Intro

When it comes to scaling customer service, businesses are facing more challenges than ever before. Customer demand is higher, their needs are more complex, and they expect businesses to offer omnichannel service at a time that suits them. 

How can a scaling enterprise meet these challenges without soaring costs?

Meet the AI Agent – an automated customer service representative that can transform your customer service processes to supercharge productivity, cut waiting times, speed up call resolutions and slash costs. 

In this guide, we’ll explore how Artificial Intelligence gives enterprise organizations an incredible tool to drive fast, efficient contact center automation at scale. 

What Is an AI Agent?

An AI Agent is a digital assistant that uses Artificial Intelligence to engage with real customers in a way that mimics human interaction. AI Agents are available 24/7 and have no downtime, allowing you to offer instant customer service that cuts down on waiting times, speeds up call resolutions, and improves customer satisfaction. 

Where earlier iterations of automated customer support tools (such as ‘chatbots’) were strictly limited to specific pre-planned scenarios, AI Agents are flexible and fluid autonomous systems that can understand human language, call on short and long-term memories, and even reason through problems.

Perhaps most importantly, an AI Virtual Agent is also action-orientated. It is integrated with your backend systems and tools and can recognize goals within a customer’s query, create tasks, and then carry them out – all without human intervention. 

As part of their versatility, AI agents are highly configurable and controllable. Therefore, enterprise organizations can design and deploy different agents to address specific tasks. For example, an insurer may have a fluid and flexible AI Agent for general customer queries and a more rigid onboarding agent that follows clear steps to guide users through a tight onboarding process. 

How Does an AI Agent Work?

AI Agents combine different types of Artificial Intelligence (AI), such as:

1. Conversational AI: Allows a machine to understand human language via both voice or text input and communicate in a human-like manner. 
2. Generative AI: Generates content in response to user prompts and input. 
3. Agentic AI: Allows an AI to reason its way through problems dynamically, plan its own goal-orientated workflow, and pursue its own objectives. 

AI Agents understand and interpret user input to identify goals and carry out actions. They are trained using Large Language Models (LLMs) to build a deep knowledge of language, then fine-tuned using industry-specific databases and knowledge hubs. With this knowledge, an AI Agent can be deployed to tackle customer support problems immediately – but it will continue to learn and improve as it works. 

The most compelling feature of an AI Agent is its ability to engage in progressive reasoning. This refers to the process of interpreting user intent based on contextual clues, identifying needs, and then breaking them down into goals, which the agent can then pursue as efficiently as possible. 

Whether a task is simple, like answering a common question, or a customer has a more complex need, such as rebooking a flight, the AI Agent is capable of adapting to the customer's requirements and progressively reasoning its way through the case. By integrating with your backend systems, the AI can take actions like updating a customer’s details in your CRM, clarifying the status of an order, or even canceling and rearranging a booking. 

Benefits of AI Agents

There are many different benefits associated with the type of automation an autonomous AI Agent provides to your business. By improving your organization's cost and time savings and providing better, personalized customer interactions, an autonomous AI Agent increases performance both internally and externally. 

Let’s take a closer look at the benefits an AI Agent brings to enterprise organizations… 

Improved Efficiency

An AI Agent's primary benefit is improving efficiency across your customer service processes. It can achieve this either by engaging directly in customer-facing support and cutting down on long wait times and call lengths – but also by assisting human agents via Agent Copilot features. 

By automating repetitive, repeatable tasks within your service process, AI Agents help streamline your business and make it more time and cost-efficient. 

Enhanced Customer Experience

Customers have clear expectations when it comes to approaching customer service teams – they want fast, efficient support that feels personalized around their needs. AI Agents allow you to field queries 24/7 and in a language that best suits your customers, without having to invest in expensive translation teams. 

What’s more, AI Agents also allow for omnichannel interaction, with customers able to contact them via voice, text, or social media channels on any device they prefer. This all combines to mean your AI Agents give customers more ways to contact support and speed up positive resolutions.

By providing faster, more efficient service that customers can engage with whenever it is most convenient to them, AI Agents will also improve your customer experience metrics as they drive forward business productivity. 

Data-Driven Insights

AI Agents aren’t solely for customer-facing applications. They can also perform large-scale analysis across all of your call history to identify patterns and sentiment. By analyzing vast amounts of data and making recommendations based on your customers' genuine, evidence-based patterns and habits, AI agents provide valuable insights for decision-making.

Learn more about how Cognigy's Insights can help provide actionable data.

Personalized Interactions

Regarding automation, customers are more likely to accept and engage with a service that feels personalized to their needs. Pre-AI chatbots were too rigid and inflexible – customers are now too familiar with technology to settle for anything less than a bespoke, tailored experience. 

AI Agents provide this by analyzing a customer’s CRM entry and past interactions using both long-term and short-term memory. This allows the agent to tailor conversations around the customer's needs without asking repeat questions. The agent can also identify any changes in sentiment to adapt on the fly and keep the call focused on positive outcomes. 

Cost Savings

The most significant benefit of automation and AI Agents is to drive down costs. AI Agents drive significant cost savings throughout your organization by improving efficiency across every area of your business, increasing customer satisfaction, and reducing the resources required to cope with higher demands. 

