How Collaborative Intelligence Creates New Roles for Agents

Natalie Mackay at Five9 explores how it is a misconception that ArtificiaI Intelligence (AI), including advanced robotics and digital bots, will gradually replace people.

That may be true for certain jobs or tasks, but AI’s greater power is in complementing and augmenting human capabilities.

Machines can perform repetitive tasks, analyze huge data sets, and handle routine cases. That frees people to do what they do best: resolve ambiguous information, exercise judgment, and communicate with dissatisfied customers.

We call this Collaborative Intelligence: our philosophy that humans and AI actively enhance each other’s complementary strengths. Collaborative Intelligence not only improves the overall customer experience; it also creates new, exciting roles for contact centre workers.

First, let’s look at how AI technologies are being adopted in the contact centre to empower agents.

New Roles for AI

Reduce Agent Workload: Implementing AI in the contact centre reduces an agent’s workload and stress by automating simple interactions and streamlining workflows. Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) free-up agent time by creating self-service automation for voice, webchat, SMS, and social channels.

This gives agents more time to focus on complex interactions, while providing customers with exceptional self-service experiences.

If an interaction requires a live agent, an IVA automatically routes the customer along with their full history – which can include attachments and rich controls within a digital channel.

Workflow Automation can also boost agent productivity and reduce stress by eliminating repetitive tasks and automating complex processes.

Workflow Automation lets you connect your Intelligent Cloud Contact Center with other business systems to consistently create exceptional customer experiences by aggregating information, providing comprehensive views of data and performance, and automating sophisticated, cross-platform workflows.

Pre-built data and functional integrations to external systems mean agents have repeatable processes that deliver consistent positive outcomes.

Build Agent Expertise: AI can not only reduce agent stress but serve as a complementary tool to help agents develop product expertise.

Providing agents with the information they need in an intuitive manner during a customer interaction also supports consistent, positive customer experiences.

Agent Assist is a practical application of AI that can bring improved customer satisfaction scores by immediately improving agent performance; increasing first contact resolution (FCR); and reducing average handle time (AHT), escalations, and onboarding time.

Agent Assist empowers your teams to deliver exceptional customer experiences with features including real-time transcripts and guidance, AI checklists, call recordings, and a transcript viewer.

New Roles for Human Workers

An individual who advances in a contact centre doesn’t necessarily have to follow a traditional contact centre management path. Collaborative Intelligence will also create new and exciting roles for agents. For example, agents can become trainers, planners and sustainers.

Trainers: New roles are emerging for people who will design, deploy, and train contact centre AI systems. New tools will become available for these roles that no longer require deep technical expertise. This means people with a business-level understanding of customer challenges can easily create automated solutions.

Planners: Contact centre managers forecast how many agents they need during periods of varying demand. With the introduction of IVAs, managers will need to plan for how many human and virtual agents they’ll need.

Sustainers: People will need to continuously work to optimize AI performance and invest in solutions that provide positive results. The future of work for contact centre agents remains bright. As organizations strive to exceed employee expectations and implement new AI tools to support their teams, there’s no limit to what they can achieve.

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.