In a recent Dialpad study, almost 50% of companies with over $500M in revenue are confident that AI will improve the agent experience. An improved agent experience leads to reduced friction and unparalleled customer experiences.
In this post, we’re diving into how AI in customer service can make agents’ lives easier in order to mitigate any friction that may occur throughout your customer’s interactions with your brand. We’ll also take a closer look at how AI has a pivotal role in achieving a better experience for both your agents and customers.
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What Is Agent Friction?
Source: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
As you can imagine, agent friction can greatly impact your business because customers might end up waiting for a long time, feeling unhappy with the service they receive. This results in the company spending more money and even losing customers along the way.
Agent friction can also occur through inconsistencies in how customers are helped through different communication channels, confusion about the rules, and difficulties in transferring phone calls. Outdated technology, stressed-out customer service staff, and training gaps can worsen these problems.
Luckily, there are a number of solutions that can help with these challenges, and they involve using AI-based features. For example, real-time assist cards can be triggered on an agent’s screen when a customer says a certain keyword. These cards help your agents perform better, especially when faced with tough conversations. Using AI can help reduce agent friction and help resolve some of the common pain points in customer service.
AI in Customer Service and Engagement
One of the biggest and often introductory use cases for AI is automating certain mundane tasks. For example, if your agents are taking notes during or after a call, imagine the power of AI. It can transcribe your conversations and pull the key action items, freeing up agents’ time and allowing them to focus on more complex customer issues. AI can also help customers with faster answers and more personalized interactions when used correctly.
AI is also an essential element of digital transformation, transforming how organizations engage with customers and employees. Businesses can use AI-driven tools and solutions to be more responsive and agile, which leads to collaboration, innovation, and AI-powered customer engagement.
Along with digital transformation, AI then opens up incredible possibilities for growth. It can give marketing and sales teams competitive edge that allows businesses to resonate with their customers and, ultimately, increase profits.
Benefits of Using AI To Reduce Agent Friction
Now that you have a better understanding of agent friction, this next section will cover a few of the main benefits of using AI in ways that will help reduce agent friction and lead to higher employer retention, among other benefits.
Cost Savings
The primary benefit of using AI for agent friction is cost savings. Automation can help companies reduce staffing costs by eliminating unnecessary, mundane tasks so agents can properly focus on areas they need to concentrate on. With automation, companies can save on overhead costs associated with running a contact center while maintaining service levels.
Improved Efficiency
Using AI for agent friction also improves efficiency within different customer service environments. AI customer service implies faster response times since your agents can quickly locate relevant information without searching manually through a complicated database. This lets customers receive answers quickly and accurately from agents with all the necessary information.
Utilizing artificial intelligence also increases productivity levels among contact center agents. When your agents only focus on more difficult tasks, your resources can be used more productively.
With AI’s ability to process vast amounts of data quickly, agents and managers can now be equipped with actionable insights and predictive analytics. Whether it’s identifying potential sales opportunities or anticipating customer needs, AI helps support agents in making informed and strategic decisions, thus further reducing uncertainty and friction in their roles.
Improving Training and Development
AI also helps with agent training and skill development since AI can help you easily analyze performance and customer feedback. Using features like customer feedback tools and custom moments can help you keep a tally of topics mentioned during a call without doing any manual work. That allows you to identify areas for improvement and create targeted training modules. Doing this fosters continuous learning and adaptation, guaranteeing that agents are always equipped to meet evolving customer expectations.
By leveraging artificial intelligence technologies like machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to train your agents better, businesses can drastically improve their operations while creating satisfying customer experiences.
AI-driven automation reduces agent friction, helps boost efficiency levels across departments, saves money on overhead costs, and increases overall productivity, making it an invaluable tool for any business looking to optimize its service operations.
3 Tips for Reducing Agent Friction
Now that you understand the nature of agent friction better, the next step is to learn some actionable ways your team can take to minimize agent friction — or even help eliminate it.
1. Automate & Personalize
Automation is designed to take the burden off agents by handling tasks such as data entry, order processing, or answering common questions. This means your agents can focus on more complex tasks that require a “human touch.”
Automation can also be used to personalize each customer’s experience at scale. Instead of manually looking through a customer’s behavior with your product, AI-driven analytics can easily pull that information for you and help agents tailor their responses or recommendations to the individual’s preferences.
2. Create Playbooks
Playbooks are a comprehensive guide that contains various strategies, tactics, and guidelines for your team. Using your sales team as an example, you can create a sales playbook that helps your sales agents close deals. This can be an essential component of your onboarding process or regular training of your employees.
