Real-time guidance has become a driving force behind superior customer experience. When customers interact with a company, whether that’s via chat or phone, they expect to have their questions and concerns addressed quickly and effectively.
Real-time guidance allows customer service agents to optimise the time they spend with customers by offering immediate suggestions to improve a conversation, while it’s still in progress.
What is real-time agent guidance?
Real-time guidance uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to monitor conversations, most often between customers and customer service agents in the contact center. Based on pre-determined parameters, such as scripting compliance, customer statements or competitive mentions, real-time alerts can help agents more effectively navigate through customer interactions. The right tools also enable supervisors to monitor agent performance, empowering them support agents through conversations, such as escalations, as needed.
How real-time agent guidance works
Computer-based real-time guidance uses AI and conversation intelligence to detect the tone of a conversation and help steer it in the right direction. Customers are usually alerted that their call may be recorded, but the actual real-time guidance process happens behind the scenes.
As a conversation intelligence platform identifies emotions and sentiments from a customer, real-time guidance delivers immediate alerts to an agent with key insights into what they can do to improve the conversation and the outcome. Sometimes, that means finding the right part of the conversation to upsell. Other times, it might be escalating the call to a supervisor to help correct a problem.
Supervisors can also play an active role in real-time guidance to monitor agent performance for training and onboarding purposes.
Using real-time guidance tools, a supervisor can listen in on conversations to determine whether an agent remains professional, adheres to a script, and genuinely tries to help a customer. The supervisor can deliver real-time guidance via pop-up messages or a chat screen to the agent as needed.
Key features of real-time agent guidance
Conversation intelligence platforms like CallMiner include the following in real-time guidance software to enhance customer experiences and agent performance.
Live insights: Real-time guidance provides immediate suggestions to agents to navigate customer conversations. Whether the platform detects an opportunity to suggest a product or identifies that an agent has veered too far from their script, the real-time guidance platform sends notifications directly to the agent, helping them take advantage of key points in a conversation.
Agent performance optimisation: Real-time guidance sends consistent and instantaneous alerts and insights to supervisors about their agents’ performance. Supervisors can look at collected data whenever they’d like, or they can watch alerts in real time to gather insight to assist with training and onboarding.
Live listening: In addition to reading data gathered during a conversation in real-time, supervisors can listen in on conversations to oversee agent performance and customer satisfaction. If necessary, a supervisor can provide their own guidance to an agent or take over the conversation themselves.
Call for assistance: With sophisticated calling systems, agents can request the help of a supervisor when they need to based on the real-time guidance they receive. Usually, this happens with the press of a button, allowing a supervisor to take over and assist the customer quickly.
Categorical alerts: Real-time guidance systems typically categorise their alerts to help contact centres pinpoint key areas of improvement. For example, alerts might be sorted into upselling opportunities, agent performance, or customer tone so that supervisors can find the information they need for training.
Automatic redaction: Although alerts happen in real time, they still need to be compliant. Top real-time guidance software automatically redacts sensitive customer information, preventing it from being shown in an alert or conversation transcripts.
