Customer service agent

Customer service agent

The standard customer service query is the most repetitive work in the contact center. The agent that handles it end-to-end, and escalates the non-standard with full context, changes the economics of the operation.

The workflow

1. The customer contacts the service center through any channel: chat, email, voice, web form.
2. The agent reads the customer’s history from the CRM, the open tickets from the ticketing system, the relevant articles from the knowledge base.
3. The agent classifies the request by intent and complexity.
4. The agent responds or acts within the policy and the customer’s permissions. For standard requests, this resolves the case end-to-end.
5. For non-standard requests, the agent prepares a packet with the customer’s history, the relevant knowledge, the proposed action, and routes to a human agent.
6. The human agent receives the packet, takes over the conversation, and the agent continues to assist with reading and writing.

What this looks like in production

The agent operates inside the existing customer service stack. The agent has the identity of a customer service role, with the scope and the permissions that role has. Every action is logged with input, policy, decision, output and customer context.

The escalation to a human is designed in. The agent escalates when the case is outside the policy, when the customer is in a sensitive situation, when the customer’s request requires judgement, or when the customer asks for a human. The human agent receives full context.

The agent’s tone and language are governed by the customer service standards. The audit runs on a regular basis to ensure consistency.

What good looks like

• First-contact resolution is measured and improves without hiding escalation.
• Average handle time falls for the cases the agent handles.
• Human agent time shifts to the non-standard cases that require judgement.
• Customer satisfaction is maintained or improved.