A Comprehensive Guide on Real-Time Agent Assist Solutions in a Contact Center
You are a contact center agent, and you receive about 120 calls a day. The queries you receive vary from a simple configuration change to a complex query that requires you to escalate to your technical team.
Would you be happy to get assistance on how to respond to your customer queries in real-time?
I bet you would. However, the assistance has to be relevant and contextual, and it should help you do your job better.
This is what real-time agent assist solutions do.
What Is a Real-Time Agent Assist Solution?
Real-time agent assist is an AI-driven solution that provides live guidance to contact center agents during customer interactions.
It analyses interactions in real-time across channels like email, voice, chat, SMS, social, mobile, and web. It delivers relevant recommendations, scripts, compliance alerts, knowledge-base articles, sentiment analysis, and next-best-action prompts.
It uses natural language processing, speech analytics, and machine learning to assist the agents in improving customer experience.
Why Do Contact Centers Need Real-Time Agent Assist Solutions?
Agents are at the bottom of the pyramid in the customer experience journey. Still, when a customer calls in, they happen to be the face of your industry. They are expected to know everything you offer, and they get paid the least, and their work is policed the most.
Everything works against them to be the performer you desire the agent to be.
They are the most stressed people when it comes to delivering customer experience.
According to a Forbes study, the reasons for their stress are:
- 26% mentioned finding the right answers to customer questions
- 25% mentioned different systems and information sources, giving different answers
- 20% mentioned hopping from one application or window to another
- 14% mentioned it was hard to keep up with all the new information and changes
- 15% mentioned other issues
If you look at this, real-time agent assist solutions could handle 85% of the stress, directly influencing the delivery of a great customer experience.
Real-time agent assist solutions should allow agents to make decisions at the moment, which is the most efficient way to boost customer experiences and ensure they are positive and memorable.
Besides these, real-time agent assist solutions help ensure compliance with regulatory and internal policies.
10 Real-Time Agent Assist Use Cases
1. Call Transcription and Sentiment Analysis
You are attending a call from a customer. He mentioned that he had already called three times about the same issue. Your AI-powered real-time agent assist tool flags this as frustration, and you are expected to respond with empathy.
Your response can be: I understand how frustrating this can be, and let me help you with this right away.
According to McKinsey, this would result in a 22% increase in customer satisfaction scores and a 40% faster issue resolution.
2. Knowledge Base Recommendations
You are handling the customer service of a healthcare insurance organization. You receive a call from a customer intimating you about a planned procedure, and the customer wants to know the documents he needs to submit for pre-approval. Your real-time agent assist solution pulls the exact knowledge base article, which helps you respond to the customer in seconds.
According to Forrester, this would result in a 30% decrease in average handling time (AHT) and 60% fewer call escalations.
3. Next-Best Action Guidance
A high-value customer calls your bank’s contact center requesting a loan. Your AI-powered agent assist solution looks at the customer’s account activity and credit history and suggests a pre-approved loan offer.
This increases the chances of conversion.
In fact, according to industry estimates, a pre-approved loan offer corresponds to a 17% increase in sales conversions and a 25% higher upsell and cross-sell success rates.
4. Compliance Monitoring
You run collections on behalf of a bank. One of your agents tries to call a customer for the third time within a day. Your real-time agent assist solution flags the call and stops the call from getting through, stating that it is a compliance violation per the FDCPA regulations.
According to Forbes, this would result in a 40% reduction in compliance violations.
5. Objection Handling and Script Optimization
You are trying to sell a software subscription to a prospect, and you hear them say, “Your product is too expensive.” Your real-time agent assist solution detects this objection and instantly guides you to say: I understand your concern. However, companies that use our solution see a 35% increase in sales. Let us explore how this could work for you.
This results in a 28% improvement in conversion rates and a 35% increase in agent confidence and effectiveness, according to Call Center Helper.
6. Live Call Barge In by Supervisors
You are struggling to close a sale in a sales call. Your AI-driven real-time agent assist solution detects it and alerts your supervisor. Your supervisor joins the call and discretely sends you a message in real-time: Mention the limited-time discount offer and the case study on ROI.
You do that, and your sale gets converted.
7. Process Adherence
You work in a medical insurance call center, and you are expected to verify the caller’s identity before sharing the claim details of their insurance. You skip a verification step, and real-time agent assist immediately flags it and prompts you to follow the protocol, ensuring security compliance.
A Gartner study states that this would result in an 80% lower risk of fraudulent disclosures and 95% adherence to internal SOPs.
8. Multilingual Translation
You run a global contact center, and one of your customers from Spain speaks to you in Spanish. The real-time agent assist solution instantly transcribes, allowing you to respond fluently in real-time.
This would allow you to handle international customers easily, regardless of their language preferences.
