5 Reasons Conversational AI is a Live Agent’s Best Friend

Friend, not foe – 5 reasons why

Yes, there’s an understandable reason for live support agents to be anxious about conversational AI. At its apex, conversational AI can potentially replace live support centers altogether – filling agents’ roles as voice assistants taking calls and handling customer queries or as virtual assistants deployed on a company’s website, guiding users through their customer journey, and easing pain-points along the way. But, in truth, conversational AI is a force multiplier for live agents. It is a tool designed to reinforce them by making their lives much easier.

Here are five key reasons why conversational AI is a live agent’s best friend:

1. Conversational AI can handle repetitive, frequently exasperating questions freeing up live agents from menial and monotonous tasks. These tasks are a prime cause of burnout and endemic in live support centers. A complimentary conversational AI assistant is also beneficial in reducing the pressure on overloaded support centers. Why are support centers so overloaded? Since the market has pushed businesses to implement a customer-obsessed approach, call center agents bear the brunt of 24/7-service expectations involving taxing, inflexible, and often overextend working hours.

2. Not having to deal with tedious tasks allows live agents to solve more challenging issues that customers encounter. Besides increasing morale, this enables them to feel more valuable to the organization, apply their training and knowledge to become real experts, and upskill themselves. The power of independent thought and creative problem-solving skills is something that chatbots cannot replace, which enhances rather than threatens live agents’ role in a company.

3. Conversational AI is instrumental in supporting and bolstering customer support. However, when necessary, user interactions can be handed off to a live representative. This bi-directional solution ensures that customer needs are met both for FAQs and the like and for queries and assistance that demands more human nuance.

4. Conversational AI, especially Hyro’s, ingests a limitless amount of information. Often live agents use deployed Hyro conversational AI assistants to help them answer questions. This is crucial for new employees who are often poorly trained, given the notoriously high turnover rates at support centers.  F. Curtis Barry & Company found that employee turnover in most live support centers is disturbingly steep, ranging anywhere from 25% and higher, with many reaching 40-50%. In some severe cases, turnover can be 90-100%. According to estimates by The Center for American Progress, the tally of replacing a frontline employee is about 20% of an annual salary. For a 50-person strong call center team, this could mean over $100,000 annually in lay offs.

5. Virtual assistants can be viewed as a live agent’s “rescue remedy” resource to fill-in potentially embarrassing knowledge gaps. For example, healthcare call center operators are unlikely to understand the thousands of medical terms out there – after all, they aren’t medically trained practitioners. Similarly, a government, financial, or banking call center operator may not have all the answers.

Key Takeaway

Conversational AI is a live agent’s best friend. AI chatbots and virtual assistants fill knowledge gaps and free up live agents, making them happier, less bored, less stressed, and feeling valuable and irreplaceable as team members. If they are less inclined to leave, companies, on the other hand, save the costs of repeatedly recruiting and training new employees begetting a win-win situation for all.

More on this topic from Hyro:

• 4 Digital Tools to Improve Patient Satisfaction Scores
• [Infographic] The State of Conversational AI in 2021
• Call Centers Cost Reduction via Conversational AI and Automation in Healthcare