Agent training has come a long way, and no one can deny the impact of personalized coaching on agent performance. Any call center manager will tell you something is missing that can push agents to perfection when handling customer conversations.
Advancements in technology have allowed agents to receive real-time assistance during their calls. It might feel like sci-fi come true, like Iron Man’s Jarvis, Gideon from Flash, or posthumous helper Po from Altered Carbon.
Despite feeling like a page from the dreams of sci-fi, it has now become possible for call center agents to receive help while talking to customers.
Let’s look at what does real-time monitoring or real-time agent assistance mean in the context of a contact center.
What is Real-Time Monitoring?
Real-time monitoring is a way to evaluate customer interactions in real time and provide the support that agents require. These suggestions are aimed at helping agents resolve these interactions without escalation.
These tools are better than post-call monitoring as they help agents avoid certain mistakes during the call. Compliance violations and leaving queries to be resolved in future conversations become worries of the past with real-time monitoring.
Now that we’ve seen what real-time monitoring is, let’s look at what it brings to the table.
What are the Features of Live Agent Assistance?
Agent Assist or Real-Time Monitoring helps agents seamlessly navigate customer calls. The various features of this tool help agents in providing customers with the best possible experience.
Let’s look at each of these features in detail.
1. Script Guidance
Every call center has a script that agents need to follow. These scripts are designed to ensure that every customer has a consistent and satisfactory experience.
Agents can find it difficult to follow these scripts when they have just joined the workforce or when the scripts are updated. Agent assist comes to an agent’s rescue and provides pointers that ensure that they don’t stray away from the script.
An agent is shown different parts of the script that they shouldn’t stray away from. In case an agent misses a parameter, they’re alerted about it.
For example, in a SaaS company, script guidance ensures that agents collect all required details, such as company size and number of systems. This helps agents ensure that every call in the discovery phase collects all relevant information.
2. Dynamic Prompt Suggestions
In certain cases, customers come with queries that agents aren’t familiar with.
Instead of having an anxious agent, battle cards are real-time cards that help agents handle complex situations. These battle cards are triggered when a customer uses certain phrases or words.
These battle cards have 3 kinds of responses:
- Step-by-step instructions on dealing with difficult situations
- Hints for the agent to resolve the query
- A list of options to ask the customer
These battle cards help agents to navigate difficult customer queries without resulting in long hold times.
For example, if a customer calls for help with insurance regarding a specific ailment, battle cards help the agent collect all information relevant to the claim.
3. Live Captions
The latest speech recognition and transcription advancements help agent-customer interactions move beyond language and accent barriers. Real-time agent assistance has inbuilt speech transcription to give agents the upper hand.
Agents can check what the customer has mentioned earlier without asking them to repeat themselves again. Agents have access to the call transcript, which can either be viewed line-by-line or completely at once.
For example, a customer who has broken Hindi can be understood by a Hindi-speaking agent without any trouble.
4. Knowledge Base
Agents often have trouble remembering the latest product updates, which can lead to longer calls when customers call with such queries.
Agent assist’s built-in knowledge base comes in handy in such cases. When agents aren’t sure about a particular resolution, they can use the knowledge base to resolve customer queries.
This helps agents find updated documentation without resorting to lengthy hold times.
For example, if a customer wants to know the reimbursement policies regarding hospitals that aren’t covered under cashless hospitals, the agent can run a quick search and help the customer.
Now that we’ve seen the different features of real-time monitoring, let’s look at the various benefits of implementing it in your call center.
What are the Benefits of Agent Assist?
There are many ways that real-time monitoring can increase your call center performance and see an increase in different key performance indicators. Here are some of them.
1. Lesser Hold Times
With the help of battle cards and the knowledge base, customers can say goodbye to long wait times. Since agents have all data at their disposal, resolutions can be made without asking the customer to wait for long.
2. Increase in First Call Resolution
As explained, hold times are reduced, and agents can find all they need in the course of a single customer call. This helps agents resolve an increased number of customer queries within the first call.
This results in an increase in first call resolution.
3. Improvement in Customer Satisfaction Levels
When a call center sees a decrease in hold times and an improvement in first call resolution rates, it directly translates to an increase in customer satisfaction.
Apart from these metrics, agent assist also informs agents when there is frustration detected in a customer’s voice. Agents can resolve these moments of customer dissatisfaction and prevent them from escalating.
All these factors align to see a significant increase in customer satisfaction.
Now that we’ve seen the impact of real-time monitoring, let’s look at whether your contact center needs such a tool.
Does Your Call Center Need Real-Time Monitoring?
Call centers that handle many customer calls on a daily basis can see the immense benefits of real-time monitoring.
Rather than wait for feedback to come from auditing customer conversations, this helps agents improve their performance on the go.
Real-time monitoring helps new agents have a smooth onboarding process. On the other hand, it helps existing agents to catch up to speed when there are updates in the product or script.
Help your agents perform better with the latest monitoring technology.
No comments yet