9. Post-Call Notes and Automated Summary
Most agents spend easily anywhere between 2 and 5 minutes after every call on call disposition. Imagine your real-time agent assist solution helps you summarize the call with follow-up actions. That would save agents a lot of time.
It would lead to an 85% reduction in after-call work and a 25% improvement in agent efficiency.
10. Upsell and Cross-Sell Opportunities
I recently called my streaming services contact center to check on device compatibility. Immediately, the agent said, I see that you don’t have our premium plan. With our premium plan, you will get a multi-device HD streaming upgrade.
I am sure the agent had access to a real-time agent assist solution that prompted him to tell me this, and I happily upgraded to their premium plan.
What Are the Pros of Using Real-Time Agent Assist in Contact Centers?
Faster Resolution and Handling Time
AI-powered agent assist solutions reduce average handling time (AHT) by instantly providing access to relevant knowledge base articles, responses, and troubleshooting steps.
One of our customers cut AHT by 30% using our agent assist suggestions for troubleshooting.
Personalization and Customer Satisfaction
Your real-time agent assist solution with its sentiment analysis capabilities detects frustration and prompts empathetic responses. Besides, the next-best-action recommendations ensure more personalized conversations based on customer history.
One of our customers saw a 25% boost in CSAT after implementing our speech analytics.
Enhanced Compliance
Real-time agent assist solutions ensure compliance monitoring to see if agents are following industry regulations. It would send immediate alerts on compliance violations, allowing you to address them immediately and avoid costly fines.
One of our debt collection customers reduced compliance violations by 60% with our solution.
Eliminates After-Call Work and Improves Efficiency
The call summaries and notes that AI-powered agent assist solutions create help you reduce or completely avoid post-call workload. This would allow your agents to handle more workload without feeling stressed.
What Are the Cons of Real-Time Agent Assist?
Reduces Human Touch
Agents may become too dependent on AI suggestions instead of thinking critically and creatively. Sometimes, the AI-driven response may sound scripted and robotic if not fine-tuned.
While it should remain a signpost, it should not completely take over customer interactions.
Potential for Errors and Misinformation
Your real-time agent assist is only as good as the quality of the data you use. With incorrect and outdated information, the assist solution can mislead agents.
Implementation and Integration Challenges
For your real-time agent assist to perform well, you need to have seamless integration with CRM, helpdesk, knowledge bases, communication systems, and other best-of-breed solutions.
It may need customization to align with custom workflows and business processes, and this might result in increased setup times.
Continuous Investment
Advanced AI solutions require upfront costs for licensing, implementation, and training. Besides, you will have to make continuous improvements and train your models, which means additional maintenance costs.
Privacy and Security Concerns
We are talking about real-time transcription and monitoring of all customer interactions. This would give rise to data privacy issues, especially in regulated industries like healthcare and finance.
You need to have strong compliance measures to avoid legal risks.
Resistance from Agents
Do you want your agents to feel policed, monitored, and micromanaged?
This would reduce their morale. You need to have a rollout plan where you will have to impress on your agents the benefits of using an assist solution, and it should be used to enhance agent efficiency and not replace them.
How Does the ClearTouch Contact Center Platform Help Businesses with Real-Time Agent Assist?
The key features of ClearTouch’s Cloud Contact Center platform include:
- Speech Analytics: Identifies customer sentiment, misselling, and compliance issues proactively and recommends optimal responses and training.
- Knowledge Base Integration: Suggest the most helpful help articles or FAQs based on customer inquiries.
- Compliance and Regulatory Alerts: Ensures agents follow industry standards like HIPAA, PCI-DSS, FDCPA, GDPR, TCPA, and CCPA adherence. Whenever there is a violation, our solution raises an alert in real time to prevent any regulatory fines.
- Multichannel Support: With omnichannel capabilities, our solution works across email, voice, chat, SMS, social, website, and mobile, ensuring consistency in customer interactions.
- Seamless CRM Integration: Pre-built integrations with industry-leading CRMs provide a unified view of customer history and preferences, allowing agents to deliver personalized service.
With ClearTouch’s agent assist solution, you can drive efficiency, enhance customer satisfaction, and maintain compliance while empowering agents to perform at their best.
Customers don’t want to wait. They don’t want to be transferred. They want their issues resolved quickly and accurately.
Does a real-time agent assist help in resolving queries quickly?
It certainly does. While AI can’t replace the empathy of a human agent, it can certainly amplify it. As an agent, when you have access to information instantly with AI-powered insights, would you be able to do more justice to your customer needs?
You certainly would, and that is the reason why you should look at a real-time agent assist solution.
A Gartner report predicts that 75% of contact centers will integrate AI-driven real-time agent assist solutions by 2026.
According to McKinsey, companies that leverage AI-powered agent assist see a 20-40% improvement in agent productivity and up to 25% higher customer satisfaction.