A new report from Cognigy looks at how AI agents could address modern customer service issues while also improving customer experience’s efficiency and effectiveness.
To AI or not to AI? That’s the question for many contact center leaders today. AI agents are a double-edged sword in that if deployed with the proper use cases, businesses can benefit significantly with improved brand loyalty, increased sales, and lower operational expenses. If done incorrectly, using AI will create a negative experience and drive customers away. The key is understanding the capabilities, where to deploy, and where not.
AI Agents should be viewed as a critical technology that can significantly improve customer experience and operational efficiency. Most technology deployments strive to accomplish one, but AI agents can do both. Businesses should adopt AI as a long-term investment, starting with targeted use cases to achieve quick wins and scaling up as they realize the benefits.
Business leaders, particularly CX professionals, must treat AI as a core component of their customer service capabilities to achieve and sustain a leadership position. Market leadership has always ebbed and flowed, but it’s happening much faster today. Businesses need AI to adapt quickly to market trends. People can no longer analyze information fast enough to move at digital speeds, but machines can. The key is understanding where and how to apply AI agents to maximize the benefits and minimize risk.
A recent report from Cognigy, titled “AI Agents for Your Business,” provides an in-depth analysis of how AI agents transform the customer service landscape. In the report, Cognigy, a company that provides AI-driven customer service solutions, focuses on how AI agents can address critical issues such as labor shortages, high turnover rates, and increasing customer demands while enhancing overall service efficiency and effectiveness.
AI Agent Capabilities
The report notes that AI agents combine two primary technologies: conversational AI and generative AI. Conversational AI enables agents to engage in dialogues that mimic human conversations, handling multiple turns and contexts across different channels. This technology integrates with backend systems, which allows AI agents to execute tasks effectively. Generative AI complements this by generating contextually appropriate responses and content on the fly, which enhances the interaction’s relevance and personalization without the risks of generating inaccurate information.
This was a critical point in the report. While generative AI has stolen most of the AI headlines since the launch of chatGPT, it’s not a panacea to all contact center woes. The combination of generative AI and conversational AI drives the value as it creates a more human response. Contact center leaders should not over-rotate to generative AI because of today’s hype and focus on both areas.
The Benefits of AI Agents
The report emphasizes several key benefits, among them, 24/7 operation, multilingual capacity, automation of routine tasks and rapid replies which are accurate and context-aware. As contact centers are often challenged to deliver services around the clock in multiple languages, particularly when it’s a lightly used one, AI can meet that challenge.
Success Key: Start Small
For businesses considering AI agents, Cognigy suggests starting with specific use cases where AI can immediately impact, such as automating simple customer queries or providing real-time transactional support. This phased approach helps organizations see quick returns while building confidence in AI capabilities.
Start simple is a point I’ve made to many contact center leaders. If one could plot all contact center interactions on a 2×2 grid with the axes being the complexity of interaction and frequency, AI agents should be used in the high frequency and low complexity quadrant. Anything complicated should immediately flip to a human as it likely requires the human touch. Most contact center interactions would fall into the low complexity / high-frequency category, offloading things like password resets and account balances and letting human agents focus on higher-value interactions.
Understanding Potential Challenges
Although AI agents offer numerous benefits, implementation presents challenges, including integration with existing IT infrastructure, initial training requirements, and ongoing management of AI systems.
The report also suggests two ways to address these challenges: Choose an AI solution that is easy to integrate and support, or engage AI vendors that offer comprehensive after-sales support and training.
Both are important, but I suggest a third recommendation: get the organization’s data house in order. In my conversations with contact center leaders, the top barrier is the need for more data readiness. CX-related data is scattered everywhere, and the company needs to ensure it can use most of it to improve contact center operations.
Support and training are critical recommendations. AI success requires ongoing training, data integrations, model tweaking, and other tasks that most companies have never done. Ensure your vendor can navigate you through initial deployment but will be there as the system needs tuning or market conditions change.
Labor Shortages and Agent Turnover
The Cognigy report highlights a significant challenge: the labor shortage in contact centers, compounded by high turnover, which research estimates is currently around 31%. Finding and retaining skilled customer service representatives is increasingly difficult, leading to operational inefficiencies.
Cognigy says AI agents are positioned to solve these challenges because they automate high-volume, low-complexity tasks. They operate continuously across various channels and languages, significantly reducing the burden on human agents.
This automation helps stabilize operations by mitigating the impact of labor shortages and high turnover rates. By handling routine tasks, AI agents enable human agents to focus on more complex interactions, improving efficiency and service quality.
This point is prescient as it dispels the myth of AI killing the contact center industry. Many investors believe that AI will replace so many contact center jobs that the overall TAM for contact center software will be a fraction of what it is today. Contact centers have a massive job shortage, and AI agents can close that gap.
AI agents will enable the human agents to provide higher value service, creating more valuable agents with rewarding work. This should help lower the high churn rate contact centers see today.
Enhancing Customer Experience and Supporting Human Agents
AI agents can help enhance the overall customer experience. They can manage inquiries in multiple languages and provide real-time support, including knowledge lookups and sentiment analysis.
This functionality enables AI agents to handle Tier 1 cases efficiently, including straightforward queries and routine transactions. As a result, freed from these repetitive tasks, human agents can concentrate on more nuanced and complex customer interactions that require empathy and advanced problem-solving skills.
Companies should integrate AI into the customer service infrastructure as a core component, like CRM systems and case management tools. This integration ensures that AI agents contribute effectively to improving customer service and operational efficiency.
