For any business that runs a contact center to handle customer requests, it’s no secret that agent turnover is high. While this makes perfect sense — dealing with unhappy, frustrated customers on a daily basis can be very exhausting — the problem is deeply rooted in agents’ not having right tools or the information DURING the conversation.

Agents aside, the inability of contact centers, now handling a much higher call volume post-pandemic, to deliver prompt and delightful customer experiences is having a much larger impact on business KPIs like lower customer satisfaction (CSAT) and customer loyalty, often measured by NPS scores.

For years most contact centers have struggled to provide an effective, self-service yet personalized responses to each customer. While AI technologies are being adopted to alleviate these challenges, success has been limited. About 70-80% enterprises around the globe agree that they not currently getting the best out of AI within their organization’s contact center.

Kore.ai took these considerations to heart and set forth to resolve these challenges – for customers as well as contact center agents.

The mission was straightforward: Empower contact center agents with the right info exactly when needed, delight customers with a personalized response across their preferred channel and consequently drive extraordinary business outcomes or KPIs (as I mentioned earlier).

And here we are!

Kore.ai is proud to announce the launch of Kore.ai SmartAssist, the world’s first AI-native end-to-end Contact Center as-a-Service [CCaaS] solution.

Built on Kore.ai’s industry recognized enterprise-class no-code conversational AI platform, SmartAssist accurately responds to the most sophisticated conversations across voice or digital channels, automatically escalating conversations to live agents with real time context assistance to move conversations forward and drive a delightful closure.

SmartAssist comes integrated with the AgentAssist virtual assistant to help live agents understand past history/context, as well as an intuitive desktop console that enables agents to easily manage conversations.

Here are three ways SmartAssist will redefine contact center experiences leveraging the industry’s most advanced and comprehensive innovations:

The power of automation. SmartAssist is the industry’s first AI-native platform that is built from the ground up using Kore.ai’s patented Natural Language Understanding (NLU) innovations. Solutions developed on these innovations have helped customers automatically resolve their issues via voice or digital channels with containments rates reaching as high as 90%! This means 90% of customer issues can be resolved by a virtual assistant, without the need to talk to an agent.

This not only delivers significant costs savings, it also increases CSAT (satisfaction) and NPS (customer experience or CX) scores.

SmartAssist is also the only contact center solution in the industry to leverage its AI/NLP technologies to intelligently orchestrate customer requests through automation, deflection to chat or live agent escalation. This uniquely delivers and optimized experience for customers and agents alike!

The power of agent assistance. SmartAssist uniquely empowers agents to provide extraordinary customer experiences with a unified agent workspace (or agent desktop) and a virtual assistant dedicated to “assist” an agent while he/she in a live conversation with a customer (or AgentAssist) leading to an increase in CSAT, decrease in agent attrition and reduced support costs.

The agent desktop provides a single workspace for all conversations. With robust features like AgentAssist, chat collaboration between peers and managers, escalation to chat/video and co-browse, agents have everything they need to deliver the best customer service.

Key Capabilities of AgentAssist

A key capability of AgentAssist is that it listens to the customer conversation in voice or chat and provides suggestions to the agent including real time answers to FAQs, request for information from the customer and then executes the request with back-end systems and completes the transaction.

You also have capabilities designed specifically for the agent supervisors! See this presentation for a deeper understanding of these capabilities.

Key Capabilities for Agent Supervisors

The power of flexible deployment. SmartAssist is built with flexibility in mind. Based on individual customer needs and preferences, it can be deployed to augment your existing telephony system with just the modules you need or can be deployed as a comprehensive, standalone contact center solution.

Kore.ai SmartAssist is the only Contact Center as-a-Service [CCaaS] solution in the world that is both AI-native and integrates automation and agent assistance components into one complete end-to-end solution, along with giving customers full deployment flexibility to protect their existing investments.