According to a report by SuperOffice, Customers prefer live chat over any other contact channel – email, social media, phone calls, etc. This medium has been around since 1970, but it’s becoming very popular these days, and growing fast. This type of instant communication has changed the way businesses interact with their customers. In fact, live chat is expected to continue growing by as much as 87 per cent in the next 12-18 months.
Google has therefore launched its “Agent Assist for Chat” to help businesses solve the most challenging customer service needs while lowering operational costs. Agent Assist is an extension of Google’s Cloud Contact Center AI platform that provides call centre agents with support via chat messages, in addition to calls. The company first announced this application in September, in an attempt to identify customers’ intents and provide agents with real-time recommendations such as articles and FAQs as well as responses to messages.
Agent Assist provides two components to help agents manage conversations — Smart Reply and Knowledge Assist.
Smart Reply provides response suggestions to agents so they can quickly and appropriately respond to customer messages. These suggestions can be taken from your top performing agents as well as modified even further to ensure suggestions properly reflect the tone and voice of your brand. Agent Assist learns when and what recommendations to make by building a custom model that’s trained on your (and only your) data.
Knowledge Assist will leverage any company’s knowledge base to provide articles and FAQ suggestions to agents as the conversation progresses. unlocks the power of your knowledge base to provide articles and FAQ suggestions to agents in real-time as the conversation progresses. When using Knowledge Assist, agents no longer need to make the customer wait while they navigate multiple applications and data to find the resolution to the customer’s issue — the answer is delivered right to them.
AI making a difference
According to Google, customers using Agent Assist for Chat have been able to manage up to 28% more conversations concurrently while driving up customer satisfaction by 10%. They also respond up to 15% faster to chats on average, reducing chat abandonment rates.
One customer, Optus, expects Agent Assist to help minimize repetitive tasks by providing response and typeahead suggestions. Another, LoveHolidays, is using Agent Assist to support their agents and customers in the travel industry.
With customer representatives increasingly required to work from home in Manila, the U.S., and elsewhere, companies are turning to AI to bridge resulting gaps in service. The solutions aren’t perfect — humans are needed even when chatbots are deployed — but COVID-19 has accelerated the need for AI-powered contact centre messaging.
There’s indeed no shortage of competition in the AI-driven call analytics space. Gong offers an intelligence platform for enterprise sales teams and recently nabbed $200 million in funding at a $2.2 billion valuation. Observe.ai snagged $26 million in December for AI that monitors and coaches call centre agents. AI call centre startups Cogito and CallMiner have also staked claims alongside more established players like Amazon and Microsoft.
For its part, Google says that more than a thousand customers have deployed Contact Center AI to date.
