Qualtrics Announces New Real-time Contact Center Solutions to Make Agents More Productive and Help them Act with Empathy

Real-Time Agent Assist uses AI and Machine Learning to analyze customer needs and emotions, then deliver real-time coaching so contact center agents can take the best next step for customers

Automated Call Summaries eliminate manual work for contact center agents by instantly creating a comprehensive summary after each customer call

Poor customer service is the number one reason customers switch brands, yet 38% of contact center agents don’t feel they’re set up for success, according to Qualtrics research

Qualtrics, the leader and creator of the experience management category, announced new real-time contact center innovations to make agents more productive and deliver customer support with empathy. Automated Call Summaries and Real-Time Agent Assist automate post-call work and help contact center agents respond with empathy and speed. These solutions boost agent effectiveness and engagement, while improving customer satisfaction and lowering costs, by using Qualtrics’ industry-leading natural language understanding and machine learning capabilities to identify sentiment, reasons for calls, common issue resolutions, compliance risks, and more.

“For many companies, addressing feedback after a customer has had a poor experience is not enough to salvage the relationship. Organizations need to guide and orchestrate experiences in real time and that starts on the front line”

Contact center agents are on the front lines addressing customer issues and remedying customer pain points, yet agent burnout and attrition are rising while the ongoing labor shortage increases the cost of recruiting and training agents. More than one-third (38%) of contact center agents don’t feel they’re set up for success and only 54% of agents believe their leadership invests in their team, according to Qualtrics research.

“For many companies, addressing feedback after a customer has had a poor experience is not enough to salvage the relationship. Organizations need to guide and orchestrate experiences in real time and that starts on the front line,” said Brad Anderson, Qualtrics’ president of products and engineering. “These new contact center solutions save agents time and arm them with the information and coaching they need to deliver more efficient and empathetic customer service.”

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Real-Time Agent Assist

Qualtrics’ Real-Time Agent Assist coaches contact center agents live, during a call with a customer, using AI to analyze the conversation and develop real-time, informed recommendations. Conventional agent assist solutions rely only on call metadata and keywords or phrases. Qualtrics natural language understanding and machine learning capabilities, powered by XM Discover, listen to contact center conversations and automatically identify a customer’s sentiment and the reasons for their call. Qualtrics brings that data together with the customer’s past interactions, as well as insights from millions of other interactions customers have had with the brand across all channels, to intelligently diagnose the caller’s individual needs and desires and make recommendations specific to each business.

Based on the analysis, Real-Time Agent Assist prompts the agent with brand-specific suggestions, personalized experiences and offers, relevant knowledge base articles, and related answers, helping the agent focus on listening to the customer and reducing the time it takes for an agent to resolve each customer’s issue.

Real-Time Agent Assist can also recognize when it’s appropriate to deliver in-call reminders to the agent, such as when they may be going off-script or out of compliance, when they should show more empathy for the customer, or when to offer a discount to an unhappy customer. This allows contact center teams to improve every customer interaction while increasing agent empowerment and reducing employee attrition.

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Automated Call Summaries

When contact center agents have to spend precious time on tedious, manual work like writing up a call summary or logging follow-up actions after each and every call, it drives up call wait times and adds hours of additional expenses to the business. Post-call work contributes to agent burnout and already one in five (20%) think about quitting every week, according to Qualtrics research.

Automated Call Summaries deliver instant, accurate automated call recaps that include all relevant details discussed during the call, including why the customer called, how the call went, whether the issue was resolved, how much effort was needed to reach that resolution, and what steps still need to be taken. Qualtrics preview customers have found that their Automated Call Summaries were more accurate than previous manual entries, which often lacked important details. Following a call, agents can simply review the automated summaries and add additional context as needed.

Automated Call Summaries easily integrate with an organization’s CRM system to give organizations a single source of truth for all customer records and a comprehensive history of the customer experience. This record can be referenced if a compliance issue arises and reduce the need for repeat callers to have to spend time explaining their service needs multiple times, making for a smoother experience for both customers and agents.