Creating a Bionic Contact Centre Agent

Josefine Fouarge of Nuance discusses how technology like Artificial Intelligence (AI) can supplement the role of the contact centre agent.

Contact centre agents are still irreplaceable when it comes to customer engagement. Instinct and context are abilities unique to humans, but artificial intelligence can augment those skills, creating a bionic contact centre agent that accelerates the Enterprise’s digital transformation journey.

“Bionics” describes technology that is inspired by nature – similar to AI, which describes the ability of a computer to act like a human. When talking about bionic agents we don’t mean contact centre agents with prosthetic arms that make them type faster, or any other physical modification of the human body. We are talking about agents being augmented and supported by artificial intelligence. What could that look like?

First, AI can find patterns in huge amounts of data much faster than any human could. Which means, by leveraging AI, we augment our own ability to gather insights or knowledge. With contact centre agents, AI can listen in to conversations between customer and agent, analyse what they talk about and recommend next best actions, upsell and cross-sell opportunities or the answer to a support question – all in real time.

Today, agents either need to know a lot of details about the organisation’s offering or to search through script trees, knowledgebases or manuals to find answers. In answer to this, AI can search for the agent, allowing them to focus on the customer, not on the information retrieval.

Continuing the thought about patterns in data, every person has their own voice identity. Similar to a fingerprint, the way we talk, the frequency of our voice and several other identifiers are unique to every human.

AI is capable of distinguishing between different voices, even identifying if the voice is human or robotic. This technology, called voice biometrics, enables agents to authenticate customers much faster, without asking the usual three identification questions like “What was your first pet’s middle name?”. This makes the authentication process more conversational and less frustrating for the customer and the agent, and it reduces fraud.

In general, looking into conversations and understanding what’s going on, finding opportunities to improve the experience and sharing useful insights with agents in simple ways such as indicators in the agent desktop, will help make the agents’ work life easier, will empower them and will strengthen their confidence while assisting customers. All of this helps with agent satisfaction – and we all know, if we like to go to work, we are happier.

But think a step further. If your agent is happy, if AI technology supports them by getting answers faster to the customer, if their tools highlight what they should pay attention to instead of guessing and if they feel more secure when asking for private information, it will also ensure that your customers are satisfied. Because happy agent = happy customer.

Author: Guest Author