Two of the latest innovations in the call center industry, Real-Time Agent Assist (RTAA) and Desktop and Process Analytics (DPA) are transforming the way call centers operate. These tools are not just about keeping up; they're about enhancing efficiency, improving quality, and ensuring that agents can perform at their best. While there are many other providers of these quality assurance technologies, we’ll focus on the offerings provided by Verint as a reference point to understand their potential and the impact they can have on call center operations.
Real-Time Agent Assist: Your Call Center Agent's Sidekick
RTAA is like having a helpful sidekick for your call center agents—or, if you are a golfer, maybe you can think of it as a very capable caddie. This kind of tool is designed to assist agents during customer interactions by providing automatic tips and reminders in real time.
This innovative technology leverages speech analytics or application activity (DPA triggers)
to notify and assist both employees and supervisors in handling calls more effectively. Whether your industry is B2C or B2B or your organization is small or large, this solution can seamlessly integrate into your environment to ensure a consistent and enhanced customer service experience.
Let's look at how RTAA can benefit call center operations.
Key Features for Selecting a Real-Time Coaching Solution
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Real-time guidance for employees, anywhere: Your agents may be based in the contact center or working remotely, but RTAA doesn't discriminate; it can provide AI-driven, real-time guidance to assist your agents wherever they are, based on acoustic (non-verbal) and linguistic (verbal) cues as well as desktop activity.
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Process and compliance adherence: Agents almost always want to do the right thing, but with changing policies and updated processes it can be difficult for even the most conscientious agent to follow all the rules all the time and do everything right. With the right in-the-moment assistance, the pressure can be taken off agents while ensuring their adherence to processes and compliance with policies.
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Promptly address negative sentiment: Negative sentiment can quickly escalate, leading to dissatisfied customers and strained relationships. With RTAA, the system detects negative sentiment. It equips agents with real-time suggestions for the next best course of action to steer interactions toward a positive outcome.
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Improve customer experience and save costs: Prolonged silences or excessive pauses can impact customer experience and increase costs. RTA Aalerts agents when these pauses reach a specified threshold, enabling them to adjust their behavior accordingly. It can also provide the right prompt at the right time to help agents keep interactions moving forward and on track. This proactive approach significantly reduces handling time and enhances customer experience while ensuring service-level agreements (SLAs) are met.
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Decrease employee churn: Agent retention is critical for building a stable, experienced workforce. RTAA improves agent experience and reduces churn by providing support in real time, especially during challenging customer calls such as complaints and escalations. With the right support, agents feel confident and empowered to do their job—two keys to retaining employees.
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Promote upsell and cross-sell opportunities: Recognizing opportunities for upselling or cross-selling is a valuable revenue-generating strategy. This solution identifies keywords and phrases during interactions, prompting agents to offer relevant special deals and seize upsell and cross-sell opportunities in the moment.
Desktop and Process Analytics: Unveiling the Hidden Insights
DPA takes a unique approach by monitoring the applications and resources that agents use on their desktops. Here's why DPA is a game-changer for call centers.
Understanding How Agents Spend Their Time
DPA leverages desktop application usage to provide a comprehensive view of how your agents are spending their time with various desktop and online applications. This invaluable insight helps you identify which applications are critical for their tasks and which might be distractions. It also helps in assessing where agents could benefit from improved time management, enhancing overall productivity.
Identifying Coaching Opportunities
Coaching is an integral part of nurturing agent performance. With DPA, you can pinpoint which agents might need additional coaching. By analyzing their desktop activities and application usage, you can identify areas where agents may be taking more time than necessary or inserting additional steps into a process. This proactive approach enables more effective coaching and aids in skill development.
Sharing Best Practices of Top Performers
Your top-performing agents are invaluable resources for your team. DPA can assist in capturing the actions and behaviors of your star agents. This data can then be shared as best practices, helping other agents learn from the most successful members of the team. This knowledge-sharing approach fosters a culture of continuous improvement.
Real-Time Process Guidance for Better Outcomes
Efficiency and compliance are critical in the call center industry. Most DPA tools allow you to set alerts or reminders that guide agents in real time when specific actions are required. These triggers can relate to your internal processes, industry compliance, or government regulations. This real-time guidance helps agents stay on track and ensures that critical steps are not missed.
Layering Desktop Activity into Quality Equations
DPA takes quality management to the next level by incorporating desktop activity data. This data enables you to:
- Tag recorded interactions with application metadata, making them easily searchable.
- Score recorded interactions based on both speech and text attributes as well as desktop activity.
- Provide real-time coaching and guidance based on predefined thresholds for KPIs.
- Impact quality in the moment, leading to more efficient calls and better customer experiences.
Bottom Line for Quality Assurance
96 percent of customers say that customer service experience is crucial to their purchasing choices. As call centers are often one of the first interactions a customer will have with your company, making that experience positive is imperative.
Staying at the forefront of technology helps call centers offer top-tier service and build brand loyalty. RTAA and DPA have emerged as game-changers in enhancing operational efficiency, improving service quality, and empowering agents to excel in their roles.
Schedule a consultation to explore how our team can assist your business in embracing technology, opportunities, and advanced tools to achieve its mission.
