Amazon Web Services and Salesforce each launched contact center features Monday aimed at helping call centers analyze data from past calls and create guides for agents to handle common inquiries.
While their solutions take somewhat different approaches, most are powered by generative AI. All, however, have the intent of assisting agents, not replacing them.
People remain an important part of the call center, but they will increasingly work alongside technology, according to Julie Geller, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group.
“The future of call center operations will be deeply influenced by employee-facing generative AI, enhancing training, performance evaluations and job satisfaction,” Geller told CX Dive in an email.
Summaries enhance agent performance
AWS and Salesforce each have a new call center solution for post-call analysis.
AWS is debuting generative AI-powered post-contact summaries, which condense customer conversations into short transcripts to help agents and managers understand call outcomes.
The summaries aim to help managers efficiently comb through many calls to uncover trends that point to shortcomings or successes, according to Michael Wallace, Americas solutions architecture leader for CX at AWS.
Meanwhile, Salesforce is introducing Einstein conversation mining, which aggregates and analyzes conversation data to find common reasons for calls. The tool is designed to help supervisors quickly find trends and opportunities for improvement, according to Ryan Nichols, chief product officer of Service Cloud at Salesforce.
Traditional analytics tools track what is happening at call centers but fail to examine the “why” behind those patterns, according to Christina McAllister, senior analyst at Forrester. Generative AI solutions greatly reduce the time and effort managers need to uncover actionable insights.
Generative AI empowers “CX analysts to be more agile and creative in their approach to conversation analytics since these discovery efforts were previously impractical or inaccessible,” she told CX Dive in an email.
Guidance creates smoother service
AWS and Salesforce are each also releasing solutions to offer agents guidance on how to handle common inquiries.
The AWS solution doesn’t involve generative AI, but offers user-friendly tools that let managers create step-by-step guides for agents to help them resolve specific customer inquiries. The guides can be integrated within relevant applications to save agents the trouble of putting a customer on hold while they reference external material, Wallace said.
Salesforce is launching an AI-powered knowledge creation tool with a similar goal. The solution harnesses AI to automatically create articles with information derived from past calls for agents to use as a resource to when they handle future inquiries on the same subject.
Managers are able to review and edit articles to ensure accuracy before they are posted on a call center’s knowledge base.
