Agent Assist as a Service for Contact Centers Real-Time Coaching Is Just the Beginning.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, businesses have experienced unprecedented levels of customer service and support calls. In 2020, Aragon Research predicted that 40% or more of the workforce will continue to work remotely permanently, long after the pandemic has disappeared. This means that many contact center agents will continue to be remote, which presents challenges for managers and supervisors—who must ensure that customer, employee, and partner satisfaction is not compromised.
Why Agent Assist?
In addition to the challenge of remote work, keeping up with savvy customers’ ever-changing needs in real-time is something that keeps business leaders up at night. Agent Assist—a form of an intelligent assistant—will become a key component of the intelligent contact center due to the explosive growth of the conversational AI market.
The Growing Demand for Digital Labor
In 2020, Aragon introduced the concept of digital labor, which represents the body of computer- based virtual agents that we see growing at a 10x rate between now and 2025. The contact center is one of the most competitive areas for the overall digital labor market.
In the digital labor market, we are used to virtual agents helping customers get through round one of a phone call, usually helping the customer route to the correct live-agent or perform a small task. With live agents being the preferred form of communication, virtual agents are still needed, especially in the new hybrid work world. Managers can no longer examine the floor picking up on behaviors, or give guidance as easily on the spot.
Thus, the next generation of virtual agents: Agent Assist. Agent Assist goes further than simple chatbots, thanks to powerful advances in AI and natural language processing. Agent Assist solutions will now be able to handle a variety of complex tasks, offering real-time coaching to human agents.
The Secret Power behind Agent Assist is AI
The power of Agent Assist is that it’s real-time text and speech-based insights can streamline communication between customers and agents by providing important insights at critical moments and drive continuous learning throughout the enterprise. It leverages the power of predictive analytics and machine learning to deploy sophisticated virtual agents that can help human agents serve their customers faster and with expertise and empathy.
Real-time Agent Assist is also a game-changer when it comes to onboarding or training new agents, especially during an era of remote onboarding. With agent assist, new human agents can get up-to-speed faster and can avoid rookie mistakes, thanks to having real-time coaching guiding them in their decision-making.
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