Today, customer experience (CX) is a crucial differentiator across industries, prompting businesses to continuously seek service improvements. AI technology is playing a pivotal role in transforming organisations across various sectors, with significant growth anticipated in AI-driven customer service through 2025 and beyond. According to Gartner, by 2025, 85% of customer service leaders will explore or pilot conversational generative AI (GenAI) solutions.
Transforming call centres with Agentic AI
Agentic AI encompasses GenAI-powered tools that can understand objectives, make decisions, and take action. These tools streamline processes, automate tasks, and provide intelligent insights to aid in quick decision making. The integration of Agentic AI in contact centres is transforming customer experience (CX) by enhancing service delivery, improving operational efficiency, and redefining the role of human agents.
In contact centres, AI can be used to design CX assistants that augment and enhance human experience. This is achieved by using CX assistants to manage simple tasks, thereby freeing human agents to concentrate on more complex issues. Over time, CX assistants can assume increasing responsibilities and eventually manage customer interactions. CX assistants can be developed for a variety of tasks and typical uses of Agentic AI in contact centres can range from transcribing and summarising interaction, automating data entries and updating CRM records, intelligent routing based on context or customer profiling to conducting sentiment and trend analysis for automated quality control amongst other tasks.
In the contact centre industry, Agentic AI contributes significantly to three areas: customer experience, service delivery cost, and the role of human agents.
Enhancing customer experience
Organisations must deliver fast, accurate and personal responses to exceed customer expectations. Agentic AI helps meet these expectations through efficient services, either directly or as an agent assistant. It can manage multiple conversations simultaneously, reducing wait times and achieving quicker resolutions. While AI chatbots can instantly address simple queries, complex issues are escalated to human agents.
This approach enables human agents to provide consistent responses. By accessing multiple data sources and generating pre-crafted replies, Agentic AI can quickly process and analyse vast amounts of data, cross-referencing customer information with internal databases to ensure accuracy and data privacy compliance such as adherence to GDPR.
By leveraging customer data, Agentic AI delivers personalised interactions by analysing past conversations and preferences. With AI addressing simple queries and supporting human agents in real-time, issues are more likely to be resolved on first contact, thus enhancing Customer Satisfaction scores (CSAT) and Net Promotor Score (NPS), which are key metrics for measuring customer loyalty and advocacy. Operational efficiency improves as Agentic AI automates routine tasks, optimises processes, reduces costs, and provides data-driven insights. It also offers real-time assistance, automating mundane tasks, providing training and development, reducing overall stress, and empowering human agents to focus on customer experience.
Driving down service delivery costs
Operational efficiency is vital for any business. Agentic AI contributes to this by automating tasks, optimising processes, and providing insightful data. It automates straight forward tasks such as data entry, appointment scheduling, and basic customer queries. This accelerates processes and allows human agents to focus on more complex, value-added activities. For instance, AI can automatically generate summaries of customer conversations and upload them to CRM systems, ensuring accurate and up-to-date records.
It also analyses customer conversations in real-time, offering agents recommendations for the best next actions, and facilitating faster issue resolution. For example, AI can suggest relevant knowledge base articles or troubleshooting steps. By automating tasks and resolving issues efficiently, Agentic AI lowers the cost per call and total service costs, which is particularly beneficial for high-volume contact centres. Lower operational costs lead to a more sustainable business model. AI also scales to handle more interactions without extra costs, which is crucial for growing businesses or managing seasonal spikes, where AI manages to maintain consistently high service quality.
Agentic AI processes vast amounts of data to identify trends, patterns and improvement areas. These insights inform decision-making and help to optimise business operations. They also detect customer issues and suggest process modifications to enhance customer experience.
Improving human agent experience
While AI transforms customer interactions, it also reshapes the role of human agents. By providing real-time assistance and automating mundane tasks, Agentic AI benefits human agents in several ways. Firstly, it provides real-time information and recommendations during customer interactions, enabling agents to handle requests faster and more competently while reducing cognitive load and stress. For example, AI can suggest responses or actions based on the conversation context, facilitating quicker resolutions.
Secondly, by automating repetitive tasks, Agentic AI allows agents to concentrate on more enjoyable and complex activities, thereby improving job satisfaction and the quality of customer interactions as agents can spend more time addressing unique customer needs. Further, it alleviates the stress associated with handling high volumes of customer interactions by assisting with information retrieval, compliance tracking, and other tasks, leading to a healthier work environment and reduced agent turnover.
Finally, AI supports agent training and development by analysing performance and offering personalised feedback and coaching. This helps them to enhance their skills and stay current with the best practices.
With AI handling routine tasks, agents gain autonomy to make decisions and address complex issues, resulting in higher job satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment as they can focus on delivering excellent service and creating memorable customer experiences.
A business imperative
The business case for Agentic AI in customer experience is clear. By improving customer experience, operational efficiency, and the human agent’s job, Agentic AI is a highly valuable tool for contact centre solutions.
Any CIO or business leader implementing Agentic AI is not merely adopting technology but embracing a business imperative. Organisations that do not implement Agentic AI might face difficulties in staying competitive or maintaining their relevance in today’s dynamic and evolving contact centre industry.