How contact center AI makes customer service agents’ jobs better

Working in a contact center can be a tough gig. Customers are often frustrated, if not downright angry, while agents are expected to be on top of information spanning multiple systems and channels.

When agents pick up a call, the person on the other end increasingly expects to get their issues resolved there and then. More than 80% of support teams witnessed growth in customer expectations during 2022, up from 75% a year earlier, according to one survey. Just 40% of respondents said they are confident of meeting those expectations.?

Meanwhile, agents are under pressure to maintain high levels of performance from managers who know what is at stake during customer interactions. Almost 90% of consumers are more likely to make additional purchases from a company after a positive customer service experience. Even if a company makes a mistake, 78% of customers will do business with them again if their customer service is excellent .

Little wonder, then, that attrition rates in the customer service industry are so high, averaging 30-45% compared with 15% for all industries. More than 70% of customer service agents surveyed last year said they had considered quitting .

When they go, they take with them experience and the time invested by managers and peers to get them up to speed—leaving behind more pressure on the rest of the team to pick up the slack.

Companies try many approaches to reduce employee stress, from free snacks to meditation pods, but that’s just window dressing if the job itself isn’t satisfying. What really makes customer service agents happy is the ability to make customers happy, or at least less annoyed. And contented agents are better-performing agents (by an average of 13%, according to an Oxford University study).??

To do their jobs better and feel as though they are making a difference, agents need the right tools. They need to have all necessary information at their fingertips, not hidden inside difficult-to-access applications. They need all interactions with a customer in one place, regardless of which channels were used to contact them.?

They need AI tools that help support them through customer interactions, providing prompts during the call and summaries once it’s over. They need to know that their manager knows what is going on and can step in to help, even if they are not working in the same location.

AI tools have been shown to help the lowest performing employees the most. A study published in May this year from researchers at Stanford and MIT found an average performance bump of 14% when customer service agents used an AI assistant, with most of that coming from the least skilled workers. Managers spend around a quarter of their time supporting the lowest performing 10% of employees, so providing the right tools for them not only eases their burden, but also frees up valuable management resources.

Meeting the rising expectations of customers is not a goal all companies will achieve. But those that do will rely on AI to support their agents in delivering next-level customer experiences.