Agentic is a type of artificial intelligence that is designed to act autonomously, making decisions and taking actions towards a specific goal. Agentic AI is the next frontier in customer service – providing numerous benefits in contact centers to deliver seamless, efficient interactions for customers.
Agentic AI is addressing a range of bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the contact center, including:
- Staff shortages and high employee churn rates
- Rising customer expectations
- Inefficiencies in traditional CX approaches
By providing more human-like interaction, agentic AI heralds an era of meaningful interaction with digital agents. Rather than threatening to replace humans’ jobs, agentic AI will actually evolve the role of the call center operator and help ease some of the more mundane tasks through automation.
As Sebastian Glock, Director of Product Marketing at Cognigy, explains: "AI will take over simpler tasks, allowing human agents to focus on more complex problems. In the short term, this shift will push agents to develop new skills. Over time, as their roles become more valuable and specialized, it could lead to lower attrition rates and potentially higher wages, reflecting their growing importance to business success."
Here we explore how AI and human agents can complement each other in customer service, highlighting both the opportunities and the challenges of their collaboration.
Job roles: AI and human agents
The jobs of both human and digital agents are set to evolve as agentic AI is rolled out in contact centers. Striking a balance between optimal use of the two types of agents includes their abilities in areas including:
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Task Automation vs. Complex Problem Solving
AI Agents: AI will take over or continue to assist with routine, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks such as answering common customer queries, managing simple transactions, and handling initial customer interactions. The AI agent will use pre-defined processes and data-driven decision-making to autonomously resolve routine issues, such as checking account balances, delivery statuses etc.
Human Agents: Human agents will be responsible for complex problem-solving, handling escalations, and managing emotionally charged or high-stakes interactions.
There will be a warm handover from AI to human agent if required. This ensures the human agent can take over a call with a full background of the customer and the issue – so the customer doesn’t have to repeat themselves and a resolution can be quickly achieved.
“The AI can help them [human agents] by preparing data and providing context before the agent even speaks to the customer. This helps the customer feel heard and understood, improving both customer satisfaction and agent experience,” emphasizes Glock.
An AI agent will increasingly understand when to handover to a human agent, such as recognizing via sophisticated sentiment analysis when a customer is angry or upset. If a customer asks a question that the AI cannot handle, it will flag the interaction for human input.