Contact centers are on the front line of driving revenue and customer satisfaction, but how well you perform depends entirely on your agents.
And let’s face it: An agent’s job is not easy.
Nearly one quarter of contact centers say their agents are mostly bottom performers, according to our State of Contact Center Conversation Intelligence 2022 report.
But what does poor agent performance mean for the company?
How well agents perform on calls can significantly impact sales and retention. A 2020 study by Harvard Business Review showed that:
- Difficult interactions have only a 6% chance of resulting in a cross-sell or up-sell, compared with a more than 80% chance that an easy interaction would
- Among customers threatening to defect, those who had a difficult interaction had less than a 4% chance of accepting the company’s “save offer” (a promotion to entice them to stay) as compared to a 20% probability for customers whose interactions were scored as easy.
Similarly a lack of compliance and poor agent productivity can also impact contact centers:
- Businesses can run into compliance violations if agents forget critical parts of their script, e.g. disclosures like Mini Miranda
- If agents are not productive, they feel drained and churn, increasing the cost of rehiring and training. Also, if they take longer to resolve customer issues or spend more time on after-call work, they are able to take fewer calls, resulting in more hiring costs to accommodate for increases in call volumes
Understanding where each individual agent is struggling is critical to delivering the coaching required to improve business results—which is why I’m so excited to share today’s announcement.
Introducing the Only End-to-End AI for Contact Centers with Real-Time AI
For the first time ever, we’re combining the power of post-interaction AI and live call guidance with our launch of Real-Time AI to bring you the most powerful end-to-end conversation intelligence platform for improving agent performance.
We fundamentally believe that driving meaningful improvement in agent performance is deeply rooted in understanding where every agent struggles and designing hyper-personalized coaching experiences - post-interaction and in real-time.
Real-Time AI helps you increase sales conversions and produce better business results by providing live coaching and guidance for every agent as conversations happen.
But this isn’t just another agent assist application.
Combined with our existing post-interaction AI suite of coaching, quality assurance, and analytics solutions, you can understand exactly where each individual agent is struggling and deliver personalized coaching before, during or after conversation happens.
For example if QA and Auto QA data shows you have a sales rep who routinely fails at countering a pricing objection, you can set them up with a Real-Time AI prompt that guides them on the steps to counter it. But if an agent is acing their pricing objection on every call, there’s really no need to show them this prompt.
Vice versa, real-time trends can be used to trigger post-interaction coaching processes as well. For example, if Real-Time Reports show you a customer service agent is not showing appreciation for customer payments, you can trigger a coaching session to ensure they learn how to be more appreciative with customers in the future.
Let’s take a closer look at how Observe.AI’s Real-Time AI works.
Real-Time AI by Observe.AI
Observe’s Real-Time AI improves sales, compliance, and retention by improving agent performance on live calls through scripts, prompts, call notes, and live supervisor monitoring.
Contact center teams can create custom real-time experiences that ensure script adherence, improve agent skills, and make them more productive while handling customer calls. Supervisors can monitor live call trends, access live transcripts as well as real-time data insights.
Customers using Real-Time AI have already reported amazing results:
- 10% increase in sales conversions
- 90% increase in compliance rates
- 23% reduction in average handle time
- 60% reduction in hold time violations
“Observe.AI’s Real Time AI brings new levels of personalization to agent coaching,” said Tom Nusspickel, Chief Operating Officer of American First Finance. “It expands the universe of data and insights that inform real-time guidance, so our agents can focus on what’s actually relevant to them rather than be bombarded with irrelevant alerts. I feel we’re better positioned to act quickly and precisely in improving the service we provide to our millions of customers and financial partners.”
Let’s dive deeper into how it works.
Real-Time Agent Assist
Agent Assist empowers agents to sell better, handle objections, stay compliant, and resolve issues faster resulting in sharper skills and increased confidence.
Visual checklist for each conversation
Agents use Smart Scripts as they speak with a customer to ensure they orchestrate the conversation correctly. This creates consistency across your teams in terms of how calls are executed.
Positive reinforcement and self-learning
Create a positive, affirming feeling for agents as items covered by them get checked off the Smart Script automatically by AI. At the end of the call the agent sees a summary of their Smart Script performance to aid autonomous learning.
Next-best actions to guide agents
Dynamic Prompts provide recommendations on handling customer objections and surface the best responses to customer questions. Prompts can also link to knowledge base (KB) articles so agents don’t need to search for appropriate responses.
Immediate attention at make-or-break moments
Alerts ensure agents get personalized behavioral and communications coaching while on the call. Out of the box advice helps agents reduce hold time violations and respond correctly to negative sentiment moments
Automated Actions reduce after call work
AI automatically captures call notes by identifying critical information in a conversation such as dollar amounts and dates, and automatically creating call summaries to help agents focus on the customer and reduce after-call work. Agents can easily add or edit notes and sync them to the CRM or any system of record.
Real-Time Supervisor Assist
Real-Time Supervisor Assist is the mission control center for contact center team leaders. It provides 360 degree views of all active calls at any point of time.
Direct visibility into live calls
Supervisor Assist helps contact centers keep remote or hybrid teams in sync, no matter where agents work from. Supervisors get real-time visibility into agent call performance and can assist agents any time a conversation gets tough
Seek and get immediate help
Agents can raise their hand in the Agent Assist interface to get supervisor help on difficult calls. Supervisors are alerted to hand raisers and can assist agents at critical moments and save calls before they end.
Live transcripts for context
Surface coachable moments and calls in violation to team leaders so they can proactively understand what’s going on in live calls and coach agents.
Insights on real-time trends
Outside of monitoring live calls, supervisors and contact center operations can also access live data trends on call volumes, average handle time, script adherence or violations, call alerts, and so on. Insights can be used to immediately coach an agent in person or edit their agent assist experience in the Experience Designer interface.
No-Code Experience Designer
Leverage the industry-first Experience Designer to tell Observe how to guide agents. Experience Designer is the command center for Observe.AI Real-Time AI. It opens the AI black box and empowers anyone to create and deploy custom agent experiences within minutes.
Personalization that drives results
Most real-time AI solutions fail because agents do not find continued value from the real-time guidance. Observe.AI’s Experience Designer lets you create personalized real-time experiences that take into account each agent’s strengths and areas of improvement. It also makes it easy to keep experiences updated with time.
Trigger and action framework
Experience Designer leverages a powerful cause and effect framework. Business users can use pre-configured AI Moments to set off Smart Scripts, Dynamic Prompts, Alerts, and Call Notes for agents. Also, leverage pre-built templates for scripts or for alerts such as empathy, speech rate, or hold time violation alerts
What are the top use cases of Real-Time AI
Close more revenue consistently
Ensure telesales reps have the ability to convert and upsell through better call execution, rebuttals to customer objections, and upsell reminders.
Create better customer experiences
Help agents navigate make-or-break moments on customer service calls, triggering immediate attention and next-best action.
Deliver foolproof compliance
Ensure agents never miss scripts or say things that can result in massive fines or complicated legal issues
Accelerate agent ramp and retention
Onboard new agents seamlessly through self learning cues and supervisor help. Drive ongoing engagement and self-learning in agents with easy access to knowledge assets.
Useful resources on Real-Time AI
If you're new to Real-Time AI or have dipped your toes already, here are some additional resources to get you started:
- Product Page on our website
- Our CEO Swapnil’s announcement blog
- Request a demo of Real-Time AI
- Real-Time AI Value Calculator
