What is agent assist?

Agent assist, sometimes known as real-time guidance, is a technology that ensures agents have everything they need on calls. This ranges from tips to help agents resolve calls faster to sentiment analysis revealing what customers really think. As more and more organizations embrace AI, agent assist is a must-have tool.

How does agent assist technology work?

Agent assist is built upon AI technology, including natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU). As agents carry out calls, agent assist constantly collects and analyzes data. It then provides actionable insights “on the fly,” allowing agents to adapt their approach as they carry out their calls.

Agent assist isn’t a new technology, although it has advanced considerably in recent years. Today, agent assist is capable of much more. Alongside offering tips and analysis, it’s capable of speech recognition. It can create transcripts of calls and even summarize data.

AI can also enable assist tools to automate key processes, such as providing agents with next best actions, knowledge base recommendations, or suggested responses. Ultimately, this increased efficiency helps to streamline workflows, as agents spend less time typing the same things over and over. Agents complete their tasks more quickly, and customers receive better service.

Why is agent assist important?

Modern customers are used to getting information quickly. They don’t expect to be left waiting in queues or to be passed from agent to agent to get resolutions. This puts more pressure on customer service teams to provide swift answers. Agent assist can deliver the speed teams need to deliver results.

There’s no more second-guessing. Agents can use data-driven insights to get to the heart of customer issues. They can quickly identify resolutions and move on to the next person in the queue.

What benefits does agent assist bring to businesses?

Thanks to its versatility, agent assist brings many benefits to businesses. Here are some of the top examples:

• Helps agents offer more-attentive service: Successful customer service is about recognizing how a customer is feeling and responding appropriately. Agent assist uses sentiment analysis to gauge customer satisfaction. Agents will know when to alter their approach, such as by appearing more empathetic or using more active listening.

• Builds a happier team: In the fast-paced and stressful environment of the contact center, it’s not hard for agents to feel overwhelmed. Agent assist helps reduce stress by handling manual tasks, such as interaction summarization. Agents can then focus their energy on providing better support to customers.

• Spot compliance issues: Many industries must comply with strict regulations or face costly monetary and reputational impacts. Agent assist AI can be trained with compliance policies. Agents can then be warned when actions might risk breaching regulations.

• Improves cost efficiency: All the time your agents spend not talking to customers is wasted money. That’s why agent assist’s ability to handle manual tasks is a huge advantage. Agents can focus on reducing queues and solving queries, cutting costs and boosting productivity.

Is AI agent assist a bot?

Agent assist is not an autonomous bot. It won’t handle entire customer interactions – that’s still the role of human agents. Instead, it will provide additional assistance to enhance your agent’s skills.

It will offer suggestions, automate tasks, analyze conversations, and provide additional information. All this results in improved employee performance and greater customer satisfaction.

While agent assist is not a bot, it can have bot-like features. For instance, it could integrate with a chatbot tool or AI-powered assistant to help with simple tasks. This might include quickly responding to basic queries or retrieving information from a knowledge database.

Once again, these tools only assist human agents. Employees will still be required to handle more-complex interactions.

What are the key features of agent assist?

Agent assist solutions come with many valuable features. Let’s explore these in more detail:

• Knowledge recommendations: AI can suggest answers to customer questions, or even draft a response for the agent to select and submit. This ensures a consistent level of service that is not dependent on which agent is handling the interaction.

• Real-time coaching for agents: AI can offer tips to agents during calls so that they get the most out of every customer interaction. Whether it's techniques to help de-escalate tense situations or even responses to customer statements, it can provide a range of assistance.

• Transcribing and summarizing calls: There’s a lesson in every customer interaction. Agent assist can create transcripts and summarize calls. This enables supervisors to look back on customer interactions and gather information at a glance. These records are also valuable resources for training new team members.

• Sentiment analysis: Knowing what customers think of your business is always useful. Agent assist uses sentiment analysis to analyze speech during calls. It can inform agents whether customers’ tones are positive, negative, or neutral. They can spot conversations going in the wrong direction and alter their tactics.

What channels can agent assist be used on?

Agent assist isn’t just designed for agents on calls. It can gather information from whatever channel the customer chooses, e.g., directly analyzing a text conversation or creating a text transcript of a call to analyze later.

For instance, an agent providing support on social media might utilize sentiment analysis the same way as an agent on-call. NLP can analyze text to gather insights, helping employees gauge customers' feelings.

