How to Use Voice AI to Empower Live Agents

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Source: Austin Distel @austindistel

Your call center agents are the lifeblood of your contact center. They have a huge responsibility to represent your brand during a customer’s time of need and frustration, all while actually solving a customer service issue in real-time. Now that’s a tall order.

Whatsmore, positive and negative experiences with your call center agents have a direct impact on your bottom line, resulting in either customer retention or customer churn. In fact, 90% of Americans say that their customer service experience directly influences their decision to either continue or stop doing business with a brand.

With fierce competition, it’s important to make sure your call center agents are empowered and set up for success. New and innovative advances in voice AI and machine learning are already being used by call centers to not only improve the customer experience but also improve the agent experience.

Here are some ways that voice AI is being leveraged to empower and augment live agent performance and job satisfaction:

Voice AI as the first line of defense

Many call centers are using voice AI to fully resolve low complexity, high volume transactional phone calls that can easily make up half of their call volume. Typical call types voice AI can automate for call center agents are scheduling, order or account management, changing a reservation, and so on.

These types of calls are too mundane for live agents, yet simple enough for AI call center agents to handle end-to-end. Removing transactional calls from live agent queues means your agents have more time and energy to focus on those calls that require greater empathy and ingenuity, and live agents report feeling more creative and stimulated, hence improving their overall agent experience.

Guarantee a warm handoff to live agents

Another advantage of voice AI and automation is that any call that needs to be escalated to a live agent always comes with context so that the live agent is never starting from scratch. AI-powered call center agents can handoff authentication details, notes, sentiment, and even the entire transcript, which eliminates on-call and after-call work for the agent, and allows the agent to resolve the customer issue faster and more efficiently.

When integrating your voice AI technology with your helpdesk and CRM, call center agents get all the contextual information they need on the ticket itself. The live agent is able to get up to speed quicker and resolve the issue in a shorter time than they would without pre-authentication or conversation context.

Advanced conversational analytics and insights

Voice AI assistants field thousands of calls daily, which are then transcribed, logged, and securely stored. This translates into massive amounts of conversational data ripe for mining. Through advanced conversational analytics and reporting, call centers can extract and interpret conversational data into insights for call center managers.

These conversational insights from voice AI function as feedback for improving the business. Call center leaders have used voice AI analytics to improve the IVR experience, modify agent scripts for faster resolution, and even provide feedback to the product or service itself.

Omnichannel feedback loop

Voice AI customer support over the phone is the only channel that relies on the customer to find a solution using their own words, rather than choosing from a picklist or adapting to “robot speak.”

When call centers implement voice AI, it’s very common that they start identifying call flows they originally unaccounted for in their IVR or live agent scripts. Instead of relying on pick lists, FAQs, or disposition codes, voice AI transcribes the voice of the customer in their own words which translates to more authentic insights into why their customers are actually calling. Call center leaders are quick to incorporate these new found insights into the service offered across other channels like chat and self-service.

The future of contact centers involves human and AI collaboration, and it’s already here and improving the customer experience, and agent experience. How will you incorporate AI into your call center?

Veronica French
Veronica French is a SaaS marketing and demand generation leader. She is passionate about customer-centric products and brands, and she has years of experience in the contact center space having worked at Oracle, Talkdesk, and now Replicant.ai. With the world’s first Thinking Machine, Replicant provides always-on support to resolve customer issues quickly and naturally over the phone using Voice AI.

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