On June 3–4, 2024 boost.ai was proud to be a Gold Sponsor at CallMiner’s LISTEN UK 2024 event. For the past five years, LISTEN UK has brought CallMiner’s international community together to learn how to deliver better experiences and drive greater business value from customer conversations.
Our own Chief Revenue Officer Nick Mitchell was invited to attend and participate in the panel discussion, “Unleashing Real-Time Guidance to Empower Agents and Drive Customer Excellence.”
Nick was joined by:
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John Cottrell, Operations MI Manager at Ageas Retail Ltd.
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Paul Giggins, Head of Strategy and Performance at Cabot Financial
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Paolo Righetti, Global Executive at AtomBit
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Jonathan "JR" Ranger, Chief Customer Officer at CallMiner
The panelists shared lessons learned and other key insights in how to leverage real-time virtual agent (VA) support to enhance agent performance, boost customer satisfaction and drive operational effectiveness.
For anyone who was unable to be there, and for attendees who would like a recap, here are the key takeaways from the panel:
How can companies ensure that real-time assistance is effective?
Customer agents can feel that the VA acts more like “Big Brother” than a helpful assistant. If your agents don’t trust the VA, then it’s not going to be effective. To earn trust, you have to secure buy-in from your team. To do that, you need to work with your consultants and your team leaders when you’re building out the VA and its alerts.
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When building alerts, be sure to ask your agents what information they’re interested in and actually need. Make sure those alerts are prioritized.
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Real-time alerts have to be direct. They can’t be multiple sentences, otherwise your agents may forget they're actually engaging customers and start engaging with the content instead!
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At the same time, be mindful about the number of alerts. You don’t want to overload your agents with alerts and risk overwhelming them.
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Find ways to create alerts that support your agents. For example, when an abusive customer is detected, provide a follow-up alert to check in with the agent and see if they’re okay.
When developing your assistance programs, you want to partner with organizations that have the right level of expertise and experience about your industry and specific needs. You don’t want a system developed by CRM marketing teams that ignores the essential components of operations — you have to choose a partner that knows how to avoid silos between departments and understands the needs of your agents.
How do you know when your organization is ready for real-time guidance?
Your organization is ready when you have engagement and buy-in, and that’s a step-by-step process.
Start with gathering insights by communicating with your agents. This will allow you to evolve to other elements such as developing scorecards and gathering feedback from your teams. This can help you avoid the “Big Brother” stigma of trying to impose a system onto your agents.
Once you get your scorecards in place and have that initial buy-in, you’ll need to continually communicate and work with your managers and supervisors on supporting the improved experience. Be sensitive to the perceptions of your agent managers and supervisors; you can't just throw them into the real-time technology and assume that they're going to find the process to be easier.
When your agents are able to understand how real-time alerts can be a tool for them, you'll get the buy-in and engagement needed to drive efficiency.
Should real-time support replace coaching and training?
Absolutely not. Real-time AI assistance should work as a complement for training, not as a replacement. You can think of it more as an evolution, as humans will never be out of the loop (nor should they be).
One of the considerations with utilizing real-time support is you don’t want to throw out all the things that work well, such as your scorecards, just to adopt something new. Instead, you need to see it as an asset that can help improve scores to provide better customer service.
For example, traditionally, you’d use a training program to get everyone on the same page using the same methods, but real-time assistance from an internal support VA can provide an individual level of coaching and support. It’s a powerful and effective add-on, not an entirely new approach.
How does AI and machine learning enhance the capabilities of real time agent guidance and assistance tools?
AI assistance allows your live agents to focus on higher-value interactions while having a truly genuine conversation with the customer, rather than relying entirely on scripts. We’re already seeing a high degree of automation in contact centers. Financial services, governments and hospitality are all achieving greater than 70% automation for customer interactions.
While increased automation handles most cases, there are still important human-to-human experiences with the valuable and vulnerable: Your highest-value customers and the ones you’re at risk of losing. Automation frees up money and resources to move some agents to newer positions to train the AI and automated solutions while other live agents can focus on customer interactions. This is where you can increase your net promoter score (NPS) and ensure that your live agents are spending more time with your highest-value customers to increase your ARPU (Average Revenue Per User).
For example, customer-facing VAs like chatbots are great if a customer just needs to put a stop on their credit card because it's been lost. But, if that customer wants to discuss details about their mortgage or their life insurance premium, then they may really want to speak to somebody. AI assistance is not just about reducing the upfront time, it frees up your agents so they can spend more time speaking with that person about more complicated matters and providing them the detailed information they need, as soon as they need it.
Are brands able to retain more agents because conversations are less mundane?
Yes. What we’re seeing is that AI assistance isn’t eliminating positions, but enhancing them by removing the more mundane tasks and giving agents more important work to do.
One example given was of an insurance organization across the Nordics that uses their chatbot to do all of the initial assessments. Then, the chatbot hands the customer over to a live agent to effectively close out the insurance transaction. As a result, they’re seeing a greater than 40% conversion rate on that combined chatbot and human interaction, compared to transactions with just the live agent.
Because the service is completed much quicker and more efficiently, they're able to increase the revenue they're bringing in, which helps with agent retention.
How should contact centers prepare for the future of AI assistance?
The four major recommendations are:
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Approach customer experience (CX) as an investment. You should always have the understanding that this is all about developing the experience that you want to provide to your customer base. Customer care is not a cost, it’s a gold mine — a way to generate customer lifetime value.
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Give agents support to have high-value interactions. Call times are doubling as call complexity is increasing. While automation tools such as generative AI (GenAI) are able to handle the simpler calls, agents can have — and should have — the time and support to have a genuine conversation with customers.
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Emphasize proactiveness and personalization. Access to customer data means you’ll be able to mine lots of data quickly and then present it to your agents or directly to the customers themselves. Where compliance allows, that data can inform GenAI tools, allowing for much more human-to-human experiences even in automated environments.
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Think of AI as evolutionary. The public perception of AI is changing, especially with the recent advancements of GenAI, and there are concerns about how it will disrupt industries. While we will always work on ensuring compliance and efficiency, keep in mind that the most powerful thing you can do with AI and automation is to augment the performance of your human agents.
Boost.ai is a leader in conversational AI platforms for enterprise organizations. We help businesses transform their customer and employee experience through the use of AI-powered virtual agents. If you’re interested in maximizing the potential of your conversational AI tools and want to start your journey, connect with one of our experts today!