Thanks to this versatility, agent assist has become a popular tool. Organizations can ensure they provide the best service, regardless of the platform used.

There are some limitations, however, when using agent assist for cross-channel support. That’s why many businesses complement their assist software with another tool. This is where Vonage comes in handy.

Is Vonage an alternative to agent assist software?

Vonage isn’t a direct alternative to agent assist. Instead, it can augment your software so you can provide even stronger experiences.

As standalone software, agent assist is designed to improve the performance of your teams. While this may indirectly improve customer experiences, it isn’t its primary objective.

For instance, you can use the software to assist with individual channels but not to provide seamless experiences between them.

Vonage brings customer satisfaction into the mix. Not only can it help you determine how to improve agent performance, it can also help to ensure that customers get the best experience possible.

How Vonage enhances agent assist

But how does Vonage help deliver the top-class experiences that your customers expect?  Let’s look at some of the ways Vonage can help you.

Omnichannel integration 

Sometimes, a customer might begin interacting with customer support on one channel or device and finish it on another. Customers like to go from A to B without retracing their steps. When they switch channels, they expect to be able to carry on where they left off. Standalone agent assist can’t deliver this functionality.

With Vonage, however, conversations flow anywhere on any device. So, when a customer switches channels or devices, agents can see their conversation history. They can continue to provide support without having to repeat old questions. These omnichannel experiences help ensure queries are resolved faster, satisfying customers.

AI-powered support 

Artificial intelligence is the hot topic in business. Forward-thinking businesses know to use AI to stand out from the crowd.

Vonage enhances the AI capabilities of agent assist to deliver more powerful functionality. The AI virtual assistant forms a complete conversational AI package tailored to your business.

The tool can be used to answer customer queries immediately. As with a human agent, it can have a conversation with a customer, understand their issue, and formulate a solution. This helps take some pressure off your human agents, who can focus on core tasks instead.

Alongside self-service, the virtual assist has other handy use cases. For example, it can be used as a virtual representative on outbound campaigns. It can carry out tasks such as lead generation, compiling surveys, and executing recalls.

Alternatively, you might use your assistant as a receptionist, answering questions and routing callers to the relevant lines.

CRM and workflow automation 

Your CRM is at the heart of your contact center operations. It should have access to a steady data stream to get the most out of your agent assist. For this, your CRM  must be up-to-date with the latest customer interactions. Usually, this would mean agents having to add records to your CRM manually.

With Vonage, this process can be handled in seconds. The platform will provide real-time logging. So, interaction data lands straight into your CRM as soon as it becomes available. Your agent assist tool can draw from fresh information to provide useful tips and advice.

All call data is also synced into your business application’s native reporting dashboards. Agents can access data and key insights at a glance, helping inform their approach.

Key features of Vonage agent assist capabilities

We’ve explored how Vonage can augment your agent assist tool. Now, let’s explore these features in more detail.

Real-time agent support 

Why wait until after a call to give agents tips? With Vonage, your team can benefit from continuous learning. The platform ensures that real-time agent assist keeps agents updated with relevant tips and insights to their call. Below are some ways Vonage can support your employees in real time.

• Sentiment analysis: Earlier, we mentioned how agent assist can give insights into customers' thinking. Vonage helps take this feature to the next level. Agents gain a visual representation of the customer’s experience. You can also set thresholds to alert toward low satisfaction scores. Calls can be escalated to a manager when dropping below these thresholds.

• Real-time translation: Even the most experienced agents can face a dead-end when language becomes an issue. Vonage can connect you to a real-time translation engine, enabling agents and customers to speak their preferred language. Both parties will hear translated responses, ensuring a smooth conversation.

• Voice agents: With customer expectations steadily growing toward time to resolution, offering swift answers is essential. Vonage voice agents ensure customers with simple queries can call in, have minimal wait times, and have their questions answered quickly. This reduces queues so that more complex queries can also be handled quicker.

Advanced analytics and reporting

Data is everything in the fast-paced environment of the modern call center. However, data is only as useful as the insights it provides.

Vonage provides access to a suite of advanced analytics features. This way, you can easily access the information you need to optimize call center operations. The platform provides comprehensive analytics dashboards. These enable users to capture and analyze metrics that unlock customer insights quickly.

Of course, Vonage doesn’t just analyze customer data. It can also paint a full and accurate view of your team’s activities and actions. With real-time and historical data access, you can measure your team’s performance over time. You can spot areas where your team members excel and earmark areas for improvement.

