How Collaborative Intelligence Creates New Roles for Agents

It’s a misconception that ArtificiaI Intelligence (AI), including advanced robotics and digital bots, will gradually replace people. That may be true for certain jobs or tasks, but AI’s greater power is in complementing and augmenting human capabilities. Machines can perform repetitive tasks, analyze huge data sets, and handle routine cases. That frees people to do what they do best: resolve ambiguous information, exercise judgment, and communicate with dissatisfied customers. 

At Five9, we call this Collaborative Intelligence: our philosophy that humans and AI actively enhance each other’s complementary strengths. Collaborative Intelligence not only improves the overall customer experience; it also creates new, exciting roles for contact center workers.  

First, let’s look at how AI technologies are being adopted in the contact center to empower agents.  

New Roles for AI  

Reduce Agent Workload: Implementing AI in the contact center reduces an agent’s workload and stress by automating simple interactions and streamlining workflows. Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) free-up agent time by creating self-service automation for voice, webchat, SMS, and social channels. This gives agents more time to focus on complex interactions, while providing customers with exceptional self-service experiences. If an interaction requires a live agent, Five9 IVA automatically routes the customer along with their full history – which can include attachments and rich controls within a digital channel. Five9 IVA speech recognition can respond to common questions in 125 languages.  

Workflow Automation can also boost agent productivity and reduce stress by eliminating repetitive tasks and automating complex processes. Five9 Workflow Automation lets you connect your Five9 Intelligent Cloud Contact Center with other business systems to consistently create exceptional customer experiences by aggregating information, providing comprehensive views of data and performance, and automating sophisticated, cross-platform workflows. Pre-built data and functional integrations to external systems mean agents have repeatable processes that deliver consistent positive outcomes. 

Build Agent Expertise: AI can not only reduce agent stress but serve as a complementary tool to help agents develop product expertise. Providing agents with the information they need in an intuitive manner during a customer interaction also supports consistent, positive customer experiences. Five9 Agent Assist is a practical application of AI that can bring improved customer satisfaction scores by immediately improving agent performance; increasing first contact resolution (FCR); and reducing average handle time (AHT), escalations, and onboarding time. Agent Assist empowers your teams to deliver exceptional customer experiences with features including real-time transcripts and guidance, AI checklists, call recordings, and a transcript viewer. 

New Roles for Human Workers 

An individual who advances in a contact center doesn’t necessarily have to follow a traditional contact center management path. Collaborative Intelligence will also create new and exciting roles for agents. For example, agents can become trainers, planners and sustainers.  

Trainers: New roles are emerging for people who will design, deploy, and train contact center AI systems. New tools will become available for these roles that no longer require deep technical expertise. This means people with a business-level understanding of customer challenges can easily create automated solutions. 

Planners: Contact center managers forecast how many agents they need during periods of varying demand. With the introduction of IVAs, managers will need to plan for how many human and virtual agents they’ll need.  

Sustainers: People will need to continuously work to optimize AI performance and invest in solutions that provide positive results. The future of work for contact center agents remains bright. As organizations strive to exceed employee expectations and implement new AI tools to support their teams, there’s no limit to what they can achieve.  

Learn More 

Five9 will be highlighting collaborative intelligence at the upcoming Five9 CX Summit, taking place Aug. 9-11 in Las Vegas. Notable sessions include:  

Keynote: Five9 Vision  

Five9 CEO Rowan Trollope will share how we’re innovating with collaborative intelligence and key industry trends. Learn about the latest results from our global Customer Service Index Business Decision Makers Survey so you can get ahead of what’s next in the world of CX. Hear about key customer transformations and how Five9 is driving industry partnerships to help you reimagine your customer experience and drive successful business transformation. 

Enable Your Agents with AI 

No industry has likely undergone more change than healthcare in the past two years. The healthcare contact center is no different. Hear from Andrea Brown of Teladoc on how they’re using Five9 Agent Assist to empower agents to deal with the most challenging issues. 

Elevate Self-Service with Conversational AI  

Want to scale your workforce and empower your customers? Join Scott Baker, Senior Analyst at Opus Research, for an insightful panel discussion with Five9 customers on deploying intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) in the contact center. Topics include: IVA maturity across several industries based on Opus survey data; how to get started with Conversational AI and determine the best use cases to support; and how to measure success. 

Business Planning - Collaborative Intelligence: What you need to know to stay ahead 

Collaborative: produced by two+ parties working together. Intelligence: the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. Seems simple enough, right? Then why are so many businesses slow to define and implement a collaborative intelligence (CI) strategy? Join Srini Ravaghan, Senior Vice President of Product at Five9, as he gives you the knowledge and tools you need to develop your own CI business plan. You’ll leave with a greater understanding of the space, a clear plan, specific use cases to consider, the tools to measure the ROI, the perspective to measure the outcomes, and the wisdom to know where to start. Set your business up for success for the next 10 years by developing a strong CI plan today. 

Learn more about these sessions and the rest of the insight-packed agenda at Five9 CX Summit.