How AI Boosts Agent Productivity and Customer Loyalty

Janna Pugh at Five9 shares insightful strategies on how both traditional and generative AI can enhance call centre productivity, empower agents, and improve customer satisfaction.

After generative AI and ChatGPT exploded onto the market in late 2022, the tech industry was flooded with this revolutionary technology. What’s been difficult for many, however, is understanding how to use both traditional and generative AI in day-to-day work.

Fear not – we’ve gathered the best ways AI can boost your call centre agents’ productivity while inspiring customer loyalty. Let’s dive in!

Self-Service

For many years, self-service has largely meant static knowledge base articles in a support hub that your customers may or may not find.

From restrictive search settings to customers using the “wrong” keywords to ask a question, it sometimes feels tougher than it should be to get your customers the support they need without them resorting to live help.

However, as AI has evolved, from the first natural language searches to the tools available today (e.g., contextual search), it has been instrumental in advancing self-service.

Now, generative AI can even take the existing data in your knowledge base and re-form it to fit customers’ questions.

This self-service can also be made available during agent calls and help your agents ramp up more quickly and become more knowledgeable.

So, rather than hope your support articles cover all the varying situations and hope your customers find them (so your agents can focus on the really tough questions), AI can more easily help your customers help themselves.

As a result, your customers are less frustrated when trying to find information – giving them a much more enjoyable experience with customer service.

Pre-Call Assistance

Often, the most inefficient part of any call is caller verification. Lost customer PINs, fraudulent calls, uncertain callers… the list goes on.

Where your agents should be spending their time is helping customers, and AI agents are perfect for taking over before your reps get on the phone.

Not only can AI agents handle all the information-gathering and verification your human agents need, but they can also take care of the more routine questions.

Billing questions, password resets, and even order statuses can all be handled by either text or voice intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) that seamlessly hand off calls to your team when necessary. This boosts customer satisfaction and frees up your agents to work on more high-value tasks.

Customer Information

In addition to verifying customer info pre-call, AI can also pull data from your CRM to help inform your agents of things like location, previous purchases, and even support case history.

With all the information at their fingertips – and without having to pull it themselves – your agents can fully focus on the conversation at hand and provide better customer experiences.

Some AI tools will even use the information available to help provide a personal touch. Even something as simple as the current weather for the customer’s location can help aid small talk or build rapport in the call.

Call Transcripts & Summaries

Human memories are a fickle thing. We’re subject to a fair number of cognitive biases, and information overload can easily make us forget what was just discussed – much less what we had for breakfast!

AI, however, is great for generating transcripts of calls as they happen so agents can quickly scroll back up to see the conversation whenever they need to.

This also helps in the event of escalated or transferred calls, giving the new representative full context without waiting for a summary or debrief from the current agent.

Then, after the call, AI can automatically and concisely summarize what was said to reduce the post-call work agents must complete. This helps agents be more productive while ensuring customers’ complete needs are recorded and addressed, boosting customer loyalty.

Real-Time Recommendations & Coaching

Even if your call centre was filled with all-stars, your agents can always use a little support. AI can help by automatically reminding them of standard processes, especially to maintain compliance.

Then, during the call, it can analyse sentiment and read into the caller’s emotions to help both the agent and management understand how a customer is feeling and help identify and avoid potential escalation. At the same time, your customers are more likely to feel heard, leading to higher customer satisfaction.

AI can use all the available information to motivate reps, help them learn how to better approach customer conversations and, ultimately, reduce average handle times.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Five9 – View the Original Article

For more information about Five9 - visit the Five9 Website

Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.

Author: Five9
Reviewed by: Jo Robinson