The contact center virtual assistant has evolved, supporting customer service teams in various new ways.
Additionally, they are smarter than ever, leveraging machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), generative AI, and advanced algorithms to make contact center teams more productive and efficient.
As such, it’s no wonder that around 80 percent of contact centers are using AI-powered technologies, such as AI assistants, to revolutionize customer service.
Indeed, leveraged correctly, they can cut long waiting times, track customer sentiment, increase sales, and offer service teams live coaching.
As these tools continue to evolve, thanks to the evolution of agentic AI technologies, the possibilities widen further.
Yet, before getting too carried away, let's consider 20 use cases virtual assistants are capable of performing today.
Contact Center Virtual Assistant Use Cases for Agents
While virtual agents may automate many contacts without a human-in-the-loop, human agents are those who handle the complex, emotionally charged queries that make or break customer loyalty.
As such, the success of any customer retention project still hinges on human professionals who can creatively solve problems, empathize with customers, and build relationships.
However, AI can augment these agents in a range of ways, streamlining tasks and boosting productivity on a massive scale.
Here are some of the top contact center virtual assistant use cases for agents.
1. Bringing Context to Customer Conversations
Virtual assistants can collect information about a customer in the call queue, summarize it, and hand it over to an agent before they begin a call.
Moreover, it can collect complementary information from CRM systems and knowledge base articles, ensuring agents have everything they need to address an issue quickly.
Think of this use case as the old-fashioned contact center screen pop on steroids.
2. Surfacing Valuable Information in Real Time
According to one McKinsey report, employees spend around 1.8 hours daily searching for information. In the contact center, even a few minutes spent looking for answers to a customer’s question can cause frustration.
Thankfully, a contact center virtual assistant can recognize the keywords a customer says in an initial conversation, identify their "intent", and surface relevant information from trusted sources in real time.
As a result, live agents can address issues faster and stay focused on the conversation.
3. Crafting Customer Responses
Crafting highly personalized responses to queries across digital channels takes time, but a virtual assistant can help. Leveraging GenAI, they can immediately suggest a response to a question, which an agent can then review, edit, and send in seconds.
To do so, the virtual agent can leverage insights from various knowledge sources, such as knowledge bases, CRMs, and web links. All the agent needs to do is ensure the response is relevant, and accurate before clicking "send".
4. Simplifying Note-Taking with a Contact Center Virtual Assistant
Note-taking is important in the contact center. After all, it helps the agent stay focused on key aspects of the customer's story, aiding the resolution process.
However, taking notes throughout every customer conversation can drag an agent’s attention away from what matters, the discussion at hand.
As such, some virtual assistants can automatically take notes when a customer talks for the agent, so they can keep track of critical topics throughout a discussion.
Additionally, these notes can accelerate the post-call wrap-up process, as they may automatically filter through to the CRM.
5. Providing Real-Time Coaching
Contact center virtual assistants can be valuable coaches and guides for team members, gathering extensive live data and using it to provide real-time training to every employee.
For instance, it may recognize specific terms that the customer says that suggest an excellent opportunity for upselling or cross-selling.
Such actions can help agents achieve their goals and targets faster, and increase sales and revenue for companies, too.
6. Monitoring Customer Sentiment Signals
Sentiment analysis is becoming sophisticated, aiding companies as they look for ways to learn more about customers and what drives loyalty and retention rates.
However, insights into customer sentiment can also provide agents with insights into where they can proactively improve.
With a contact center virtual assistant identifying signals that indicate positive or negative sentiment, agents can see in real-time when they might need to adjust their tone of voice and take a different approach to de-escalate a situation or improve customer satisfaction.
7. Enabling Real-Time Translation
Globalization is happening at an incredible pace in virtually every industry.
In the past, companies that wanted to scale into new geographies would have to spend a fortune hiring multilingual customer service team members.
Now, a contact center virtual assistant can instantly bridge language gaps, translating conversations in real time.
This ensures agents can deliver the same quality of service to customers from different locations.
While this use case is usually reserved for digital channels, some contact center virtual assistant providers are taking steps to translate voice calls, thanks to the GenAI advancements.
8. Automating Desktop Processes
The faster a live agent can address a query, the quicker they can move on to the next conversation in the queue, improving efficiency.
Yet, during certain conversations, mid-discussion tasks can take up a lot of time, like entering details into a form, copying and pasting information, or initiating processes like refunding customers.
A contact center virtual assistant can handle these tasks automatically, populating forms with information given by a customer and even completing tasks like scheduling an engineer to visit a client’s home.
9. Streamlining Transfers and Escalations
While intelligent routing tools increase the chances of a customer being connected to the right agent straight away, there are still times when a conversation might need to be transferred or escalated to another professional.
A contact center virtual assistant can simplify this process by summarizing the conversation so far and ensuring that the summary passes through to the next person talking to the customer.
In enabling this transfer of context - across channels - virtual assistants can support the development of an omnichannel contact center.
10. Tagging Interactions with Disposition Codes
During post-contact processing, virtual assistants can automatically tag each customer's conversation with a disposition code. This code classifies the reason why the customer reached out.