We’ve all been there: You evaluate a solution and vendor for your company and bring it to the table, champion it, and see it implemented — only for it to fade into the technology graveyard, marked with a “No One Ever Used It” epitaph.
It can make anyone second guess their skills in driving adoption. But it’s not just adoption practices and training modules that make or break the success of a software. It’s also…the software.
People have to want to use it.
That means the software needs to be easy to access, easy to manage, and delivered in a format that encourages use.
In the case of real-time agent assistance, all relevant information should be at every agent’s fingertips during every call. (When you’re actively in a conversation with a customer, relevant information is what you need to thrive. In-call context is everything.)
Any solution you evaluate in this arena should meet that bar — at least. Ideally, it should clear it by a mile. So, what else do agents want in the solution that they use every day?
Your agents and representatives want what everyone wants from an assistant: someone to improve their day. Because agents spend their days making phone calls and having conversations, their assistant can start there.
Can it improve their ability to stay in the moment and follow along during calls? Does it help them access the information that matters to their customer more easily? Can it help them better remember things during calls, so they rarely, if ever, have to backtrack? Can it understand them and respond to the way they’re speaking and what they’re saying?
If you offer an agent a real-time assistant that checks all of those boxes, you’ll also achieve the next wish on this list:
Every rep or agent can be a top-performing rep or agent with the right tools and processes in hand. Agent assistants should help agents practically — meaning, they should help agents do the stuff that changes their jobs for the better. It’s a long-term version of a better workday.
That’s why a great real-time solution should offer prompts that:
The first is a celebration and a centering of the best agents’ best practices and wins. The second is the way to make agents successful long-term.
With compliance prompts that slash violations, emotion prompts that help boost customer experience, and gamification to engage and motivate with results, agents have a much better chance of doing the things that help them be more successful — and more satisfied.
While agents may not always say outright that they’d like a mentor, every agent surely deserves one.
A mentor can help agents ramp up more easily and upskill more quickly. Just consider what it would feel like to have a backup on every single call. And it’s someone who is involved, helpful, and invested in your success. In fact, it’s someone whose main objective is to help you be successful! That’s a work dream come true.
Real-time agent assistance solutions don’t have to feel like just another piece of software. Because agents aren’t looking for another tool to exploit. They’re looking for ways to improve.
The worst thing that an agent assistant can do is make conversations more difficult to manage. They should be instead geared for focus and attentiveness — helping agents give their full capability and empathy to the customer.
So the user interface (UI) — everything from on-screen visuals to buttons, fonts, colors, and beyond — counts.
On a call, no one can afford a distraction. Agents want a real-time assistant that offers relevant, succinct prompts in a clear flow, quickly, Simplicity should be at the core of its design. Complexity can happen behind the scenes — but agents want access to what matters.
Simplicity also relates to function. The solution has to *just work.* It can’t ignore the agent’s input or miss the cues they’re giving it. Its main function is to assist — and definitely not to hinder.
While everyone has different software requirements, we do all have a few things in common. Everyone wants a solution to be easy to use, and beyond that, actually useful.
That’s easy enough to understand. But when you’re evaluating a real-time agent assistant, it can help to evaluate from the agents’ perspective, too.
Think about improvements both short and long-term, getting as micro as “that particular phone call” and as macro as “their career.”
Ready to get started? Read more about agent assistance here, or talk to our experts below.
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