Are you looking for the smartest way to support customer care while protecting your brand? For most contact center leaders, the answer is yes. The answer isn’t adding more team leaders, extending training time, or budgeting for significant errors and fraud. Contact centers with an eye to the future are adopting attended automation to support their teams and their business.
Attended automation—artificial intelligence and machine learning used to support live agents, not replace them—delivers ongoing training, real-time workflow guidance and policy enforcement, and noteworthy improvements to KPIs across the board. Agents have more cognitive bandwidth to do the job they were hired to do: provide an empathetic customer care experience.
Support and Guidance: The Key to Better Agents
Attended automation acts like a GPS system for agents, guiding them to pertinent information and suggesting the best course of action while taking care of repetitive or low-value tasks in the background at lightning speed.
Self-service solutions are readily available and widely used. This means most customers won’t contact an agent directly unless they have no choice. These customers often have complex issues and are upset or frustrated. The human element of customer service is especially vital for empathy and nuance in these situations. When helping an upset customer, the last thing an agent needs is navigating multiple programs and complex policies while the customer’s impatience grows.
With attended automation as an agent assist tool, the agent can focus on interacting with the customer and providing outstanding service rather than fumbling around for the right info or keeping a customer on hold for an extended period. Basically, the agent—and, by extension, your brand—gets credit for an amazing customer experience with a little support from some very cool technology.
What Is Attended Automation?
Attended automation leverages AI and machine learning to guide and support human agents by surfacing answers, handling repetitive tasks, and preventing errors. The automation is “attended” by the agent—it does not replace the human. Unlike self-service tools or a chatbot programmed to handle limited tasks or conversations before turning over a customer to a live agent, attended automation works alongside the agent from the very beginning of the call or contact.
Attended automation software sits on an agent’s desktop and has access to the same programs and information the agent does—but it can surface and compile this data faster and more accurately than an agent ever could. The agent monitors the automation and provides the human interaction that’s at the heart of customer service—without the hassle of switching between tabs, screens, or programs. Essentially, attended automation allows agents to work smarter, not harder.
What Can Attended Automation Do for My Contact Center?
If you’re already familiar with the concept of robotic process automation, you probably understand and expect an agent assist tool will be able to:
- Retrieve customer data
- Auto-populate forms
- Present a branded script
- Log basic call details
But here are some things attended automation can do you may not have considered:
- Prevent unintentional overpayments and intentional ones (fraud)
- Enforce policies and approval processes
- Highlight personalized insights
- Draft professional, perfectly on-brand emails
- Decrease ramp time without sacrificing training quality
Attended automation can significantly reduce AHT (average handling time) and ramp time, increase productivity and accuracy, and improve CSAT (customer satisfaction) scores. In short, attended automation in the contact center has the potential to deliver happier agents, happier customers, and, ultimately, a happier bottom line. That’s the contact center of the future.
Guest blog post written by Laivly. To learn more about this topic and others, visit our events page to check out upcoming events.
