Contact center agents are often stressed out in their jobs. They are constantly bombarded by frustrated customers with problems and troubles to solve. The stress of dealing with angry responses and feeling battered by recurring issues takes a toll on their mental health. This is the reality for many contact center agents, who often find themselves in high-pressure environments without the right tools to help them. The long-term impact on their well-being is significant, leading to burnout and high turnover rates.
But what if there was a way to help agents and give them superpowers?
Enter agentic artificial intelligence, a game-changer that can greatly reduce stress for agents and make their jobs more enjoyable. With AI assistants, agents can quickly and proactively receive the right information and recommended actions, helping them to provide better services to customers and feel more fulfilled in their roles.
Agentic AI can help reduce stress for contact center agents in several ways. One of its biggest advantages is its ability to handle repetitive and mundane tasks through automation. Activities such as data entry, appointment scheduling, and basic customer queries can be easily automated, reducing agents' workloads and freeing up their time to focus on more interesting and rewarding tasks. AI can also automatically summarize conversations, update CRM records, and perform credit checks, speeding up processes and taking some of the monotony out of agents' day-to-day activities.
When on calls with customers, agentic AI tools can listen in on conversations and provide real-time support to these agents. By offering relevant information and suggestions based on the context of customer interactions, AI can help them handle calls more effectively and resolve issues faster. AI can suggest knowledge base articles or troubleshooting steps based on the conversation, reducing stress by taking pressure off contact center staff and allowing customer interactions to run more smoothly. AI tools can also track the sentiment of the call and detect if the customer is angry or upset, providing extra support and direction as necessary, and allows agents and supervisors to act quickly when negative sentiment is detected.
Starting a new job is always stressful, but AI tools can significantly reduce the time required to train new agents while making the process as relaxed as possible. With AI providing real-time guidance and support, new agents can quickly get up to speed without needing to learn every detail of their companies' products or services.
This Stress Awareness Month, it's vital to remember that new technologies are not just about improving efficiency but also about creating a more fulfilling and engaging work environment for employees. The potential for transforming contact center operations and enhancing the agent experience, and thereby the customer interaction, will only grow as AI technology continues to evolve.
Jurgen Hekkink is head of product marketing at AnywhereNow.