From overwhelmed to augmented: How AI can take the strain to empower supervisors

As a working mother, I often find myself wishing for an extra pair of hands to manage the chaos of daily life. The feeling of being stretched thin isn't unique to me, or to parenthood - it's a sentiment that resonates deeply in our modern era, in which we’re trying to live up to the expectation—ours and society’s—of having it all and doing it all, personally and professionally.

The constant pressure to be “on” all the time, to perform, adapt and excel in all areas of life, is particularly acute for those in demanding, people-facing roles, such as sales and marketing. Add in the added pressure of being responsible for a team – in terms of both their wellbeing and performance – and it’s clear that something has to give. And that’s exactly the sweet spot in which contact center supervisors sit.

One of the ways in which I juggle the load in my personal life is by using tools like generative AI for tasks that take up a lot of head space—like juggling our family calendar. It significantly reduces my time investment, and more importantly, the hassle. And now, supervisors can harness similar technology in their work life, all wrapped up in a new tool that’s tailored to meet their day-to-day needs and challenges: Enlighten Copilot for Supervisors.

The supervisor squeeze

Supervisors are challenged to manage—and motivate—agents who are grappling with heavy workloads, juggling an array of tools, and spending valuable time stuck on repetitive tasks. On average, a supervisor will be responsible for 20-50 agents, each of them dealing with multiple contacts—chats, calls and social media—typically with 3.2 ongoing contacts per agent at any given time.

This frenetic work environment no doubt contributes to call center attrition rates—which can be as high as 70%—in turn resulting in reduced productivity and increased costs of hiring and training for the organization. It’s also probably why a NICE and CMSWire Insights survey found 62% of supervisors overseeing contact center agents say they have found their work more stressful in the past two years, with the knock-on effect being that 78% say increased work stress is negatively impacting the customer experience. 

Meanwhile, customers are increasingly expecting a slick, personalized service – and heaven help the contact center that doesn’t deliver! In a recent Omdia survey, 65% of customers reported that they had left a provider because of poor customer service, 47% of them because the company did not know their particular interests or needs. What’s more, 48% of consumers stated that a company’s lack of digital capabilities has a negative impact on loyalty, meaning they won’t hesitate to jump ship to another, more tech-savvy provider.

Enlighten Copilot for Supervisors as a strategic ally

This is where Enlighten Copilot for Supervisors comes in—making the work of the supervisor more efficient and enabling them to contribute to the company less as a task manager and more as a strategic leader.

Purpose-built for CX, Enlighten is a comprehensive, AI-powered assistant that converges insights from across the CXone platform—including ACD, WFM, QM, and IA. It is based on world-class AI models that leverage the power of the world's largest validated dataset of omnichannel customer interactions, to enhance customer experience. Providing efficient, personalized services, it bridges the gaps between customer expectations, business needs, and service quality.

By adding this layer of AI, Enlighten Copilot elevates the business impact of CXone Supervisor—the core one-stop-shop app that brings together supervisor tools (dashboards, reporting, monitoring, coaching, evaluating, reskilling, and more) so they can be used in a seamless, effortless way. This ensures a more strategic and targeted approach to managing and improving agent performance. It does this through a number of core functionalities: monitoring, alerts, assistance and insights.

Actionable Insights

Enlighten Copilot uncovers trends, patterns, and risks related to team KPIs that are being tracked over time. Carrying out enriched data analysis of metrics such as response time, customer satisfaction ratings, and issue resolution rates, Enlighten Copilot provides supervisors with a deeper understanding of what’s going on in an interaction in less time. AI alerts direct supervisors’ attention to the most important matters about their team, together with AI insights and context based on summaries, reasoning, and background information. This empowers them to handle issues quickly, making informed decisions and offering agents targeted assistance, to address specific challenges with maximum efficiency.

Enlighten Copilot’s insights also go beyond the contact center, enabling benchmarking against industry standards so supervisors can set strategic team performance goals, and reach new heights in CX.

Conversational Inquiries

Truly leveraging AI to capture details that may otherwise be overlooked, supervisors can obtain relevant, personalized insights into what’s going on in the contact center - from across the CXone platform - via simple proactive conversational inquiries. Rather than carrying out intense, time-consuming analysis of data extracted from different interfaces, they can simply ask, “Who are my top five agents?”, and Enlighten will identify high-performers. The supervisor can then recognize individual achievements—a great way to make agents feel valued and boost their motivation, which helps reduce the dreaded attrition rates.

Beyond surfacing the contact center’s critical CX issues, such as sentiment risks, Copilot conversational inquiries help supervisor prioritize issues that arise, provides them with real-time context for those issues, and then recommend next best steps which they can easily take directly from within the application. Enabling supervisors to provide agents with smarter, in-the-moment, personalized guidance not only enhances the effectiveness of supervisor input, but also drives continuous improvement in agent performance, resulting in a more skilled and empowered agent workforce.

This is the AI-zation of supervisors’ daily tasks—a true augmentation which takes the supervisor beyond the role of operational taskmaster, to a much more strategic role in the contact center instead.

Supervisor Impact

Supervisor impact insights provide a clearer picture of how supervisory actions—or inactions—affect overall performance, by analyzing the impact of supervisor involvement in escalations and agent performance. Incorporating these insights into the team management strategy, organizations can uncover opportunities to enhance supervisors' effectiveness as an influential force within the team. This approach highlights the potential for performance optimization through informed and optimized management practices—a welcome development given that both supervisors and agents express being eager to take on assistance from AI.

Unlock your organization’s true potential

Choosing the right AI tool for your contact center isn’t just a tech decision—it's a strategic one that can impact how successful your business is in the competitive market. Across the board, from agent experience to business outcomes and customer satisfaction, Enlighten Copilot delivers tangible and quantifiable advantages, redefining the way employees work and fostering a positive environment that translates into improved job satisfaction, enhanced efficiency, streamlined customer journeys and better resolutions.