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What is Real-Time Agent Assist?

Real-time agent assist is software that assist contact center agents during live conversations with callers. Today’s advanced agent assist solutions use artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize a variety of contact center processes and augment call staff capabilities. The technology provides AI-powered assistance to customer service agents, using tools and technologies like machine learning and natural language processing to make live prompts and suggestions. AI agent assist software also helps businesses train and onboard call center agents for hybrid workforce situations.

As a result, agents can provide more accurate responses and deal with issues more quickly. Real-time agent assist, also known as virtual agent support, enables contact centers to enhance customer service, boost productivity levels and agent performance and improve user experience.

Key features of real-time agent assist 

Real-time agent assist helps contact centers transform the experience and service they offer to their customers. The AI technology also enables agents to become more productive and handle queries more quickly. Features that allow this transformation include: 

  • Live data and insights: Real-time agent assist uses AI to provide agents with immediate insight into customers and their preferences. The technology supplies agents with live customer data, checklists and recommendations that improve engagement and enable faster resolutions.
  • Automated prompts: Human agents can benefit from proactive prompts that help them better guide customer conversations. For example, real-time agent assist can prompt agents when they interrupt a customer or take the conversation in the wrong direction to keep them on track. This feature improves the user experience by encouraging agents to listen to the customer and solve their challenges.
  • Real-time suggestions: The ability to track live data means real-time agent assist can make automated suggestions during a call. The technology can advise the agent on products, services and upgrades they could offer the customer based on their conversation. Agent assist also extracts information to notify the agent of the actions they need to take when the call concludes, which reduces the amount of after-call work (ACW) they need to do.
  • Sentiment analysis: Advanced AI tools and technologies enable the use of emotion AI to help contact centers recognize what their customers say and how they say it. Emotion AI capabilities combine real-time analysis of non-verbal cues like facial expressions, tone of voice and sentiment to fully understand the meaning behind every conversation.
  • Knowledge base integration: Integrating real-time agent assist with the contact center knowledge base enables companies to provide agents with detailed, highly relevant information. The technology ensures agents have access to the best possible answers and recommendations to accurately resolve queries as quickly as possible. Agents can also use the technology to quickly search for solutions to more challenging or complex queries.
  • Multichannel support: Real-time agent assist can help contact centers improve customer interaction across all their digital channels, from social media and web chats to live voice and video calls. Utilizing the technology ensures more engaging conversations and quicker issue resolution for all customers, regardless of which channel they use to contact a company.

Benefits of real-time agent assist

The benefits of virtual agent support are wide-ranging, from improving the user experience and solving issues as quickly as possible to making agents more productive. Real-time agent assist is especially crucial to helping customer service teams deliver on-brand experiences, with benefits including:

  • Call analysis: Real-time agent assist that uses advanced technology like conversational AI can maximize the value of every conversation. Conversational AI uses speech analytics and voice analytics to help call center agents—and the companies they serve—truly understand what customers are saying.
  • Immediate customer support: Customers increasingly expect brands to solve their issues quickly and effortlessly. That often means providing self-service; but, in cases where a customer needs to speak to a human, real-time agent assist provides agents with live data and insights to solve more complex issues. It also helps to build agents’ confidence and knowledge for future interactions.
  • Customer experience improvement: Too many friction points in the customer journey can significantly impact customer experience and, as a result, brand reputation. Real-time agent assist allows contact centers to quickly identify challenges in their customer service operation and enhance user satisfaction.
  • Personalized support: Integrating real-time agent assist with corporate knowledge bases enables contact centers to arm agents with new levels of insight. The technology can utilize data like customer profiles and purchase history to engage users with personalized incentives and upgrades at the right time. As a result, companies gain significant cross-sell and upsell opportunities to boost sales.
  • Improved productivity: A critical benefit of real-time agent assist is helping customer service teams solve issues faster and, as a result, handle more incoming calls. The technology enables contact centers to enhance productivity across the organization, which means happier customers and potential cost savings.
  • Agent onboarding: Real-time agent assist is crucial to helping new agents get up to speed with companies’ systems and technologies. It provides live feedback and directions that allow new agents to understand customer queries and become more proficient at handling calls and chats. The data and insight from customer interactions also help organizations identify areas that require additional agent coaching for better results.
  • Agent satisfaction: Deploying real-time agent assist makes it easier for agents to solve customer challenges and have more engaging interactions with callers. As a result, agents are less likely to deal with frustrated customers, less susceptible to stress and burnout and more likely to experience positive job satisfaction. Happy, well-supported agents typically means lower employee turnover rates, which in turn helps contact centers reduce the cost of hiring new staff.
  • Compliance assistance: Organizations operating in highly regulated industries, like finance and healthcare, must abide by strict regulations. Real-time agent assist tools can provide agents with real-time alerts and reminders to ensure conversations comply with all relevant guidelines and rules. As a result, contact centers can minimize the risk of penalties while improving the customer experience.

