s chaotic consumer landscape, businesses are dealing with endless customers who demand more personalised, relevant, and engaging experiences. They don’t want one-size-fits-all interactions; they want the advisers that they deal with to understand who they are and what they need from the moment that they pick up the phone.
Obviously, delivering the kind of experiences that customers want would be in possible in a traditional legacy contact centre. However, today, artificial intelligence and automation are beginning to unlock new opportunities for the modern adviser.
Agent augmentation is a concept that brings together two trends in AI development in the contact centre: automation and virtual agents. Together, these tools can work to augment and empower human agents in the workforce.
The Intelligent Evolution of the Contact Centre
When artificial intelligence initially began to appear in the contact centre, many people were concerned that bots would one day overtake the human adviser completely, leaving millions without a job. However, the more that we have journeyed into the age of AI, the more we’ve found that artificial intelligence is more of a supplement for human agents than a replacement.
Rather than doing all of an agent’s work for them, AI has the power to ensure that today’s contact centre employees focus on the tasks that most demand their skills and creativity. Robotic Process Automation, virtual agents, and chatbots can eliminate monotonous and repetitive tasks, so modern agents can focus their attention where it’s needed.
However, that’s not the only way that AI is making a difference to the contact centre. These tools also have the power to augment agents in other ways, by delivering the information and guidance that they need to support better customer experiences.
Providing Better Customer Experiences with Agent Augmentation
Today’s contact centre agents are under increasing pressure to answer complicated questions from customers, often within a matter of moments. Consumers are less patient today than they’ve ever been. They expect to have immediate answers to their questions, without having to repeat themselves to countless advisers.
Fortunately, AI can speed up the path to resolution for agents and customers by surfacing relevant information and guidance for an adviser before they ever answer a call. Through agent augmentation strategies, artificial intelligence can immediately deliver CRM and sales data about a customer to an agent, so that they’re ready to provide a more contextual conversation. For instance, before an agent answers a call, they may receive a pop-up message from the AI showing:
- The customer’s name and background
- Previous purchases made with the company
- Previous complaints
- Agents that they’ve worked with in the past
- Products or services that they have
Once the agent answers the call, the supplementary virtual agent can then linger in the background, drawing up additional information when keywords are mentioned, or offering helpful suggestions. Some particularly advanced agent augmentation strategies may even involve using things like natural language understanding to analyse the sentiment of a conversation.
For instance, if the AI recognises that the customer is getting upset, it might deliver suggestions on how the agent can rectify the conversation and reduce the risk of further issues. Some agent augmentation programmes can even analyse conversations and determine when to contact a supervisor on behalf of an agent.
Supporting the Modern Support Agent
Agent augmentation is all about helping contact centres to discover how artificial intelligence can support, empower, and enhance today’s customer service representatives. Using artificial intelligence and automation, it’s now easier than ever for businesses of all sizes to give their advisers the extra information and context they need to have relevant and valuable conversations with customers.
Everyday contact centres collect vast amounts of information. Unfortunately, agents can’t always access that information when they need it most. However, we’re beginning to discover that data is the lifeblood of an excellent customer experience. The more you know about each client that contacts your team, the easier it is to deliver a conversation tailored to their needs.
Agent augmentation allows businesses to take their customer service strategy to the next level by empowering agents with better information, useful real-time analytics, insights, and more. With the right augmentation strategy, every customer adviser can have their own personal robotic assistant, dedicated to making sure that your advisers have the tools they need to solve client problems.