When you combine Conversational Intelligence with the precious gift of recouped time, you create more meaningful and productive connections with your customers, and you improve the contact center agent experience. This is the vision and hope for Collaborative Intelligence, as described by Five9 during their recent CX Summit 2022. Opus Research analysts share their takeaways from the event and discuss a promising future for contact center agents.

Here’s a future that’s not hard to imagine. When conversational intelligence and automation can deftly handle 99% of all Tier 1 customer support cases, when low code, no code and API integrations can read/write 50%+ of simple transactional requests without requiring agent intervention, we are left with high touch, compliance based, and opportunistic agent interactions requiring domain expertise and proven communication skills.

Conversational intelligence allows us to know more about customers and their journeys than ever before. Real-time agent assist features can prescribe remedies and finely tuned opportunities that are contextually relevant to the customer. Conversational Cloud providers who support this vision for the future of the contact center will rank higher in the eyes of decision makers.

In this imminent enterprise environment, agents will become front line trusted advisors for delicate and complex issues, and they will become instrumental in the optimization of your conversational cloud solution. It offers new career paths for agents to become conversational designers, business analysts, and specialized subject matter experts.

“[Agents] want to do the stuff that’s more meaningful and then have a little downtime in between interactions with customers to document that work, share it with their peers…and they’re being recognized not for what they know individually, but what they can share with others so that everybody is smarter, everybody can answer those questions.”

— Kim Block, Sr. Operational Excellence Manager, RICOH USA during the Five9 CX Summit 2022 panel session, “Elevate Self-Service with Conversational AI”

In this new era of the high skilled and empowered agent, how will their success be measured? If Tier 1 and 2 support needs are largely automated and transacted by an enterprise intelligent assistant, what does that mean for an agent’s average handle time when they do receive an escalation?

If your business agreed to measurable business outcomes and defined those interactions where human to human contact is essential to the customer journey, perhaps it’s time to reconsider the reflexive urge to minimize average handle times.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: Contact Center, Conversational Intelligence