Steps to implement real-time agent assist

Implementing real-time agent assist is a multistep process. Contact centers should carefully research their options and ensure they have the basics in place for the technology to succeed. They must also decide whether to build their own solution or implement third-party tools. 

Identify needs and objectives

Before implementing real-time agent assist, it’s vital to outline your contact center's needs and the objectives you want the technology to help you achieve. Defining the goals and objectives enables you to accurately monitor the technology’s effect and optimize it for future improvement. Sufficient planning will also help agents understand how the technology will work and why it’s being introduced before use.

Choose the right technology

It’s also essential to assess the real-time agent assist technology market to identify the solution that best aligns with your needs and objectives. Begin this process by evaluating the problem(s) your contact center faces, then research, test and compare to select the most appropriate solution. It’s also important to assess whether the solutions you test are compatible with your existing technology stack.

Customization and training

Your real-time agent assist solution will only achieve the goals and objectives you set if your agents understand how it works. Prior to implementing the technology across your contact center, schedule training sessions and regular follow-up best practice reminders. Also, use agent feedback to customize the technology and address any concerns they may have.

Deployment and monitoring

Deploying effective real-time agent assist doesn’t stop when you roll the technology out across the contact center. Monitor data to assess opportunities to optimize technology use, encourage agents to share feedback and suggestions, and listen to customer insight on agent interaction.

Challenges to implementing real-time agent assist 

Some contact centers can experience challenges with real-time agent assist, typically because it’s incompatible with existing solutions or due to poor implementation. Common challenges to consider include: 

  • Technology scope: Real-time agent assist excels at supporting and enhancing call agent capabilities. It isn’t a substitute for agent reasoning or interpersonal skills. Companies may struggle if they attempt to implement the technology for tasks beyond its capabilities. So, it’s vital to define the specific functions for which real-time agent assist will be used.
  • Lack of human interaction: Implementing real-time agent assist isn’t a matter of plugging the technology in and letting it go. It requires human involvement to ensure the tool functions appropriately and can handle more complex tasks. While AI tools can recognize and understand cues like emotion and sentiment, they work best in tandem with human interaction and feedback.
  • Technology over-reliance: Virtual agents are ideal for helping human agents solve customer queries as accurately and quickly as possible. However, when agents work with AI tools, they can become over-reliant on them for immediate answers. It’s important to balance technological capabilities with human initiative.
  • Data privacy challenges: Maintaining data privacy is critical when implementing new technology. Real-time agent assist tools may access personal information and process customer interactions, so it’s vital to ensure they handle data correctly. Some customers may not be comfortable with their data being analyzed by an AI tool, so be upfront with users about how and why the technology handles their information.
  • Integration problems: A common cause of technology failure is a tool's incompatibility with a contact center’s existing tech stack. Real-time agent assistance may require customization to best align with existing processes, software and workflows. Be sure to check how well a solution integrates with your current call center systems before committing to it.

Encourage adoption of real-time agent assist solutions

Real-time agent assist solutions are crucial to helping contact centers improve customer interactions. The technology provides real-time insight into customer conversations, enabling agents to resolve a customer challenge immediately and eliminate tedious after-call work.

Uniphore’s real-time agent assist software, U-Assist, removes the guesswork from call flow processes by issuing in-call alerts and actions to guide agents through every customer interaction. It ensures your customer service teams deliver a consistent customer experience and have the data they need to provide fast, accurate answers to the most complex customer challenges. 

Discover how Uniphore can transform your customer service operation with real-time agent assist software.

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