Spyros Methenitis Head of Product
16 January 2025
Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions are revolutionizing the roles, skills and general job landscape in the contact center industry. While business leaders across all industries are focused on opportunities for automation, another phase of AI innovations include those in which human-driven jobs are augmented. And there is no better place to up-skill and augment with AI than in the contact center.
Contact center agents are increasingly expected to handle multiple chat interactions at one time, while customer-to-agent conversations are increasing in priority and complexity as AI and self-service field a higher volume of simpler tasks. AI solutions such as Agent Assist provide much needed relief to the beleaguered contact center agent, while contact center executives and supervisors enjoy a tangible lift in customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
Let’s take a closer look at how Agent Assist can transform your company’s agent and contact center performance. In this article:
- What is Agent Assist?
- How Agent Assist improves agent performance, speeds onboarding and improves employee retention.
- Why Agent Assist should be in your 2025 toolbox for improved organizational performance and increased revenue.
How Does Agent Assist Support Contact Center Agents?
Agent Assist is an AI-powered conversational intelligence solution that provides contact center agents with real-time assistance during customer interactions.
By “listening” to the conversation as it occurs, Agent Assist equips human agents with suggestions, relevant information and actionable insights that enable them to direct the interaction towards a favorable outcome. Better still, in addition to allowing the contact center operative to better understand what was said by the customer, Agent Assist provides insight into how they said it, capturing the sentiment of the conversation. This enables agents to better empathise with customers, making them feel heard and doing much to defuse tense situations.
Subsequently, Agent Assist pulls forward analysis and insights that are typically only reviewed after a call has been recorded and assessed, and surfaces them to contact center agents during the conversation – when it matters most.
With an AI-powered support system behind them, agents can manage customer interactions with increased confidence, resulting in better performance, faster resolutions, and most importantly, increased levels of customer satisfaction.
The Agent Assist Advantage
Now that you have a clearer idea of how Agent Assist supports your contact center staff, let’s home in on the various benefits it offers individual team members, customers, and your company as a whole.
Improved Agent Performance
With the benefit of real-time prompts and timely access to information that allows them to move the conversation forward, contact center agents can better ensure customer satisfaction and first time issue resolution. Proactive AI knowledge and behavior prompting ensures that agents give customers the most accurate and helpful advice every time. With AI covering important aspects of the conversation, agents have improved confidence and focus when complex or difficult conversations arise, resulting in fewer conflicts with customers and reduced stress all around.
AI Agent Assist taps into both knowledge and behavioral data to offer proactive suggestions that help agents reach faster conclusions with positive customer sentiment.
Faster Onboarding of New Agents
Agent Assist is invaluable for training new contact center staff. It significantly reduces their learning curve and allows them to start answering calls and chats on day one.
In the past, new agents were required to learn the bulk of the information about their company’s products and services on the job. Not only that but they were required to recall such details, or know where to access them, during a customer interaction. These pressured requirements only got worse as contact center technology and data storage turned into a maze of point solutions that required some agents to access upward of 20 different applications during one customer interaction.
Agent Assist removes these burdens from new agents, arming them with the required competence to perform their jobs with greater efficiency and far less stress. Competency is achieved faster, boosting employee satisfaction and retention while delivering happier customers and increased revenues at pace with the organization’s goals.
Increased Agent Retention Rates
As a result of feeling more confident in their ability to serve customers, your contact center personnel are less likely to feel uncertain, stressed and constantly on the back foot. With reduced emotional turmoil and burnout, agents are less inclined to seek employment elsewhere. Agent enablement and satisfaction is a key element to reversing dipping CX Index scores in the contact center industry, and AI augmentation is the most cost effective and results-driven approach.
A reduced agent attrition rate offers the dual benefits of customers engaging with a greater number of experienced agents, leading to improved service standards and saved costs for recruitment and training.
Reduced Manual Work for Performance Gains
Another way that Agent Assist helps to reduce burnout and subsequent attrition is by automating some of the manual work contact center employees are typically tasked with. So while Agent Assist does a great job helping the agent through a live interaction, it also handles tedious wrap-up tasks. This benefits the organization by ensuring accurately documented interactions, all while freeing up agents to handle more customer conversations, which reduces delays, shortens response times, and increases customer satisfaction.
Improved Fraud Detection and Prevention
Agent Assist helps to support agents to mitigate the financial and reputational risks that accompany attempts of fraud and social engineering. Voice biometric verification, liveness detection, speaker change detection and behavioral analytics work in real-time to authenticate customers, and Agent Assist equips your agents with these anti-fraud tools to provide warnings and prompts to assist them when suspected malicious activity is detected.
Improved Agent Performance, Improved Organizational Performance
A bottom-up, managed and focused approach to AI solutions reaps many benefits for agents which ultimately translates into benefits for the entire organization. As agent performance improves, so does organizational performance. Ultimately, the benefits outlined above all combine to help companies achieve faster growth and reach their long-term objectives.
If contact center agents are better at their jobs, they’ll provide better service, resulting in happier customers, continued business, and long-term engagements. Similarly, by enjoying greater job satisfaction and less stress, agents are less likely to seek alternative employment, allowing a company to retain more talent with which it can grow. And in reducing its turnover, organisations can lower their costs, which they can invest in other areas that will facilitate further growth.
For more information about how you can boost agent and contact center performance, read more about Omilia’s Agent Assist solution.
