- Written by Kris Graham - Senior Account Executive
- Connect with Kris on LinkedIn
When traditionally thinking about contact centre efficiency, we stumble into the world of manual tasks and cumbersome jobs for supervisors. They are less than efficient. Which is ironic. When we try to improve the customer experience or agent experience, the rest of the business suffers.
So the introduction of a tool called Agent Assist is a welcome one. The only thing needed from your side is a subscription and a fraction of agent learning time to unlock on-screen prompts, pop-ups, and analytics that boost the efficiency of your contact centre. You’ll wonder how you survived without it!
How to improve contact centre efficiency
Here are some ways to improve contact centre efficiency:
- Spend weeks in a boardroom huddled around a whiteboard brainstorming
- Run workshops with agents and supervisors, removing them from the frontline
- Hire expensive consultants and business analysts to tell you what you already know
- Trial and error various ways and means you find on Google and in other training manuals
And here are some ways to improve contact centre efficiency without spending hours, days, and months of your time:
- Turn on Agent Assist and benefit from instant answers, customised prompts, and on-the-spot agent training
How Agent Assist can transform contact centres in the financial services industry
With Agent Assist, your call centre agents have access to an experienced subject matter expert with supervisor qualities and access to all your systems without needing a break for lunch.
Picture the scene before Agent Assist.
When a new agent starts, they observe an experienced agent for a week or so. Then, you let them start handling calls with a supervisor sitting looking over their shoulder.
You don’t want to interfere too much so you recap what they could have done differently after the call. During the call, agents can put a customer on hold and ask for help.
There are several things wrong with this scenario:
- Customers must wait for your agent to ask supervisors questions
- Supervisors are pulled away from their jobs and responsibilities
- Agents feel pressured by having someone watching them work
- New agents are learning personal biases and shortcuts
It’s also incredibly difficult to introduce things like upsells when the conversation is disjointed. When you’re clearly asking for help or unclear on customer queries, the likelihood of buying something from that agent is low.
In fact, 36% of customers say agents who lack the knowledge to resolve their issues are the most frustrating aspect of customer service. But you can’t rely on your most experienced agents to handle every single call.
So, here’s what you can change.
- When an upsell opportunity gets identified by Agent Assist, it flashes the detail on-screen.
- If a customer calls but owes you money, you get an auto-payment reminder displayed.
- When customers call about an order and have already input their account number, get that order number available for copy and paste without asking your customer to repeat themselves.
- If agents get stuck during their script, lean on your guidance library for prompts to get the call flowing again.
- After a call, review the instant transcript with suggestions flagged for improvement next time.
Where does Agent Assist get its prompts and suggestions from?
You.
Or, more specifically, all the systems you integrate it with, your contact centre software, any prompts and data you upload manually, and its built-in AI learning models.
Every time your agents use a prompt or suggestion, Agent Assist learns from its effectiveness. For example, if agents dismiss or ignore the same suggestion three times in a row, it will evaluate whether that’s the right suggestion.
Likewise, if the same issues come up and Agent Assist helps diffuse the situation, it will show this prompt more often in that scenario.
How can we trust it to be accurate?
There’s an element of what goes in is what comes out. Anything you enter into Agent Assist manually is down to you. Its job is not to question human input, but rather to make your contact centre agents more efficient.
Aside from learning over time, the machine learning technology is always optimising its responses, timings, and relevance. If you’d rather do this away from your live customers, take advantage of the Generative AI studio.
Instead of letting AI into the wild and saying whatever it likes, spend a few weeks/months in a sandbox environment putting AI to the test.
You can create and deliver personalised, relevant interactions by tailoring prompts to specific use cases and using contextual customer data. Rather than using an off-the-shelf AI product, you get the chance to choose exactly what happens when.
GenAI Studio also addresses organisational concerns around responsible AI with its ability to control the data that generative AI can access and share.
It’s low code by nature, meaning you don’t need constant help from IT or developers. Instead, contact centre managers and supervisors can program their desired outcomes for different scenarios.
You get automated quality management, data testing, and monitoring of real world situations so you ensure AI is treating your customers exactly as you wish.
Where can I get Agent Assist for my business?
Agent Assist is a small but mighty feature of the modern cloud contact centre. It’s embedded into the agent interface when calls get answered.
As such, when you buy a contact centre solution from Opus, we’ll check to see whether you’ll benefit from Agent Assist and advise on the correct licensing model for your team.
Turning on Agent Assist is truly a game changer for financial services teams who wish to offer more real-time agent help and identify in-call upsell opportunities.
