The future of customer experience: 5 benefits of agentic AI
Delivering excellent customer service over the phone starts with effective listening. A voice assistant must accurately hear and understand what...
The top 5 benefits of agentic AI
It’s no surprise that everything seems to be about AI these days. Yet even though it can feel like old news within the repetitive media landscape, this technology remains the dominant force across nearly every industry. As AI development moves at a clip, valid use cases continue building across the enterprise. But despite years of growth for this groundbreaking technology, contact centers have been one of the most significant and successful areas for AI adoption.
AI agents can manage up to 90% of repetitive tasks, empowering agents to focus on higher-quality, complex work. But incorporating AI isn’t just about cutting costs and replacing the inherently human aspects of customer service—it is actively reimagining digital transformation on the enterprise level. As the transition away from basic services becomes more of a need than a nice-to-have, rapid AI adaptation and experimentation prove critical in providing a holistic customer experience.
The genesis of this conversation started with our very own Nikola Mrkšić, CEO & Co-Founder of PolyAI, on a recent episode of the Tech Transformed podcast . Mrkšić, alongside Jon Arnold, Principal of J Arnold Associates, deep dives into all things AI, particularly agentic AI, and its potential to transform contact centers.
1. Remedy understaffing and demand increases
Most enterprise contact centers today experience a massive volume of repetitive tasks at grand scale. These monotonous queries can range from making reservations to asking questions about medical insurance or mortgage payments and even granular standard failure demands, such as overcharges. And while every customer query is important and worthy of resolution, the tedious nature of nonstop, unvarying requests builds up over time. The primary benefit of voice AI is the immediate relief it provides during demand surges, seasonal upticks, and staffing inadequacies.
2. Improve agent quality amidst budgetary concerns
In the battle against agent burnout, attrition, lack of resourcing, and inefficient time allocation, it’s unsurprising, even intuitive, to think of cost-cutting as the main benefit to implementing AI solutions. While some might liken this to the classic chicken-egg riddle, Mrkšić believes that a cost-cut-first mentality doesn’t get to the heart of the problem, “I think many start from cost-cutting as the primary high-level explanation for what's going on, but we've found that is not the case. It's one of the corollaries, not necessarily where people start. They're not doing customer service well enough.”
3. Go from contact center to command center
Once AI has been operationally integrated, the contact center can begin to look and act like a true command center. In the command center, the bidirectional stream of information starts to flow in a seamless, holistic way. Think of agentic AI as AI that can do work on an agent's behalf. The work being done is asynchronous, almost like a balm that smooths the rough points that connect various workflows.
4. Drive relevant insights for the entire business
When a contact center can quickly and effectively pull structured conversational data from massive reservoirs of customer interactions, they can make smarter decisions for their agents and the business at large. For instance, if a manager can easily access organized data, they can report on the inner workings with better precision. If you can identify the why behind a problem, such as a struggle to meet demand, the contact center turns from a cost center into a revenue generator.
5. Create a fail fast culture with room to experiment
When demand is high, staffing and agent morale are often minimal, hindering a contact center from the privilege of experimentation. The focus fixates on manic volume control and keeping heads just barely above water. With agentic AI and the speed with which it operates, contact center integration reveals itself quickly, giving CX leaders a fairly solid idea of what is and is not working. The use of this technology is not about implementing small, barely noticeable changes—because, let’s face it, big problems require bold solutions.
Agentic AI: another dimension to conversational AI
Conversational AI has long been a part of contact center operations, especially those that seek consistent, cost-mindful automation. The basic deterministic logic of this technology has helped countless customer queries through fixed decision trees. But as customer expectations grow and challenges take on a multiplex nature, traditional deterministic AI starts to fall short of easing contact center demands.
Agentic AI has the adaptability to respond to more unpredictable situations and improve its learning capabilities over time. While it currently serves as a tool for automating tasks, its next growth spurt will come in the form of transformative approaches to solving problems, allocating resources, and influencing business outcomes. While agentic AI solutions get to work immediately and reveal the fruit of their labor (or lack thereof) expeditiously, scaling this technology is ultimately a marathon, not a sprint.
