Benefits of AI Agents in Contact Centers

Benefits of AI Agents in Contact Centers

Giving your team good tools is very important for customer satisfaction. However, building up a human team, for instance, around-the-clock support is very expensive. 

But luckily, with AI agents, you can get rid of wait times. 

You can also personalize every conversation. This will let your agents work on difficult problems.

AI Agents for contact centers can help you deal with these business needs. Here is how they work.

What Are AI Agents in Contact Centers?

Contact centers are moving away from the frustrating phone trees of the past. Using AI agents in contact centers is a main part of this change. 

These smart AI assistants look after customer communications over the phone and online, often without direct human help. 

Unlike simple chatbots that can only follow a script, today, the benefits of AI agents in contact centers can include them joining in on natural, human-like conversations.

This is possible because of several key technologies:

• Natural Language Processing (NLP/NLU): This technology helps the agent figure out what a customer is actually asking for. The system understands their intention and feeling, not just their exact words. This allows for a flexible conversation. This is very different from the old press 1 for sales system.
• Machine Learning (ML): AI agents are not fixed. They are made to learn. By looking into many customer communications, machine learning helps agents get better at their jobs. They can also adjust to new customer behaviors, improving with each conversation.
• Agentic AI: This is a key development. This changes the business case from just cutting costs to creating real value. NLU-based agents follow set conversation paths. Agentic AI agents, however, are made to finish a specific task. They can independently pick out which tools to use. They can get into customer, billing, and inventory systems. This allows them to carry out multi-step actions and solve issues completely.

Main Benefits of AI Agents in Contact Centers

Using automation, there is a wide set of benefits of AI agents in contact centers. These advantages create a positive cycle of improvement. This helps customers, human agents, and the company's financial health.

The benefits are clear:

AI Agents Improve Your Customer Experience (CX) 

AI agents give instant, 24/7 support. This gets rid of the wait times that upset 69% of customers. This is important since 61% of new buyers would pick a quicker AI response over waiting for a person.

AI contact center benefits also include personalized support to many customers at once. By connecting to your customer information system, the agent understands a customer's full history.

AI Agents Support and Retain Your Human Agents

The rate of agents quitting their jobs in contact centers is high, almost 40%. AI helps with this problem. The system automates the boring, repetitive tasks that lead to burnout. 

These tasks include answering basic questions, making call summaries, and updating customer records. This AI contact center benefits help free up your human experts. 

Create a Positive Cycle of Improvement 

The benefits of AI agents in contact centers for both customers and agents are linked. 

When AI takes care of simple questions, happier and better agents can solve difficult issues more successfully. This changes the agent's job.

How AI Agents Improve Contact Center Productivity

These high-level benefits of ai agents in contact centers lead to real gains in productivity. This happens through a mix of automation, real-time help for agents, and improvements based on data.

Here’s how AI helps your whole operation work better:

Automate Time-Consuming Work 

Agents spend a large part of their day on manual tasks that do not require human skills. This work, after a call, takes up about 17% of their time.

• AI contact center benefits include completely automating this work. AI creates call summaries and puts notes in the customer records system.
  
• This takes away a large administrative task and lessens human mistakes. AI bots can also sort out up to 80% of routine customer questions without any human help.
  

Help Human Agents During Calls 

AI contact center benefits also allow them to work as an AI assistant for your human agents. AI helps them during live calls. As a conversation goes on, the AI listens and pulls up useful information from knowledge bases or policy documents. 

This real-time guidance can include reminders to follow company rules. This has been shown to shorten average call handling time by 30%.

Improve Operations with Data 

Instead of guessing, AI lets managers use data to make the whole contact center better. AI can look at 100% of communications, not just a small sample.

For ECCs, this kind of AI contact center benefits add value by automating where agents need to improve, where processes can be tweaked and this can even automate the full call scoring and CRM entry processes.

Business Impact of AI in Contact Centers

The operational improvements from AI build a strong business case. They produce real financial returns and a notable competitive edge.

The documented financial and operational results are significant:

• Major Cost Savings: AI is a great tool for holding down costs. Projections show AI will save $80 billion in agent labor costs worldwide by 2026. On average, companies see a 35% decrease in customer service operational costs. One analysis pointed out a 50% decrease in cost per call. For every $1 spent on AI, businesses get back an average of $3.50.
• Noticeable Revenue Growth: AI does more than save money. AI helps bring in more revenue. Companies that are good at using AI for personalization make 40% more revenue than their competitors. In general, using AI is linked to an average revenue increase of 32%.
• Large Improvements in Key Metrics: The effect on performance numbers is big. AI helps companies close out support tickets 52% faster. First response times go down by an average of 37%. This improved performance leads to happier customers. Some systems have improved customer satisfaction scores by as much as 67%.

Thunai: The Future of AI in Contact Centers

To see what the benefits of AI agents in contact centers will look like in a real product in the future, you can look at a platform like Thunai. This AI agent is designed to point to where the industry is heading.

Thunai is built around the following main components to help with this:

• Thunai Brain: This is a central, smart knowledge system. This system holds all the correct information. This design is very important. One main reason that 95% of AI projects fall through is that they use scattered and outdated information. By putting all knowledge in one place, the platform makes sure its agents are consistent and correct. 
• Voice, Chat + Email AI Agents: Delegate routine tasks to Thunai's powerful AI agents. Voice Agents can handle high-volume inbound queries, qualify customer needs, and create support tickets, freeing up human agents for complex issues. Email Agents and chat agents can draft follow-up correspondence in seconds or completely automate replies for common inquiries based on your knowledge base.
• 100% Automated QA: Instead of manually reviewing a small fraction of calls, Thunai provides 100% call and chat coverage with automated scoring and sentiment analysis. This gives you complete visibility into agent performance, script adherence, and customer emotion on every interaction.
• Automated CRM + Ticket Updates: Thunai eliminates the most tedious part of a sales or support agent's job: manual data entry. It automatically logs call details, summarizes outcomes, updates the sales pipeline, and enriches CRM records based on the conversation.
• Real Time Agent Assist: During live calls and chats, Thunai listens in and provides agents with real-time, contextual suggestions. This includes surfacing relevant knowledge base articles, providing answers to tough customer questions, and suggesting effective rebuttals or cross-sell opportunities.

Thunai aims to give human-like, specific conversations and AI agents that help you focus on what matters. Want to see the benefits of Thunai AI? Try it out for free!

FAQs on AI Agents in Contact Centers

Will AI take my job?

Employees worry about being replaced. However, experts agree that AI is meant to help human agents, not take over their jobs.  Low-skill roles are at risk. But jobs needing deep product knowledge and emotional intelligence will be in higher demand. In fact, 70% of contact center managers believe AI will lead to an increase in human agents for these more difficult roles.

Why do customers still get so frustrated with bots?

Many people have had bad experiences with bots. They feel the bots create more problems than they solve. The problem is not with the technology itself. The issue is usually a poor or incomplete setup. Unhappiness happens because of bad data management. Problems also happen when bots are not connected to other systems, like customer records. 

What does the future of the contact center hold?

One prediction states that by 2029, agentic AI will sort out 80% of common customer service issues without any human help. The future standard will be a closely connected hybrid system. In this system, humans and AI will work together.