When your agents know exactly what to say and when to say it, getting your prospect down the funnel and to the finish line to become a customer is much easier. That also makes things easier for your customers if they have a pressing need for your solution but have many questions or lingering doubts.
3. Streamline Processes & Workflows
Streamlining processes and workflows ensures that all operations run smoothly and efficiently without any issues and can also prevent long wait times or conflicting information from different departments.
In an effort to reduce agent friction, you should review your current processes and look for ways to simplify your agent’s workload so that they become more streamlined and efficient over time. This could include using one platform or a centralized system where all agents can access relevant information about your products or services to alleviate any potential confusion.
How To Build Memorable Customer Experiences
As we’ve discussed, tackling agent friction isn’t just about your team members — it’s equally about your customers and how they’re treated. Crafting a memorable and positive customer experience takes center stage. Achieving this involves weaving personalized interactions and enhancing support mechanisms, enabling companies to forge unique customer connections.
Craft Personalized Interactions
Building lasting customer experiences lies in personalized engagement. Leveraging data and insights, companies can personalize the interactions for each customer, finely tuned to their specific needs and preferences. Utilizing customer behavior cues, you can offer customers tailor-made solutions that resonate. This cultivates a sense of value and recognition among customers, creating a favorable image of your brand.
Fine-Tune Your Support Strategies
Optimizing support is another way to nurture positive customer experiences. The key lies in providing comprehensive support services that expedite the resolution of any issues customers encounter with the products or services they’ve acquired. Agents equipped with a robust toolkit can proactively address inquiries and grievances in a timely manner. By ensuring such comprehensive support, companies will notice an uptick in positive customer encounters at every touchpoint.
How AI Enhances Customer Experiences
Again, let’s add AI to the mix. AI can help enhance your customer experience in a few ways that can help increase customer satisfaction while reducing operation costs.
AI-Powered Chatbots
AI-powered chatbots provide customers personalized service and can answer common customer inquiries quickly and accurately without the help of your agents. They’re also ideal for handling simple inquiries, as they can be trained to recognize various customer questions and provide the appropriate response. Chatbots can also be programmed to respond naturally and can be integrated into existing tools your team uses, such as your helpdesk software.
Another overlooked benefit of AI chatbots is that they can engage in customer conversations and learn from them. They can pull information about each customer’s history and personalize responses to each individual.
Image Recognition
In industries like e-commerce, potential customers can simply snap or upload a photo to an e-commerce website and use AI to identify the product or locate similar products. This makes it easy for customers to find whatever product they are looking for and make a purchase.
A straightforward shopping experience helps increase the likelihood of a sale. Aside from shopping, image recognition can also be used to detect counterfeit products, which can be extremely helpful for marketplaces that authenticate and sell second-hand goods.
Predict What Customers Want
Using AI, you can now anticipate customers’ wants and needs, which means opportunities to upsell products or simply provide better, more tailored services. Let’s say your business specializes in selling shoes. With predictive analytics, you can analyze customer data to understand the types of shoes customers are looking for and make product recommendations tailored to their needs. This can be a quick and easy way to improve conversions and drive sales.
Predictive analytics can also be shared with your agents to proactively address issues before customers escalate, leading to more satisfied customers who feel understood and valued by the business.
Applying AI To Contact Centers
Contact centers give customers direct access to your agents whenever they need assistance with products or services they have purchased or used in some way. This can also be a cause for agent friction.
Source: Phone System for Small Business: What Is It and Why You Need It
To help alleviate this, businesses should explore contact center transformation, where they can leverage AI to improve their overall business performance. As a result, your company can benefit from cost savings due to reduced staffing costs and improved productivity levels across departments within the organization.
With the rise in different contact center solutions, it’s time to reimagine the traditional contact center model and create a more responsive, agile, and customer-centric operation. Contact centers need to start finding a balance between human expertise and machine efficiency. This means that while providing customers prompt service, your agents are empowered with the tools and insights needed to excel in their roles.
For instance, RingCentral RingCX—a cloud-based omnichannel contact center platform—leverages AI-powered Agent Assist to automate routine tasks during live conversations and provide agents with real-time assistance when needed. Relevant support articles, guidance insights, and quick replies are made readily accessible to agents, making it easier for them to resolve issues during first contact and without escalations. Couple this capability with other AI features, such as intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) and sentiment analysis, and you are guaranteed to boost productivity, reduce agent friction, and deliver exceptional customer service.
Future of AI and Customer Experience
From productivity and cost-savings, imagine agents being guided to the heart of customer queries and knowing exactly what to do no matter their situation. At the end of the day, using AI is not just about aiding the transactions that occur — it’s about fostering relationships, both with customers and within your organization, that endure.
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