What Agents Have to Gain from AI

Imagine this. You’re trapped for hours at a time in a crowded, noisy, non-descript building. You’re surrounded on all sides. You don’t have much freedom of movement. You have to try to survive against seemingly impossible odds. You’re being closely monitored. And you get yelled frequently.

Question: Where are you?

If you answered in prison, there’s one strike against you. If you said in some dystopian novel, wrong again. The answer, my friends, is inside a contact center.

Contact center work ain’t the chain gang, but it’s no picnic either.

You have to sit for hours at a time. Policies are strict. Managers are always watching. And callers can be rude.

That’s why turnover in these environments are so high. The U.S. Contact Center Decision Makers’ Guide suggests that 3.3 years is the shelf life of the average customer service representative at a given company. A whopping 60 percent of agent attrition is due to quitting. And IBM says turnover among contact center agents can be around 40 percent annually.

But in contact centers ­­– as in dystopian novels, and in life – there is hope. And sometimes it comes in the form of artificial intelligence.

IBM (News - Alert) says AI-powered chat bots and conversational agents can answer up to 80 percent of contact center inquiries. That frees up human agents to address more complex queries.

“Artificial intelligence can’t replicate the human touch, but it can ease your agents’ burden by handling many simple, repetitive requests,” notes customer experience solutions provider Genesys.

And as Lauren Kindzierski of HGS notes in this byline: “Combining empowered human agents with efficient bots, be it the front-end bot or bot-assisted agent, can reduce customer effort, contain costs, and generate revenue. Bots free up human labor for higher-minded, complex decision making. It lets humans be human.”

Edited by Mandi Nowitz