Agent Assist for the Modern Contact Center

We’ve crossed into the busiest retail season of the year, and outside of crowded malls and retail outlets, the customer service professionals who are taking calls from frazzled customers may win the award for “most likely to burnout!”. Even outside of retail, the health insurance providers are entering open enrollment periods. The telco and technology providers are navigating headwinds to accommodate an increase in calls. Whatever the industry, contact center agents are handling more complex interactions in the period between December & January than any other point in the year. Simple transactions and queries are still handled via self-service, but contact centers are more likely to experience a significant influx in customer escalations, with customers experiencing friction along the self-service arm of the customer journey. These months also represent massive increases in demands for customer empathy, and potential drops in resolution availability (e.g. assessed as decreased FCR).

Contacts centers have invested heavily in automating less complex components of calls away from the desk of the agent – and new agent assist tools that feed agents scripted conversational AI are one format of these. However, an agent assist can easily be lost amongst the crowded desktop and other systems demanding agent attention.

How can leaders navigate the contact center turbulence and steer their teams to calmer seas without driving up employee attrition or inducing burnout?

An Agent Assist ‘Companion’

Cogito’s real time coaching and guidance solution, also known as Companion, offers agents the resources they need to reduce the burden of emotionally charged calls and resulting mental load. Companion is an agent assist solution available via a web-based app or through an API integration linked directly into a customer CRM. Cogito also made Companion a homebase, for all coaching, transcripts, and resources to improve agent performance.

Nestled within Companion, the real time AI platform will surface appropriate knowledge articles as needed, links to the right documentation for a particular customer query, and guidance to adjust behavior in the midst of conversation. For example, the consumer need for empathetic responses has jumped by 108% in the last 2 years. Cogito has tracked over 34.8million requests for empathy in 2022 alone. These types of insights are derived directly from the Emotion AI models that Cogito makes available to all customers. Further, coupled with full call transcripts – customers can now extract the full context of their customer needs – revealing customer intent and path to resolution more efficiently than ever before.

Keeping Supervisors and Agents on the Same Page

It’s one thing to deliver live guidance and improve in-call performance – it’s another thing to enhance the employee experience – Cogito’s introduced personalized coaching tools that keep Supervisors and their Agents on the same page regarding skills that could be improved. This transparency and objective, data driven feedback ensures trust between the two counterparts and gives Agents the positive reinforcement that they need to make it through these grueling months of high volume call states!

Additionally, Supervisors who manage remote or hybrid teams, are granted with visibility into the state of each of their agents’ engagement – with an EX Score generated on every call. AI is only as useful as the people who can benefit – and with an EX model based on the employee’s perception of each of their calls, Supervisors have insight into how their agents are adjusting to the rigors of a busy holiday season.

What’s more, operational leaders and the business team(s) can leverage the customer experience score, also available on every call, to predict the success of their holiday season with accurate, timely, and predictive customer experience metrics.

Supporting Agents When They Need it Most

Contact center teams do not operate in isolation; agents, customers, and operational leaders share space with a full complement of technology systems and platforms. Further, data and live intelligence is quickly funneled to customer experience teams, workforce management resources, and other habitual consumers of large data streams. With Cogito Companion, a single agent shouldn’t feel that they are taking on the burden of all customer success metrics on their own – instead, they’ve got the resources of an intelligent, emotionally aware system, ready to drop in guidance and support when the agents need it most.

Have your agents’ backs with an agent assist technology that meets the needs of the modern contact center. Request a demo today.