Balto Elevates the Agent Experience in the Contact Center with New Suite of Features

Reaffirms commitment to agent empowerment for retention and growth in the contact center

Balto, the leader in uniting contact center agents with AI for better conversations, is excited to announce the release of a suite of features for its market-leading real-time guidance platform dedicated to improving the agent experience in the contact center.

The new features bolster Balto’s commitment to empowering agents to confidently navigate every call conversation, creating a happier, more engaged contact center workforce — a philosophy that translates to happier customers, increased revenue, and higher employee satisfaction, according to research by Glassdoor.

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The robust feature-set slated for release in October will include:

Top agents know what works best to drive call outcomes. Agent-sourced content empowers top agents to achieve success by offering greater flexibility in the content they see. Selected agents can add their voice to the playbook, test new checklist items, and snooze or minimize prompts. This provides opportunity for senior agents to contribute best practices that will benefit new agents, so they can ramp faster and more effectively.

Gamification drives agents to want to achieve through the spirit of competition. Challenges, leaderboards, and badges increase agent engagement and make their job more satisfying, while providing a framework to be recognized by leadership with monetary rewards.

Agents can set up Balto with their own spin. Themes, personalized win animations, and accessibility options bring new ways for agents to be delighted with their Balto experience. Enabling agents to customize their work space will result in improved agent productivity and overall job satisfaction.

“Balto champions a fun, flexible, and engaging agent experience that creates moments of delight and rewards the wins — big or small.” said Chris Kontes, Balto COO and Co-founder. “These incremental capabilities will help contact centers achieve high levels of customer growth, improve customer satisfaction, and reduce average handle times, while retaining agents who will be more satisfied with their jobs. Because if your agents are satisfied, so are your customers.”

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This month, Balto became the first conversational AI technology platform to surpass 150 million calls guided in real time. A key contributor to this exponential growth has been market endorsement of Real-Time Guidance as more than a tool to simply “assist” agents live on calls to one of true agent empowerment.

“Agent assistant tools really put the onus on the agent to figure out what to do with the information presented and are more of an enforcement tool. That’s the last place we want to be,” continues Kontes. “Instead, we focus on giving agents the confidence to improve their conversations by providing the support they need in the moment — making them better, and happier, at their jobs.”

One such new agent empowerment feature is the ability for top performing agents to source their own content, offering greater flexibility in the content they see. Earlier this year, Balto conducted a survey of over 500 agents across industries and found that two out of three wanted to change their script — particularly tenured agents who have the most familiarity with the talk tracks. From them they have developed their own personalized approach. Getting content input from them invests them in the script-writing process and its results. On the manager’s side, it helps them continuously iterate on playbooks with little-to-no interaction and allows them to draw from an untapped well of knowledge — their agents — for improved call outcomes.

In addition to agent-sourced content, the new personalization and gamification features keep agents delighted and engaged. In fact, according to a recent TalemLMS survey, employee respondents said gamification makes employees feel more productive (89%) and happier at work (88%). “When the agent experience is improved, the customer experience inevitably follows. And our customers are seeing the results,” adds Kontes.

The recent release comes on the heels of several other major agent-focused announcements in 2022 to date. First, Balto launched Real-Time Guidance in Spanish for Spanish-speaking agents and customers. Balto is also now embeddable in Genesys, NICE in Contact, Salesforce, and other major softphone and CMS platforms for a “single pane of glass” experience that streamlines agent workflows.

The new agent experience features will be rolled out in October after a thorough pilot program.