How Agents Benefit from Automated Interaction Summaries

An agent logs in to her computer and sees she has been assigned a callback to a customer who reached out the previous day about a missing credit card payment. Seeking context, she reviews the notes in the CRM application which read: “CX James Smith 25854116585858/concerned about missing pymnt/DM researched/no record in acc/informed not posted/ prms cb.”

The summary she’s viewing was written in about a minute by her hurried colleague who handled the last interaction with the customer, but unfortunately it’s not quite clear—she’ll have to ask the customer to review some key details.

Many contact centers today look to their agents to provide a detailed accounting of what happens during each interaction just like this example. Agents are responsible for accurately and consistently capturing every detail, from why the customer contacted the business to the outcome of the call and the actions taken during the interaction. When those notes are taken manually, however, it’s a time-consuming process—and one that often results in an incomplete or inaccurate summary of an interaction.

Consider an alternate scenario, one in which the agent works for a company that leverages AI-enabled technology to automatically generate objective, consistent interaction summaries. The same agent is now able to quickly understand what happened in the previous interaction with James Smith by reviewing the summary in sentence form:

“Mr. James Smith last contact about Billing: Missing Payment was 7 days ago, had negative sentiment, and was not resolved. Mr. Smith was offered and declined a bill credit and was promised a callback.”

Armed with the relevant information and insight into caller sentiment, the agent is able to deliver a seamless, exceptional experience for the customer. And, when the call concludes, the technology automatically generates an interaction summary, freeing the agent to move immediately to the next task on her to-do list.

Eliminating the Busywork Associated with Automated Call Summaries

Advances in AI are making manual agent interaction summaries a thing of the past. The latest generation of AI contact summary tools automate the notetaking process with great accuracy. Incomplete, scattered notes become a clear, concise agent summary. The results include smooth and complete interactions with customers and focused, efficient agents.

Automated notetaking offers a wide range of benefits, including the ability to:

• Empower agents: Agents can focus on the customer, not on tedious notetaking. Automating the interaction summary process not only improves agent productivity by eliminating busywork but also enables agents to spend more time on the human side of their job—those higher-value activities that technology can’t replicate. For an agent spending a minute per call on after-call work for an average of 55 calls per day, automated notetaking can save, on average, 30 seconds per call. That time savings adds up to approximately 3 hours (of free) time in a typical work week.
• Boost KPIs: Agents can decrease after-call work, average handle time and repeat contacts—the metrics they’re judged against every day.
• Boost EX (employee experience): Automated interaction summaries help eliminate agent frustration. Agents no longer have to search the CRM for previous summaries for past interactions and can instead benefit from easily accessible notes. Agents are happier when they have the tools they need to do their jobs, and do them well.
• Improve CX (customer experience): A recent NICE study found that the shorter call times and less dead air that good notetaking promotes can lead to significant satisfaction gains (as much as 3.7x higher CSAT). When an agent can’t understand what happened in previous interactions, they have to ask the customer to fill in the details, and one-third of customers say this is the most frustrating aspect of phone support. Removing that source of customer frustration, in turn, reduces stress that can lead to agent burnout – a key factor because customer satisfaction and agent satisfaction are inherently linked. According to Forrester, “there is no doubt that a key contributor to CX improvement is EX.”

The quality of customer support you offer can either sink you or deliver a competitive edge, and it’s more important than ever—nearly six in 10 customers think the quality of customer service has diminished during the pandemic. Automated interaction summaries remove the tedious notetaking required of agents, empowering them to focus on delivering a great customer experience while delivering a significant boost to productivity for the organization. Learn more about how AI-powered automated agent interaction summaries are delivering benefits to agents, and the organizations that employ them, with Enlighten AutoSummary.