AI’s transformative nature means its impact will be felt across the contact center, both internally and among customers. Improving the customer experience (CX) is paramount, but the agent experience (AX) isn’t far behind and involves different use cases and outcomes.

The last time we broached the topic of AI’s impact on agents, we focused on the agent desktop. The agent desktop is a critical part of AX, but there is a bigger picture to consider.

Contact center automation is a core driver for deploying AI-based solutions. There are many forms of contact center automation that AI can address; here are three that will improve the agent experience. Any of these represent good starting points for building an agent-centric business case for contact center AI.

1. Automate Responses to Customer Inquiries

Agents are under constant pressure to resolve issues as quickly and thoughtfully as possible. When you consider factors like the inexperience of new hires, the isolation of working remotely, and a host of language and culture-related issues, agents might face many challenges when trying to get their response right. Then you layer in customers facing a stressful situation and the risk of hostility increasing; the correct response can make all the difference. Supervisors can coach agents in real-time, but they can’t help every agent through every interaction.

Contact center AI solutions – Generative AI in particular – are emerging to address this need in ways supervisors cannot. These applications can contextualize all the elements of an interaction, like the content, tone and intent, along with the entire customer history to generate responses that are appropriate at the moment. This could take the form of crafting a text-based message that the agent would send to the customer or guiding the agent with a response they can convey via speech. Not only does this reduce the stress about saying the right thing, but it also saves the agent time.

2. Automate Conversation Summaries

Most agents take a constant stream of interactions, leaving little time in between to reflect on each conversation or destress. While some would argue this is counter-productive for maximizing productivity, it is critical for wellness and an essential facet of AX.

These elements will be incorporated into conversation summaries, which are part of the agent’s job. Not only do conversation summaries help agents recall what they have learned, but they also provide important data about customer interactions to the contact center, and supervisors rely on them for training and managing their teams. However, agents don’t always have perfect recall or have the time to provide detailed summaries after every conversation.

Contact center AI solutions are ideal here. Not only do automated call summaries capture everything objectively, but they happen in real time. Supervisors have never had such a complete dataset to work with, but this capability is also great for AX, as it takes a manual task off the agent’s plate.

3. Automate Processes and Workflows

For contact center agents to provide seamless CX, a lot of orchestration must happen behind the scenes. This orchestration requires extensive automation to keep things moving in real time and allows agents to focus on customer interactions.

Most existing forms of process automation are standalone, working in silos, with limited ability to integrate with other applications for a holistic view of the customer. This is one of the ways contact center AI is transformational, by integrating across multiple processes, databases and applications with the bonus of AI’s intelligence.

Contact center AI can handle simple requests, such as updating a credit card, changing an address, or processing a refund. Not only can these processes be fully automated, but they can trigger proactive responses that lead to deeper customer engagement. For example, AI can prompt the agent to offer an upgrade package tailored for that specific customer or pass along documents or links from the knowledge base that will be of interest.

The possibilities are endless. The main takeaway is how AI-powered contact center automation can improve CX and AX. Not only do agents not have to worry about how these processes are done, but proactive responses empower agents to have more impactful interactions with customers.