Most companies operate in highly competitive markets with goods and services that exist in abundance in today’s market. They rely on things like brand, unique designs or experience to attract customers. But there’s always another shoe brand, airline, toy or car.
In this type of environment, the margin for error is low and customer service is a key differentiator to help companies stand out from everyone else. Yes, your customer can buy clothes from anyone for example, but they know they can trust you. So how can customer service maintain that trust?
With many contact centers experiencing high call volumes, complex inquiries and customer frustration coming from unnatural voice interactions and fragmented experiences when being transferred between departments, customer service isn’t delivering what customers want and expect. And if they can’t trust you when something goes wrong, why should they trust you at all? Something needs to change.
These are problems that Agentic AI is designed to address. With Agentic AI, customers can get their problems sorted out without needing to follow a script, remind the agent of their problem or start over if they’re transferred to a new agent. Agentic AI differs from earlier technology where chatbots were confined to preexisting scripts. With Agentic AI, customers can ask multifaceted questions, receive natural responses in real-time and have their problems solved.
Agentic AI is starting to make waves and has great potential to vastly improve the customer experience. Gartner predicts that Agentic AI will routinely solve 80% of customer issues by 2029. Let’s see how.
Reasoning
Customers often contact your organization because they have a problem they need solved. Your agents should be able to reason through the problem and offer a quick, effective solution. That means being solution oriented, not obsessed with following a script at the cost of basic common sense. According to research, first contact resolution along with short wait times are two of the most important considerations for customers looking to get their issues resolved. And why wouldn’t they be? Contacting customer service is an interruption and time investment on top of the problem they’re having!
Agentic AI systems have the power to address both these concerns. Customers don’t want to have to be stuck with narrow “Press 1” phone trees, nor to hear robotic human agents follow a written script. They want the right answers the first time they ask. In contrast to the bots of old, Agentic AI is flexible enough to reason out a solution without forcing customers through a set of predefined hoops or repeating themselves again and again.
Personalization
Customers want to feel like their business matters. They chose your brand out of a huge pool of competitors and don’t want to be just another number. They also don’t want to have to repeat themselves every step of the way any more than your agents want to repeat the same tasks over and over. According to Deloitte research, customers say that only 43% of their experiences feel personalized, even though brands claim to personalize 61% of experiences. (Here’s a hint: using someone’s first name doesn’t count!) Such relationship activation is crucial for building customer loyalty and trust.
The last thing customers want to do is start over every time they call. Agentic AI can go a long way toward improving relationship activation between brands and customers. Agentic AI uses a combination of short and long-term memory to remember your customers’ previous interactions, preferences and needs. Using this, it acts contextually and in a personalized fashion in every interaction so they feel more personalized, strengthening brand loyalty and improving relationship activation. And best of all, this only improves over time as your customers interact with you more.
Orchestration & Handovers
While customers have a strong preference for their issues to be handled by a single agent, sometimes that just isn’t possible and contact centers need to transfer calls as necessary to achieve resolution. The reality is customers who complain about transfers aren’t upset about the transfer itself; they’re angry about having to start over from nothing, i.e. that you’ve just thrown all the time and effort spent thus far in trash. That’s why it’s imperative to get it right, which means using a modern AI Agent that passes over all relevant information to the human agent on screen from the current interaction to relevant CRM and ticket data and summarizes what’s happened so far.
Customers also don’t want to wait for your AI system to think or just bring you to a dead-end because it’s lacking the integrations to get stuff done. Your Agentic AI system has to be integrated with all of the same enterprise systems your agents can access so it can orchestrate seamlessly between all of them in real time, without any noticeable lag. Seamless resolution orchestration will contribute to the call being handled quickly, which your customers will appreciate.
Conclusion
Think about the last time you spent time explaining something, only to find out the other person wasn’t paying attention and asks you to repeat it all. It’s disrespectful and downright infuriating. Customers’ time is valuable. When they get in touch with a contact center, they want their issues handled quickly and efficiently — and they want the experience personalized, so they feel less like a number and more like a real person the brand cares about.
AI-first contact centers can address these customer concerns by providing fast, personalized service, with no annoying wait times or lagging responses. In an era where customer experience is one of the few true brand differentiators, your contact center should deliver the best experience for your customers. Agentic AI will help you deliver on that promise.
See Cognigy’s Agentic AI in action at cognigy.com.
