Ask any contact center leader, and they will tell you that they are under immense pressure to adopt customer-facing automation, like conversational AI (aka AI agents), to keep up with rising consumer expectations and growth mandates. However, trusting that these AI agents will perform as expected is a concern for both the contact centers and the customers who are on the receiving end of the AI-led service.
On the customer side, unfortunately, when greeted by a robotic voice and a predefined list of menu options to choose from, most customers’ reactions are not favorable. Typically, they’ll attempt to escape the rigid, preset process by either demanding to talk to a live “representative” or repeatedly tapping “0” on the keypad. This stems from years of failed attempts to prioritize programming call flows rather than actually listening to your customers and resolving their inquiries successfully. They already know that, in the end, they will need to speak to a person, so why waste any time?
On the business side, trusting that AI agents will perform as expected is essential as organizations accelerate their efforts to automate contact centers. Legacy interactive voice response (IVR) and intelligent virtual agent (IVA) solutions clearly didn’t cut it. And while the latest agentic AI solutions seem promising, businesses are still weary about the safety, security, and accuracy of this technology.
Although you and your customers are more likely to trust your human agents, how do you know that they follow your processes and rules, provide customers with accurate information, and don’t let their personal bias influence their actions? That’s a tricky question to answer if you—like most contact centers—only analyze 2% of your conversations.
The best approach to building this all-important trust in all your agents–whether human or AI–is first to understand the exact concerns you and your customers have with AI and then provide the same training, oversight, quality control, and access support to both so you feel equally confident in your agents’ performance. This shared approach to supporting excellence across any customer interactions promotes trust by helping your contact center deliver:
- Accurate, timely, and consistent answers
- Shared continuous learning and improvement based on real customer interactions
- Always-improving quality due to sophisticated monitoring and analytics tools
- Adhering to the organization’s brand and conversation sentiment for the topic at hand
- Rapid detection and response to the emotional nuances of customer conversations
Understanding the AI agent skepticism
According to Gartner, 42% of consumers believe that AI agents will give them the wrong answers. Sixty percent also dislike the clumsy transitions—often resulting in calls being dropped or disconnected—that make it difficult for them to reach human agents. When robotic voices and unhelpful deterministic bots have failed, there has to be a better way to solve this.
Here are some of the problems customers can have with the current generation of AI agents:
- Mechanical, “canned” responses: Unlike human agents, AI agents have trouble responding appropriately to emotional nuances like frustration, anger, and other complex emotions. Interactions can feel robotic and untrustworthy.
- Lacking context: Humans do a great job of understanding the customer and the reason they call. However, legacy conversational AI tools lack this context and fail to personalize their interactions.
- Inaccuracy: Customers lose trust when AI provides light, trivial, or generic responses.
- Difficulty managing more complex questions: Although fairly adept at providing FAQs and basic account info, AI agents can fall short with complicated, multi-step problems that require critical thinking and flexibility.
- No transparency: Many AI agents can’t explain their answers if asked to provide details or to dig deeper into a topic, making it difficult to validate–and ultimately trust–their responses.
- Poor or lacking handoffs to human agents: Many customers want to talk to a human agent if the AI agent cannot solve their issue. But these transfers can be slow, get stuck in automated loops, or require the customer to start again from the beginning, causing further frustration.
Building trust on one platform
Since both your internal business functions and your customers need to trust contact center agents, why not use the same approach with AI as you do with your human workers?
This approach puts both AI and agents on the same conversation intelligence platform for onboarding, training and coaching, and supervision. Such platforms enable you to evaluate 100% of all conversations for quality.
Ideally, you should upgrade your deterministic conversational AI to what’s called “agentic AI,” which can reason, proactively take action, and respond with empathetic responses to customers that eliminate the restrictive, rigid workflows provided by last-generation voice agent solutions. These AI agents are usually built based on your conversation data rather than rigid workflows so that they can act more like their human counterparts. This allows you to deliver consistent, high-quality customer experiences that your customers can trust across all touchpoints.
Because both will be on one platform that enables you to QA 100%, supervisors can evaluate AI agents the same way as their human ones and help them improve. This transparency and ability to interject should foster more trust in AI performance on par with their human agents. Businesses can thus eventually automate as much as 60% of their incoming calls while feeling confident their customers are being well-served.
Seamless handoffs between AI and human agents that include detailed call notes containing the full context of each call’s history are also a hallmark of the new generation of contact center unified platforms.
Create trust with Observe.AI
Observe.AI offers you advanced VoiceAI Agents built on our leading contact center conversation intelligence platform, giving you one place to equally support your human agents and confidently scale your AI agents. VoiceAI Agents’ ability to deliver quality, empathetic, human-like service will make your callers more confident about communicating with AI. Thanks to our robust security protocols, rigorous guard rails, and quality management supervision, we ensure the AI agents stay on task and perform to your enterprise-grade standards. Finally, by giving contact centers real-time assist, automatic call summarization, auto QA, coaching and training, and conversation insights capabilities, our platform ensures you and all your agents get the best tools to increase trust across the board.
