AI Contact Center Agent Assistants
AI Contact Center Assistants are enablers for contact center agents, managers and others such as nurse triage. They are not autonomous and are built for human-in-the-loop workflows. They are intended to make existing agents or others handling contacts more efficient and/or more effective. Capabilities of these vendors include:
Call summaries or transcripts
Management of follow up tasks from phone calls
Surfacing care gaps and tasks for follow up during a contact
Surfacing relevant policies and procedures during a contact
Real time QA and feedback delivery to agents
Many companies offering these solutions also offer fully autonomous solutions. Many will also have AI powered analytics and intelligence solutions.
Product Usage: Zendesk was used for customer inquiry management, acting as an information hub and for product roadmapping.
Strengths: Zendesk’s community engagement and responsive customer support are its main strengths.
Weaknesses: Zendesk lacks in design and visualization features, resulting in formatting issues and limited customization.
Overall Judgment: Despite some limitations, Zendesk was a good choice due to its easy integration and out-of-the-box features.
Product Usage: Zendesk is used for managing multiple points of customer inquiries; phone, email, and chat functionalities considered efficient; the majority of the use is for managing patient queries; separate workflow created for managing communication with clinicians.
Strengths: Easy to navigate and minimal training required; comprehensive for basic customer service needs; allows for effortless access to necessary data and contains good analytics capabilities.
Weaknesses: Lack of real-time dashboards for incoming issues and volume; delayed delivery of some crucial features; difficulties experienced with customer service; issues with scaling and pulling individual reports; might need to integrate with other phone options for more complex needs.
Overall Judgment: Zendesk is simple, especially for teams that need to hit the ground running with basic customer service operations; it’s a reliable and intuitive platform despite the need to improve in certain areas like live reporting and dashboards; good option for organizations with strict budget constraints.
Product Usage: Zendesk was used to centralize operations, handle member services and create effective workflows for incoming calls across a healthcare company servicing a Medicaid population.
Strengths: Zendesk is easy to implement, offers a low lift for internal IT and engineering teams, provides robust out-of-the-box reporting, and integrates well with other services like Talkdesk.
Weaknesses: The standalone telephony feature of Zendesk was lacking without integration with Talkdesk, and the text functionality was limited, more suited to respond to inbound text rather than initiate outbound messages.
Overall Judgment: Zendesk is a useful and cost-effective tool for streamlining operations and increasing efficiency in handling customer/member services, although there is room for improvement in its standalone features.