74% of customer support agents are susceptible to occupational burnout without adequate support or resources. It’s understandable because they have to juggle multiple tasks ranging from assigned support tickets, hot-headed customers, complex business processes, report generation, to answering L1 queries repeatedly. And all this while keeping company policies and rules in mind.
It’s high time companies made some changes to improve support agents’ experience and quality of work life. After all, agent experience is as important as customer experience, and elevating the former propels the latter. How do you improve your agents’ experience? By employing technology that aids agents in finishing mundane tasks and provides case-resolving information on the fly. One such technology is agent assist bots, also known as agent-facing AI bots or agent automation bots. This blog post explains what they are and how they improve customer service agent productivity.
Agent Assist Bots: How They Differ from the Usual Chatbots
Think of giving your support agents an assistant that helps them at every step. For instance, if your frontline rep is working on a customer query, an agent assist bot provides smart suggestions and case-resolving content. If there’s a tedious & repetitive task such as CRM data entry, knowledge creation, etc., the agent assist bot automates it.
Isn’t it amazing? Your support agents can finally focus on more complex tasks while the AI bot takes care of simpler ones. Still not convinced? Here are five stellar ways in which agent-assist chatbots that are powered by cognitive tech supercharge your agents’ productivity.
5 Ways Cognitive Tech-Powered Chatbots Ameliorate Agent Productivity
1. Real-Time Case Sentiment Analysis
Agent assist chatbots that are built over a unified cognitive platform use AI, NLP, and machine learning to analyze & learn from historical data. After analyzing they zero in on the user sentiment and gauge dissatisfaction and chances of ticket escalation in real-time. This enables your support team to empathize with customers accordingly and also pick up critical tickets first.
Agent assist bots can infer customer intent after correlating customers’ profiles, ticket history, CRM data, etc., and present this information to the agent in a pop-up as an agent opens the ticket or picks up a call. Thus, making personalized and customized conversations, at scale, possible.
2. Faster Time to Value
Another interesting feat of agent-assist chatbots built over a cognitive platform is that they can crawl the search index that maps user queries to documents and URLs in your company. This means if agents want to access a certain file or doc, they’re no longer at the mercy of their colleagues. They don’t even have to hop between different platforms to get the answer. If you want to dive deeper into this topic, here’s the perfect e-book for you.
Once you integrate agent assist bots with your collaboration or communication platform, it answers questions right in the chat window by fetching data from all the knowledge bases, and information silos across your enterprise. While interacting with these bots, your agents can dig deeper with easily selectable facets and search within particular categories—content sources, content types (text, videos), categories, objects, etc.
3. Automate Standard Operating Procedures
Many times business KPIs or a process flow in customer support requires certain activities to be performed or approvals to be taken. An agent assist bot can automate such everyday tasks to ensure that agents are compliant with business processes. Not just business processes, you can automate recurring tasks too.
Let’s say your support team receives a service request frequently that requires your agents to restart a certain service on one of the servers. You can automate and schedule this service to re-start with an AI bot. You can also enable notifications or messages from the bot once the task is completed. Hence, in this way, a chatbot streamlines activities and support operations, not to mention, reduces support costs.
4. Helps in Upselling & Cross-Selling
The role of customer support reps or contact center agents has evolved. Salesforce State of Service Report states that 71% of agents see their role as more strategic than two years ago. Today, they don’t just serve as a query-resolving team but also create upsell & cross-sell opportunities and voice customer interests to product teams.
Your customers use multiple channels for customer service. A chatbot has insights into customer behavior consolidated from different channels. It uses this and the information already stored in the CRM to suggest the next-best actions to agents that help create upsell or cross-sell opportunities. With all these insights and relevant suggestions, a customer support representative can find the right opportunity to present them with a compelling offer.
Takeaway
Agent assist chatbots help your company keep up with customer expectations and ensure your agents’ productivity fuel doesn’t run out. Not to mention they keep your support costs in check by automating manual, tedious tasks. If there’s a time to invest in chatbots, it’s now!
Need Help to Find the Right Chatbot for Your Organization?
TSIA, a leading services & technology research institute, says, “Unless AI is your company’s core competency, don’t build it yourself.” SearchUnify was cited as “ a Best‑of‑breed provider” in their latest report on chatbots. Our chatbot comes with language libraries and packaged AI/ML and ensures rapid implementations and good results without a team of data scientists. View this datasheet to know what makes our chatbots unique.