All dashboards can also be customized to a user’s liking so agents can view the most useful data. You can also set automated notifications so you’ll know when a certain metric is off-target. You can then work quickly to reverse any negative trends.

Collaboration tools 

Your contact center is the sum of its parts. Every element needs to work together to work effectively.

Vonage ensures collaboration. Thanks to Business Communications Desktop and Mobile Apps, teams stay connected no matter where or what device they use.

The platform includes Team Messaging work chat — a centralized space for instant messaging. Employees can stay in the loop and easily exchange information. They can start or join group work chats and share files and media.

Vonage also enables employees to send and receive messages from their office phone numbers, ensuring continuity. Agents can also make voice calls and escalate to video with colleagues.

Benefits of using Vonage for agent assist

We’ve explored many of the transformative features offered by Vonage. But why should you use the platform for an agent assist solution? Here are some of the advantages of this approach:

Improved efficiency 

Efficiency is key to building productive and successful contact centers. When teams are at the top of their game, they collaborate well, exceed targets, and further your business. Moreover, they keep customers happy and build a stronger reputation for your brand. Ensuring efficiency, however, is often easier said than done.

That’s where Vonage Communications APIs come in handy. The platform can automate crucial but repetitive tasks, like entering customer details into your CRM. This frees teams to focus on resolving customer queries.

As mentioned, Vonage also delivers a centralized space for communication. Agents can get all the information they need from one place, reducing delays and ensuring tasks are completed more quickly.

Better customer experience 

Contact centers quickly suffer when they fail to deliver the experiences customers expect. AI customer engagement helps you embrace a customer-first approach, bringing personalized experiences to suit customers’ needs better.

The AI virtual assistant, for example, can generate highly personalized messages during active campaigns at a scale that humans can’t achieve alone. This helps customers feel more at home and have a greater affinity for your brand.

Vonage also guarantees seamless omnichannel experiences. Customers can move between devices and channels easily with minimal interruption. They can pick up conversations with agents where they left off.

Cost savings 

A contact center is a crucial but expensive operation for large-scale businesses. Cutting costs — without sacrificing quality — is often a fine balancing act. Thankfully, Vonage can save your organization money by handling certain tasks.

Here’s one example: translation. Ordinarily, businesses must employ extra workers to communicate with customers who speak different languages. When demand is unclear, you may hire more staff than you need.

Thanks to the Vonage translation feature, expanding your team is unnecessary. Customers and agents can have translated conversations, enabling smooth dialogue. 

Vonage and agent assist: Real-world applications and success stories

Still need convincing? Here are some examples of real-world Vonage and agent assist success stories.

Ronlight 

Ronlight is responsible for distributing Garmin’s products in Israel. The company needed a way of deploying a virtual assistant to automate its contact centers and scale its customer experience. Ronlight found the solution in Vonage AI.

With the help of Vonage AI, RonLight could support a huge number of calls coming in simultaneously, 24/7, with no waiting time for customers. The company even saw measurable cost savings and was able to operate with a smaller team of representatives.

HotelBeds 

HotelBeds is the world’s leading bed bank. During COVID-19, the company transitioned to a remote contact center. The company needed to upgrade and migrate its telephony infrastructure to a single platform that integrated seamlessly with Salesforce. Vonage Contact Center with Salesforce Integration represented this solution.

The results were clear: reduced call answer times and costs and greater call stability and audio quality for customers. HotelBeds particularly benefited from full integration with the company’s CRM system and its ability to produce client details for agents during calls.

Como 

Como is a worldwide data-driven customer engagement and loyalty solution enabling food/beverage and retail businesses to understand their customers.

The company wanted to connect with customers across multiple channels and improve customer experiences. The company used Vonage SMS API, Messages API to achieve this.

The platform enabled Como to streamline business operations and centralize marketing. Thanks to Vonage’s omnichannel experiences, the company could communicate with customers securely and reliably through multiple channels.

Equip your business with a communication platform and integrations to complement agent assist capabilities

Agent assist can be a powerful tool that enhances your agents and builds more productive contact center operations. Vonage transforms this valuable technology into something revolutionary for your business.

Whether it's delivering powerful omnichannel experiences or enhancing efficiency with a virtual AI assistant, Vonage has you covered. And it’s not just for sales; Vonage can enhance your sales and marketing operations, helping you find better and more targeted ways of reaching your audience.

But don’t just take our word for it. Try Vonage contact center solutions today.