With companies such as Microsoft, AWS, Google and Salesforce all releasing autonomous agent capabilities across their offerings, it’s clear that the Agentic Age has finally dawned.
By Ryan Falkenberg, CEO of Clevva
Within the contact centre industry, the implications of this are profound. Given that much of the work of human agents involves following specific scripts and performing specific actions, the concern is that this work will increasingly be performed by virtual or digital agents.
The Agentic Age refers to the period where most digital tasks are performed by virtual agents that can reason and act on their own. But how do traditional contact centres even begin to adopt these agents? And how do they find effective ways to leverage both virtual and live agents to the advantage of the customer and the company?
Splitting the work load
Virtual agents are not simple chatbots. They can now have conversations at the level of human experts. They are designed to automate rule-bound engagements with more consistency and at a higher level of compliance than human agents.
Virtual agents are especially effective when it comes to dealing with the kind of rule-driven, repetitive calls that take up most of a contact centre’s time. In a bank setting, for example, the most frequent query is usually, “What’s my bank balance?”. In a telco, it often relates to data or billing queries and in online retail, it increasingly relates to logistics and deliveries.
Those calls can quickly stack up, particularly at certain times of the year (such as the festive season), resulting in long waiting times at best and unanswered queries at worst. That, in turn, equates to a poor customer experience, which is ultimately damaging to the company’s image.
Assigning these high-volume calls to a virtual agent can help. Think about how many human agent hours could be saved if a virtual agent could answer the most common, simple, and repetitive queries. Then think about how much customer frustration and brand damage could be avoided. Suddenly, having more virtual agents in your CX team becomes a no-brainer.
Insourcing or outsourcing the problem
Automating these calls is often made to sound easy. Most of the large CX technology providers now offer autonomous agent capabilities that sound incredibly simple to set up and get working. It feels you could have a virtual agent answering your calls and working seamlessly with your various operating systems within a matter of minutes.
Yet, like everything that sounds too good to be true, there is a catch. These agents work well when everything is set up perfectly and you are not dealing with changing rules, multiple systems and regulatory risk.
For many contact centre teams, the journey normally begins with a series of pilots that never make it to production. The technology is purchased and the team energetically begins building the logic that will drive their automated conversations across the multiple channels being served.
Soon, the explosion of code and the complexity of voice automation gets the better of them and everything grinds to a halt.
An increasingly attractive alternative is to outsource the problem to a virtual agent specialist, or digital BPO. These companies take care of all the technical and logical complexity for you. Your business simply gets a working virtual agent that is trained to handle specific calls and to work with your specific systems. These companies also manage your virtual agent for you, ensuring it stays accurate and performant, 24/7. And the cost is limited to the call they automate.
Handing this complexity over to a specialist allows you to focus on your existing operation. With agent capacity freed up by a team of virtual agents, your internal teams can take more time to focus on every customer. This allows your time to spend time listening to and fully understanding customer issues and frustrations without a timer pressurising them to move on to the next caller in the queue.
By adding virtual agents to your team, you get instant, scalable capacity into your operation. It resolves your call spikes and out-of-work hours capacity challenges. And by partnering with a specialist who takes care of the ongoing training and performance management, you get all the benefits of conversation automation, without the risks.