Some frustrations in life are fairly universal.
Whether it’s someone stealing the parking spot right outside your house, accidentally stubbing your toe, or having to explain the same issue twice on a customer service call.
We all know the drill. You’ve called a contact center with a billing dispute; you’ve navigated a virtual agent, repeating your account number twice and providing a detailed explanation; and you finally get through to a human agent who immediately asks: “So, what seems to be the problem today?”
The frustration is real...and somewhat warranted.
In instances like this, the virtual agent has handled the interaction; it just hasn’t done anything useful with it.
That gap, between what virtual agents process and what they actually pass forward, is one of the more persistent frustrations in the contact center industry.
According to Tom Azernour, AI Product Manager at Diabolocom, it reflects how the category has been defined from the start:
“The traditional virtual agents, the legacy voice bots, were about deflection of redundant requests. They follow a predefined path. They're great in specific situations, but if the caller doesn't perfectly follow the flow, they may fail.”
Thankfully, the industry has evolved since then. Intelligent virtual agents have brought intent detection and smarter routing.
However, the underlying logic of handling what they can and handing off the rest has largely stayed the same. The handoff is still the problem.
From Deflection to Orchestration
For Diabolocom, fixing that problem means rethinking what a virtual agent is actually for.
The decision tree model, where every possible outcome is mapped in advance, is obsolete; instead, contact centers should be striving for goal-driven autonomy.
"We give the virtual agent a starting point, a goal, and the virtual agent fills in the gaps," Azernour explains.
“Virtual agents judge whether they need more information or whether they have enough context to act. Then, they use connectors and access to other applications to actually do something – the same way a human would.”
The practical effect is that the virtual agent stops being a front door and starts being a functioning part of the contact center's workflow. Diabolocom calls this the orchestration layer, and the distinction matters most when the interaction ends.
“One of the most important currencies in contact centers is time,” Azernour says.
“If the client has been saying the same thing over and over, we don't get the benefit of the virtual agent. And if the human agent has to ask the same questions again, that is also time lost.”
The answer is structured output. Where most virtual agents hand off a transcript, Diabolocom's approach extracts intent, summaries, flags indicating dissatisfaction or potential fraud, and adds any custom data fields the business specifies, as Azernour explains:
“You decide what you want to fetch during the conversation, whether it is a contract numbers, sentiment, or previous call context. You can cherry-pick what you pass to the next agent or feed it directly into a CRM.”