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How to improve agent productivity and future-proof your contact center experience with AI

Empowering contact center agents with generative AI

March 14, 2024 • 4 minutes

hand and brain illustration, representing AI's role in a positive contact center experience

10 minutes on hold. That’s how long you have before half your customers consider going to a competitor, according to our State of Customer Conversations 2024 report. The contact center experience you provide for customers has become an increasingly vital part of your overall customer experience. When 77% of consumers say they are more critical of how businesses interact with them this year compared to a year ago, your contact center interactions have to be at the top of the game at all times.

Despite labor challenges and tight budgets, there is a way for brands to improve these customer interactions — by leaning into conversational AI. Not just customer-facing AI chatbots, but agent-facing AI empowering the people behind the contact centers.

Al is a great way to drive agent efficiency, protect brand consistency, and personalize conversations with customers. As we head into a new AI-enhanced world, your customers will expect their experience to be faster, more seamless, and always accurate. In fact, 2 out of 3 consumers expect the way they work with businesses to improve over the next five years thanks to AI.

The clock is ticking, are you ready?

Your new AI rollout plan? Prioritize agents over consumers

While many consumers expect AI to improve the customer experience in the not-so-distant future, they’re not exactly sold on AI today (in 2024). Only 50% of consumers feel positive about using AI to engage with a business. It’s a stark contrast to the 91% of business leaders who feel positive about using AI to engage with customers — otherwise known as the AI gap.

Fortunately, this insight means businesses have time to perfect their customer-facing AI experiences. How? By testing the waters with agent-facing generative AI tools in your contact center. AI-powered assistants can help to solve a plethora of contact center performance problems from reducing wait times to providing faster answers to customer inquiries and ensuring accurate information.

chart of what business leaders think AI-powered contact center software and automated customer service agents can help solve — Explore what consumers and business leaders really think about AI in our State of Customer Conversations 2024 report.

Empowering agents with generative AI tools gives them the ability to enhance the customer experience — while staying in control of the AI. So even if your customers are on the fence about interacting with AI bots, you can still harness the power AI brings without the risk. Use this time to test the functionality of generative AI and continue training your large language model (LLM) before you unleash it on your customer base.

AI-powered tools to enhance your contact center experience

Ready to empower your contact center agents with AI? LivePerson’s got you covered. Our generative AI tools are safe, secure, and reliable.

KnowledgeAI™

Set up and deploy your generative AI functionality with confidence by powering it through LivePerson’s KnowledgeAI. KnowledgeAI unifies and leverages your brand’s knowledge base and content to power generative AI tools. Whether you use LivePerson’s natural language understanding (NLU) or bring your own, KnowledgeAI helps to serve up accurate and on-brand answers for your contact center agents to harness in conversation, leading to a more positive customer experience.

Copilot

Boost contact center agent performance and productivity with a Copilot to help navigate customer interactions. LivePerson’s AI-powered Copilot tool helps summarize prior conversations across multiple channels (phone calls or messaging) to provide more personalized responses. It also can provide recommended answers and rewrite responses to help agents sound more professional and on-brand every time. Your contact center agents still maintain the ability to review, edit, and approve Copilot customer responses— keeping a human in the loop at all times across the customer journey.

Assisting contact center agents with LivePerson

Here’s a look at how LivePerson is helping to improve the call center and contact center experience across different industries:

Banking

Explore how Capitec, a leading bank in South Africa, used messaging as a roadmap to the future of banking, creating exceptional customer experiences and building happier customer service teams and a healthier bottom line.

SaaS

Discover how this publicly traded B2B software company turned to generative AI to better support their customer service teams. With Copilot, chatbot customer support agents were able to increase the speed and accuracy with which they responded to customer inquiries.

The countdown to improve your customer experience through AI is on — focusing on the contact center experience is a good place to start. The impact these automations can have on your agents can be seen in your customer satisfaction, agent satisfaction, and more notably, lower agent attrition in your contact centers. As your business continues its digital transformation make sure your agents have the right tools to keep up with customer expectations.