As many as 65% of customers claim they’ll change brands after just one bad experience. That’s why it’s essential to act immediately if an interaction starts going south. As a contact center manager with loads on your to-do list, you’re probably rolling your eyes right now. Sure, that sounds nice. But you can’t monitor every phone call or edit every email.

Let me introduce you to AI agent assist technology. AI agent assist tools act like an assistant, providing real-time support for each agent, helping improve productivity, and optimizing customer interactions so they don’t turn sour.

What Is AI Agent Assist?

Put simply, AI agent assist is a technology that uses artificial intelligence to provide real-time support to contact center agents. It’s powered by natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), customer data, and analytics. Agent assist works in the background, partnering with your agents and helping them perform their tasks more efficiently.

Don’t be mistaken, though. AI agent assist doesn’t replace your human agents. It enhances their abilities by offering real-time insights, suggestions, and automation to boost productivity.

For example, agent assist can access information and suggest internal self-service tools. It can also pull customer records during an interaction, analyze customer sentiment, and suggest responses during interactions. It can even summarize calls.

With agent assist, you can empower your team to handle customer inquiries more effectively. This reduces response times and improves overall customer satisfaction.

Explore seven key benefits of using AI in your contact center.

How AI Agent Assist Works

Behind agent assist suggestions, insights, and automation is a layered framework of different AI technologies.

Let’s take a closer look at how it works.

1. AI agent assist integrates with your existing contact center platforms, like your customer relationship management (CRM) system, communication tools, and knowledge bases. It learns from these tools and pulls information to support agents during conversations.
2. As agents interact with customers, agent assist analyzes the conversation. Using speech and text analysis, spoken and written language is processed to understand the context and intent of the interaction.
3. NLP enables the system to comprehend the nuances of human language. These advanced analytics can evaluate a customer’s sentiment, tone, and intent. Then, with that information, the assistant provides relevant suggestions and responses for agents.
4. The AI system generates actionable insights and recommendations. It might suggest relevant knowledge base articles, create recommended responses, identify opportunities to upsell, or flag compliance issues.
5. During an interaction, AI agent assist can also automate routine tasks. Using generative AI, agent assist can summarize calls and enter data. This helps your agents move on to the next interaction faster. And it frees them to focus on more complex and value-added activities.
6. With ML models, agent assist also learns from past interactions, improving the accuracy and relevance of the help provided over time.

The Game-Changing Impact of AI Agent Assist in Your Contact Center

As you can imagine, this tech is a game-changer for your agents (and customers).

Agent assist offers several benefits. With it, you can:

• Increase efficiency and productivity. Agent assist provides agents with instant access to information and resources. This means you can cut back on the time spent searching for answers. It can also automate time-consuming tasks and generate fast replies. With these helpful tools, agents can help more customers in less time.
• Reduce agent stress and burnout. Qualtrics has found that as many as one in five agents thinks about quitting every week. Why? They don’t have the tools they need to do their jobs in the most efficient way possible. AI agent assist is like a life jacket that helps agents stay afloat during stressful customer interactions. With more support and the automation of repetitive tasks, agents experience less stress and fatigue. This contributes to a healthier work environment and lowers turnover rates.
• Improve accuracy and compliance. Agent assist helps ensure agents follow compliance guidelines and company policies. With agent assist on the lookout during each interaction, you minimize errors and reduce the risk of regulatory violations.
• Drive faster onboarding and training. Training new hires is time-consuming. As a result, it often gets neglected. This neglect contributes to disengagement and lower customer satisfaction. But with agent assist providing real-time guidance and support during interactions, new agents get up to speed more quickly.
• Enhance your customer experience. When you provide better support for your agents, you better support your customers. AI agent assist enables faster and more accurate responses, improving the overall quality of customer interactions. Give it time — you’ll see a nice bump in customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Learn more about the call center AI tools that actually help your agents.

3 Examples of AI Agent Assist in Action

Don’t just take my word for it. Let’s see AI agent assist in action so you can see the impact for yourself.

Example 1

The Scenario. Your agent, Sarah, receives a complex technical support question from a customer. She doesn’t know the answer off the top of her head.

Agent Assist in Action. AI agent assist quickly searches your knowledge base. It suggests an article with clear troubleshooting steps that Sarah can reference. This helps her provide an accurate solution quickly.

The Benefit. Because of AI agent assist, Sarah doesn’t have to put the customer on hold to find information. No time is wasted during the interaction. This gives the customer a fast resolution, keeping the handling time low and improving the customer’s experience.

Example 2

The Scenario. An agent named Luke takes a call from an upset customer.

Agent Assist in Action. AI agent assist analyzes the customer’s tone and sentiment. The assistant offers Luke suggestions on how to empathize with the customer, which helps de-escalate the situation.

The Benefit. Luke gains confidence in handling the situation without transferring it to his supervisor, which supports better engagement. With practical and data-backed tips from agent assist, Luke enhances the customer-agent rapport, and the customer leaves satisfied.

Example 3

The Scenario. After a lengthy customer interaction, your agent, Marie, still needs to document the call. But there’s a long call queue. Customers are waiting on hold, and agents are swamped with work. She needs to work fast.

Agent Assist in Action. Instead of documenting everything manually by memory, Marie uses agent assist. In mere moments, it generates a concise summary of the conversation, including key points and action items for Marie.

The Benefit. With reduced after-call work, Marie can work more efficiently. She’s not bogged down with tasks, so she can support more customers and reduce wait times. With highly accurate notes from her calls, Marie improves her follow-up, boosting customer satisfaction and retention.