The biggest challenge facing every contact center is agent churn. Many agents are bored, unengaged, and generally unhappy, and they churn at a rate of 33% across all industries. As a contact center leader, you work extremely hard to mitigate these challenges, but because you are pulled in many different directions, it is tough to keep your best agents. Not to mention, technology constraints can sometimes make it difficult to improve the agent experience. Imagine if you had a pool of AI-powered virtual agents in addition to your live agents.
Cloud-based “AI agents” supplement and empower your live agents by handling the menial tasks so that live agents don’t have to: order status, bill payments, account updates, appointment confirmations, credit checks, and many more. Since they are already pre-trained to understand thousands of customer intents, virtual agents simply need access to your customer data and instructions on which calls to handle and which to transfer. They allow you to automate conversations that your live agents had been handling, especially the rudimentary call types that bog them down most. You can now optimize your human resources in new ways and challenge them to be better agents. When call volumes spike (expectedly or unexpectedly) your virtual agents lighten the load, allowing live agents to focus on the complex, meaningful, and high-value engagements that simply cannot be automated.
By taking the weight of hundreds of process-driven conversations off of your live agents, you’ll be helping to promote mental stimulation and professional development. You can now upskill your workforce to properly handle the conversations that matter most. Moreover, with these new capabilities, agents will play a greater role in enhancing the customer experience, rather than feeling annoyed from dealing with mundane drudgery. We’ve found that in utilizing virtual agents, contact centers are able to retain live agents and do not feel the pressure to replace those that churn.
Dozens of Fortune 500 companies are doing the same, which helps them improve and focus on leveling-up their top agents. The days of high agent churn aren’t over, but your stress over backfilling can be.
Check back next month for the final part of our four-part series on how virtual agents are automating the contact center!
