Automation and Human Agents: The Benefits of a Hybrid Workforce

By Replicant
April 21, 2021

It wasn’t long ago that artificial intelligence (AI) felt futuristic. But with the recent acceleration in digital innovation, today’s AI technology is mature enough to offer businesses real, tangible benefits that impact the customer experience. Mindful innovation has shown that AI can be a valuable workforce addition — not a substitute, as many feared.

With Contact Center Automation, there’s a place for both humans and AI in customer service. While 55% of customers say they prefer to speak to a human, a full 54% also said they would always choose AI over a human customer service rep if it saved them 10 minutes.

It’s also been found that “humans and AI actively enhance each other’s complementary strengths: the leadership, teamwork, creativity, and social skills of the former, and the speed, scalability, and quantitative capabilities of the latter.”

The contact center has become a proving ground for how AI workforces and humans can collaborate to deliver great customer experiences — each drawing on their unique strengths to create happy customers, improve retention, and increase revenue.

AI technology is now baked into cloud contact centers through Contact Center Automation. With Replicant, AI and humans team up, with the former offering lifelike conversations powered by conversational AI – with the full capacity to serve as a secondary workforce.

Working in tandem, humans and AI can resolve more issues faster and ensure customers receive the level of attention and expertise needed for the best possible outcome. Let’s break down how a hybrid human-AI workforce benefits companies, agents, and customers.

Automated resolution of tier 1 issues

Replicant’s Thinking Machine is available 24/7 and doesn’t get tired of repetitive, mundane tasks, which makes it perfect to take on tier 1 issues. AI is great for automating high-volume transactions and providing information, like sending copies of insurance policies or looking up an order status.

Instead of waiting for an available human agent to help with these simple and straightforward requests, customers receive immediate service and efficient resolution.

Agents are more engaged

When AI lifts the burden of tier 1 issues from human agents, it frees them up to focus on complex or urgent issues. When agents find their work interesting, important, and fulfilling, they’re more likely to stay with their company. This dynamic helps contact centers overcome the stifling effects of a shorthanded labor market.

Everyone wins when agents are engaged. Not only do agents and employers, but customers do too. McKinsey & Company found engaged and satisfied call-center employees are:

8.5x more likely to stay than leave within a year
16x more likely to refer friends to their company
3.3x more likely to feel extremely empowered to resolve customer issues

Increased agent efficiency

If a customer request needs to be escalated to a human agent, the Thinking Machine provides the agent with an automated summary of the conversation. With context on what has already happened, agents can easily jump straight into helping the customer without making the customer repeat themselves.

After the conversation, AI handles all of the manual logging that agents would normally do and more. It auto-logs and resolves tickets in the CRM and support software, generates a full call transcript, and auto-tags calls with their disposition and issue type. No more after-call notes for human agents, which means agents can jump into another request immediately.

Replicant’s Thinking Machine can repeat these flows over any channel – not just voice – giving reliable, consistent service no matter when or where they are.

Insights into unstructured call data

AI helps human agents easily analyze unstructured call data to measure CSAT, determine common product issues, and get real-time insights into call center performance.

By sorting and categorizing calls, AI gives contact centers an easy way to identify their most common request drivers and trends in customer behavior. With all of these insights at your fingertips, customer service organizations are equipped to continuously improve the customer experience and delight customers.

By collaborating to serve customers in tandem, AI and humans are able to do more for customers than either could do alone and do it faster with greater accuracy.

Adding an AI workforce to the contact center creates a scalable layer of service that’s always available to answer calls and resolve issues, letting brands automatically scale their customer service capacity up and down as request volume fluctuates.

Deploying a hybrid workforce leverages the best of both AI and humans to create the exceptional customer experiences needed today.