Increase Value of Every Customer Interaction with Agent Assist
August 21, 2023
Ever since cloud contact centers have grown in popularity, a common saying has been rejoiced by the CX community “Turn your contact center into a profit center”. As affirmed by Gartner, “By 2025, 40% of customer service organizations will become profit centers by becoming de facto leaders in digital customer engagement.”
Many customer service organizations have reimagined their customer experience to reduce their average handle time and lower their costs. However, there’s another crucial role that impacts contact center ROI that often goes overlooked, contact center agents.
Going Beyond Customer Service
After a point of sale (POS), customer service interactions are one of the few opportunities a business has that they get to talk live with their customer. Many businesses recognize that and ask their contact center agents to go above and beyond their call of duty to seek out the golden upsell opportunity. You fix your customer’s problem, you have them on the phone, and you might as well make more money from them. The math seems simple, right?
Let’s say you’re a smartphone user that takes hundreds of photos and stores them all on your local device. One day you decide to show your family a vacation album, but instead, your phone locks up and ghost hits the ‘delete’ album button. In this scenario, you’re probably going to spend a good amount of time with a customer service representative trying to figure out how to recover them. Before hanging up - after an hour on the phone, the agent says, “Would you be interested in trading in your phone for 50% off the new smartphone 15?”. How would that make you feel as a loyal customer?
Challenges with Traditional Upsell Tactics
Under the covers, there are several challenges the agent faces:
Contact center agents are focused on solving customer problems. They speak to customers that are often frustrated or are seeking help from experts - sometimes that even includes sensitive information and personal challenges. How would your contact center agents feel when they’ve been mandated to offer the latest promotion after handling a difficult conversation? How would your customers feel? Chances are your agents feel uncomfortable, your customers may feel even more frustrated, and ultimately you lose credibility.
In order for an agent to comfortably initiate an upsell, they need to have a level of expertise of their company’s products and current promotions. For example product specifications, pricing bundles, and discounts offered. This often comes with lengthy experience, however, according to Five9’s Customer Service Index 2022, the average tenure for an agent is 12-15 months and 47% of contact center executives cited retention as their biggest challenge. So how are agents supposed to become subject matter experts within just a few months?
Lastly, it’s important for agents to know why a particular product, feature, or promotion may add value for the customer they’re interacting with. Information like call history, and customer information can provide key indicators for whether a customer would be interested in an upsell case.
In our smartphone example, the agent would have benefited from having a deeper understanding of the customer’s root problem, product offerings that would resolve the same issue in the future, and whether the customer was ready to hear about them.
To recap, it’s challenging for agents to know when the right time is to initiate an upsell, what a particular product or promotion is with a level of depth, and why a customer would be interested in it. So, how do give the power to your agents to identify the best upsell opportunities?
How to Improve Your Upsell Win Rate
By providing your agents with important customer information, helping them identify likely upsell opportunities, and helping guide them to important product information they will add more value to your customer experience. Traditionally this was a lot, it required companies to connect their CRM, knowledge bases, AI tools like transcription services, all to their agent desktop. However, today this has become easy.
At its core, agent assist creates collaborative intelligence, that combines the unique relational skills of people and smart machines, where both augment the other’s capabilities to improve your agent’s upsell win rate.
What is Five9 Agent Assist?
Five9 offers enterprise-ready AI-powered technology that helps them to be more informed, engaged, and focused on the customer’s needs. While there are many Agent Assist products on the market, Five9 Agent Assist features some of the most advanced capabilities that have been refined to identify the right upsell opportunities, and provide real-time guidance and support to agents at the right time.
Five9 Agent Assist analyzes a customer contact for intent, and at the right time presents your agent with guidance cards and knowledge articles about existing product and promotion information. This makes it easy for your agents to know whether your customer would benefit from a specific upsell interaction, and when to initiate it.
You can also enable capabilities like AI Checklist that automatically keeps track of an agent’s actions performed during an interaction and teaches new agents the upsell process by spotting intents from the conversation and automatically checking off action items performed. This gives contact center leaders the flexibility to customize the conversational flow of upsell interactions based on insights from successful sales.
Reach out to us for a live demo and learn how Five9 Agent Assist empowers your agents to deliver better service, close more deals, and increase customer satisfaction.
