How your contact center can leverage AI to improve agent productivity and boost morale

Customer service is a crucial element of your customer experience and can have a big influence on customer loyalty — or lack thereof. Live customer service agents are the face of your organization and are responsible for providing excellent experiences to customers when they reach out for assistance. But engaging day in and day out with people who have complex questions or issues that need to be resolved — many of whom are often frustrated or stressed before their first agent interaction even begins — can take its toll on agents quickly.

According to Gallup, 76% of employees experience burnout on the job, at least sometimes. Stress, unclear expectations, and a lack of a work-life balance are all contributing factors. And for support agents, the additional need to suppress negative emotions and stay positive during tense back-to-back customer calls, no matter the circumstances, can be especially draining.

To keep your agents happy, and improve productivity and morale, it’s critical that you have the right systems and solutions in place to help manage their workload.

By using AI-powered agent assists, you can make your agent’s jobs easier — giving them the ability to provide helpful answers more quickly, and allowing them to focus on the more complex customer issues that come their way. AI-agent assists not only makes your agents’ workloads more manageable, they can also reduce the average cost per contact by speeding up interactions with customers, which can increase customer satisfaction and net promoter score by facilitating faster, successful case resolutions.

Here’s how your contact center can leverage AI to boost agent productivity and improve your overall customer experience.

Improve customer and agent satisfaction

Look for an AI-powered agent assistant solution with the ability to surface similar, previously resolved cases to the one an agent is currently working on — in real time. This helps decrease training time, by allowing agents to reference those historical cases and use them as guidance, making it easier for the agent to understand the current case and its context.

Also look for software that can interpret customer conversations and suggest relevant excerpts from (and URL links to) knowledge base articles, as well as provide smart responses, which suggest response options for the agent to use when replying to customer messages.

Automate routine customer queries and business processes

Automation is a critical feature of any good agent assist software. Look for a solution that has the ability to collect inputs and perform predefined actions based on the business flow you set up.

This type of automated flow can be used by care agents to assist customers with common issues in a streamlined manner while reducing resolution time. It can also be deployed on an external platform as a self-service option — reducing contact center volume, and improving customer satisfaction at the same time.

Empower agents to resolve cases at first contact

Long turnaround times are a major frustration for many people. And when customers are not connected with the most relevant or experienced agent to help solve their problem right away, that frustration increases rapidly.

To provide shorter resolution times, your contact center needs to connect customers with the right agent with the right skills to help resolve their query, as fast as possible.

Look for a solution that offers smart pairing capabilities, which go beyond typical routing methodologies, and include:

1. Historical and ongoing intent proficiency score: automatically quantify each agent’s performance for each intent category (for example, it could identify that Agent A is more proficient in “refund queries” and less proficient in “opening time queries”)

2. Perceived service quality score: automatically quantify each agent’s level of service, based on explicit customer mentions from reviews and messages present in cases (for example, it could determine that Agent A is more proficient in communication and less proficient in flexibility)

3. Demographic, behavioral, and psychographic data: provided for both agents and customers, if available

Sprinklr Service’s agent assist capabilities boost agent productivity and make it easy for agents to proactively engage with customers.

“Sprinklr’s Smart Responses are especially helpful for agents in our eastern European contact centers, where German is not their first language,” says Tobias Simmon, Samsung’s contact center operations manager in Germany. “It enables them to respond more quickly to emails and reduces the chance of them making spelling mistakes or grammatical errors.”

Find out how Sprinklr's AI Smart Assist solution maximizes the ability of every customer service agent to handle more cases, more effectively — while giving consumers the faster, more personalized experiences they want.

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