Running a contact center can often feel like deciding which fires to fight when the fire extinguisher is almost empty.
You’re constantly working to improve your agent performance and service delivery through your QA program, training sessions, and knowledge base maintenance, and it may feel like there’s no time left to work on more strategic initiatives that could lead to long-term process and operational improvements.
But it’s possible to get out of this reactive contact center rut with the right resources. Real-time agent guidance software can give your agents the information they need to successfully assist customers in the moment of truth, while post-call conversation intelligence can surface insights to drive better customer interactions in the future. Together, these complementary solutions create a continuous improvement loop.
What is real-time agent guidance?
Real-time agent guidance software runs during contact center conversations and serves agents the information they need to resolve customer issues. It may combine flexible workflows, which managers build and which agents navigate by following steps on-screen, with AI-powered features such as dynamic checklists, coaching prompts, and auto-generated call summaries. By bringing this information into a single interface, it reduces the time agents spend searching for answers, leading to faster resolutions and better customer experiences.
What is conversation intelligence?
Conversation intelligence software uses AI and machine learning to analyze voice and digital conversations after they occur. It can identify and tag key conversation events, such as contact reasons, agent behaviors, customer effort drivers, and product mentions. Contact center leaders use conversation intelligence to understand what’s happening in their service interactions at scale and identify their top opportunities to improve agent performance, lower operational costs, increase sales, and reduce customer churn.
5 benefits of using real-time guidance and conversation intelligence together
Real-time agent guidance and conversation intelligence are powerful technologies on their own, but together, they create a data-driven feedback loop that helps contact centers perform at their top level. Conversation intelligence gives contact center leaders insights into what needs to change to ensure a better agent and customer experience. These insights inform strategic updates to real-time scripts, workflows, prompts, and data sources, leading to better interactions and outcomes.
Below, we’ve got five examples of ways real-time guidance and conversation intelligence work together to improve the contact center, accompanied by video commentary from Creovai’s Chief Customer Officer, Steve Trier.
1. Ramp up new agents faster
Contact center agent turnover rates are notoriously high. According to multiple estimates, the industry average for agent attrition is in the 35-40% range.
With such a large percentage of agents leaving every year, many contact centers are constantly hiring and onboarding new agents. And there’s a lot for those new agents to learn, from product and service information to company guidelines to objection-handling best practices.
Rather than waiting four months (or more!) for new agents to reach their minimum performance standards, contact centers can use real-time guidance technology to reduce their agent ramp-up time and help new agents perform at the level of seasoned pros. New agents can see prompts for next-best-actions, information pulled in from the company’s knowledge base or CRM, and dynamic checklist items based on the context of the conversation.
Contact centers should use conversation intelligence to identify the areas in which their agents have historically struggled the most. This will help them configure their real-time guidance to provide the most useful information to new agents. For example, if a contact center discovers a high percentage of new agents become confused when customers ask about a specific product’s warranty, they could configure a prompt about the warranty to appear when customers bring it up.
Giving new agents relevant real-time guidance can dramatically reduce the time it takes them to get up to speed. We’ve seen some of our customers reduce their agent training time by up to 70%.
2. Close knowledge gaps
Whether they’re new or have been with the contact center for years, any agent can have knowledge gaps—especially when their company regularly releases new products, services, or offers. Conversation intelligence lets contact center leaders see where those gaps are, both at the team and agent level.
Contact center leaders can deliver that information to their managers or team leaders, who can update their real-time scripts or workflows (or add content to a knowledge base connected to the real-time platform). This reduces agent confusion, cuts down on holds and transfers, and improves first-contact resolution.
3. Increase sales
On sales calls, how an agent handles customer objections can make or break their conversion rate. Top performers may use highly effective rebuttals that they’ve honed based on experience, while some of their peers may struggle to come up with a response when an objection catches them off guard.
Conversation intelligence lets contact centers see which objections come up most frequently, which rebuttals their agents are using, and—most importantly—which rebuttals are the most successful. Contact center leaders can build the best rebuttals into their real-time agent guidance platform, arming all agents with the top performers’ knowledge.
Equipping agents with effective rebuttals can have a big impact on sales win rates. One study found that close rates almost double on calls when an agent gives a rebuttal to an objection compared to calls when customers state an objection and don’t hear a rebuttal.
4. Reduce repeat contacts
With repeat contacts making up about 20-30% of total call volume on average, one of the biggest cost-saving opportunities for contact centers is to reduce their repeat calls.
To bring the repeat call rate down, contact center leaders first need to understand what’s driving those calls—information that isn’t always captured in a disposition code or wrap-up notes. Fortunately, conversation intelligence technology makes it easy to identify the topics or issues driving the most repeat calls, letting contact centers target their biggest opportunities for improvement.
By pinpointing the top causes of repeat contacts through conversation intelligence, contact center leaders can start building next-issue-avoidance guidance into their real-time platform. For instance, if they discover that customers are frequently calling back after scheduling a service appointment because the agent didn’t specify when the field technician would arrive, they can prompt the agent to share this information on the first call.
5. Reduce customer churn
When a customer calls to cancel, agents face a challenge. It’s up to them to see if they can do anything to save the customer’s business—all while the customer’s emotions may be running high. It’s no easy task, but certain agent behaviors, such as offering proactive guidance or advocating for the customer, can increase customer satisfaction and reduce the likelihood of churn. Certain save offers, such as a discount or deferred payment, may also be compelling enough to retain customers that the business wants to keep.
Contact center leaders can use conversation intelligence software to see which agent behaviors and save offers are most effective in churn-risk scenarios. From there, they can build save offers or coaching prompts into their real-time agent guidance platform, giving every agent the tools they need to turn a potentially negative customer experience around.
From reactive to proactive
When you combine real-time agent guidance with conversation intelligence, you can spend less of your time fighting fires and more time working on strategic improvements. You can tap into conversation insights to continually improve your live phone interactions while also addressing the upstream issues that cause dissatisfaction and drive calls in the first place. This takes your contact center from being viewed as a reactive unit to a center of excellence, responsible for driving the great customer experiences that are critical to your business.