One Year Later: Service Agents Productively Working from Home
by Kim del Fierro, VP of Marketing at Aisera
The COVID-19 pandemic has turned the work from home (WFH) trend into a lasting reality for numerous businesses, and the customer service desk, or call center, is no exception. At the beginning of this new reality, as families rushed to stock up on food and other goods, contact center leaders struggled to properly transition customer service agents to remote status.
A year later, as many as 80 percent of call center agents are operating from home. At the same time, many businesses have undergone substantial spikes in demand for support services. Between February and March of 2020, the total contact center conversation volume increased by 20 percent, with industries like airlines and hotels experiencing call growth of 96–130 percent.
AI is More Important Than Ever for Customer Service Teams
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a vital part of customer service as teams deal with an incredible number of customer calls and queries daily. AI Customer Service is also boosting client satisfaction and agents’ productivity and job satisfaction. As the ultimate team player, AI is available 24/7, transparent in its work, provides guardrails to new agents during their training process and distributes work fairly to existing agents.
How AI Supports WFH
1. AI is Always On
AI agents don’t sleep, take breaks or get sick. AI Virtual Assistants resolve repeating, simple tickets in seconds, leaving human agents to focus on more pressing, critical and high-touch issues. Response times substantially decrease when AI takes over manual, repetitive tasks such as password reset from human agents.
2. AI Scales Up or Down in Seconds
AI can instantly scale to adapt to changes in volume. Hiring new agents can take weeks, followed by training and on-boarding, so scaling up human help for your existing agents is far from quick. On the other hand, AI can handle an infinite number of tickets at a single time.
3. AI Helps Onboard New Agents
Even after training, new agents might still suffer low confidence about interacting with customers or have uncertainties or questions about a business policy. AI can help these agents by recommending responses, which can also serve as a point of reference.
4. AI Can Identify New or Trending Issues
AI can alert customer service managers if there is a spike in tickets of a certain type, all in real-time. This helps managers monitor the situation, create a response plan, and communicate it to customers.
5. AI is Transparent
AI is instantly measurable, meaning that customer service managers will know in real-time what is working or not working and reveal how AI is helping agents. AI also make visible key metrics like CSAT, SLAs, response times, resolution times, and so forth. Some ticket resolution AIs can analyze the performance of ticket prediction accuracy and identify areas of improvement for agent coaching with out-of-the-box KPIs and reports.
6. AI is Available Across Every Channel
AI can scale across the omnichannel — chat, email, voice and social. When you leverage AI, you don’t have to choose just one channel. AI enables you to be present and responsive on each customer’s preferred channel.
As working from home grows in popularity many companies ae deciding to maintain at least some degree of the WFH model even after the COVID-19 pandemic ends. That makes it essential to provide employees with adequate tools to maintain productivity, security, and service. AI is that powerful, versatile tool that every business leader is looking at right now!
