Qualtrics Real-Time Contact Center Solutions Arm Agents for Success

Poor customer service is one of the main reasons customers switch brands. Yet, the ones who address customer issues, the contact center agents, feel the burnout. In fact, more than one-third of contact center agents don’t feel they’re set up for success and a little more than half of agents believe their leadership invests in their team, according to Qualtrics research.

Those are not the numbers organizations want to see as attrition rate rises amid the ongoing labor shortage, which increases the cost of recruiting and training agents. Qualtrics is taking matters into its own hands with new real-time contact center innovations to make agents more productive and deliver customer support with empathy.

The goal of the innovations is to boost agent effectiveness and engagement while improving customer satisfaction and lowering costs by using Qualtrics’ natural language understanding powered by XM Discover and machine learning capabilities.

One of the new solutions, Qualtrics' Real-Time Agent Assist, will coach contact center agents during a call with a customer by using AI to analyze the conversation and develop real-time, informed recommendations. Based on the analysis, Real-Time Agent Assist prompts the agent with brand-specific suggestions, personalized experiences and offers, relevant knowledge base articles and related answers. The goal is to get the agent to focus on listening to the customer and reduce the time it takes for an agent to resolve each customer’s issue.

Real-Time Agent Assist also recognizes when it’s appropriate to deliver in-call reminders to the agent, such as when they may be going off-script or out of compliance. This allows contact center teams to improve each customer interaction while increasing agent empowerment and reducing employee attrition.

"For many companies, addressing feedback after a customer has had a poor experience is not enough to salvage the relationship,” said Brad Anderson, Qualtrics’ president of products and engineering. “Organizations need to guide and orchestrate experiences in real time and that starts on the front line.”

Another new feature, Automated Call Summaries, will deliver instant, accurate automated call recaps. The recaps include relevant details discussed during the call, including why the customer called, how the call went, whether the issue was resolved, how much effort was needed to reach that resolution and what steps still need to be taken.

Post-call work contributes to agent burnout and already one in five agents think about quitting weekly, according to Qualtrics. With Automated Call Summaries, agents can simply review the automated summaries and add additional context as needed.

Automated Call Summaries easily integrate with an organization's CRM system to give organizations a single source of truth for all customer records and a comprehensive history of the customer experience. Use the record if a compliance issue arises and reduce the need for repeat callers to have to spend time explaining their service needs multiple times. This will create a smoother experience for customers and agents.

"These new contact center solutions save agents time and arm them with the information and coaching they need to deliver more efficient and empathetic customer service," said Anderson.

Edited by Erik Linask