Types of AI Agents

As with any form of technology, there are many different technicalities regarding how you design and implement an AI Agent. From an organizational perspective, the two main types of AI Agent worth understanding are:

1. NLU-Driven Conversational AI
2. Agentic AI

NLU-Driven Conversational AI

These AI Agents are process-orientated or rules-based.

They use Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to understand language, recognize user intent, and then pursue pre-defined dialogue flows. This makes them well-suited to processes that have clearly defined steps that need to be followed in a certain way or order (think compliance). 

Agentic AI

This type of AI Agent is capable of dynamic reasoning and contextual understanding. They can plot their own goals and make autonomous decisions about the best way to reach them, within the power you give them.

Within your organization, there are likely situations where a specific type of AI Agent is better suited. For example, you may use an NLU-Driven Conversational AI Agent to process an insurance claim, which requires a strict procedure and predefined flow. On the other hand, an Agentic AI Agent can better serve in complex cases such as outbound calling where a customer’s potential responses are nearly impossible to map.

However, the beauty of modern AI is the ability to combine both types of AI Agent within one platform. Cognigy’s AI Agent platform allows you to design and deploy a composite AI Agent workforce that can adapt to a user’s task and either follow a rigid procedure or handover to an Agentic AI Agent to begin dynamic problem-solving. 

It’s worth noting that elsewhere online, you’ll find references to a variety of AI Agent types, such as simple reflex, utility-based, and goal-based agents. These are essentially technical descriptions that are mostly irrelevant for business customers – who instead need to concentrate on the way AI Agents are used rather than how they work.

Use Cases of AI Agents

AI Agents can be deployed in many different ways to address customer service issues, improve business productivity, and automate mundane processes to free up internal resources.

Here are some everyday use cases in enterprise organizations… 

Identification & Verification

One of the most time-consuming elements of any customer call happens at the start when they need to provide details to identify/verify them. AI Agents can fully automate this process, answering the call immediately and then talking customers through the ID&V stages. In doing so, they slash waiting times and remove the manual burden of this essential yet highly repeatable process from your human team – leaving them free to focus on more complex cases.

Customer Support Agents

Thanks to the complex, dynamic reasoning of Agentic AI, AI Agents can be effective customer service agents who engage directly with customers. Using a combination of LLMs and NLU, they can understand voice or text input and communicate in a human-like manner with customers, taking their needs into account and then acting in a goal-oriented way to resolve them. 

Due to integrations with your backend systems, the AI Agent can often complete the task on its own, but if it can’t, it can also create a contextual handover and pass it on to a human agent who will be better equipped to solve the issue. 

Customer service AI Agents are a revolutionary step in your automation journey. Unlike previous tools and technology, an AI Agent is capable of the flexibility, fluidity, and natural-sounding conversations customers expect when engaging with your team. 

Agent Copilot

AI Agents are not here to replace existing human resources. Instead, they have the capability to augment them and make your current teams more efficient than ever before. AI Agents can bring powerful Agent Copilot features to your customer service teams, bringing the power and efficiency of augmentation to your workforce’s most resource-draining tasks.

Before calls, AI Agents can perform large-scale analysis across all of your logs and spot trends or patterns to better inform human employees on common issues. They can then take care of the initial ID&V stages before passing a contextual handover to the human agent – which means they’ll never answer a call and ask a customer to repeat themselves or have to explain the problem again. 

During the call, the AI Agent can transcribe and even translate the conversation for the customer service professional in real-time. It can recognize questions and present answers on your agent’s screens, saving them time and improving the chance of a positive outcome. 

After the call, the AI Agent continues to assist by automating the wrap-up process and creating a call log that the human agent can quickly review and make minor changes to. This saves valuable time at the end of every call, giving agents more time to tackle higher volumes each day. 

Outbound Support

In the past, automation focused solely on inbound support due to the more controllable nature of incoming service requests. With outbound calling, predicting what a customer may say or do becomes far harder, limiting the utility of an AI Agent.

Now, however, Agentic AI gives AI Agents the ability to dynamically reason through conversations while creating and pursuing bespoke goal-oriented workflows. This makes them fully capable of pursuing outbound calls for various purposes, such as an insurer contacting a customer proactively ahead of a renewal date to re-arrange their cover. 

Explore more AI Agent use cases and see real-world examples here. 

Best Practices for Implementing AI Agents

As with any technology, adopting AI Agents into your organization involves managing best practices to minimize disruption. Here are some of the most important things to consider if you want to implement AI in your customer service teams…

Define Clear Objectives

Before you ever commit to AI Agents within your organization, defining objectives is a good idea. AI offers a broad range of benefits and potential implementations – so picking some clear goals helps shape the parameters for your potential choice of AI Agent. 

Start Narrow

AI Agents can learn as they perform – so it’s important to get them up and running as soon as possible so they can evolve in the role. To cause the least amount of disruption, start with a narrow use case that is straightforward and repeatable but drains time in your processes (the ID&V process is usually perfect for this). 

Ensure Data Privacy and Security

Audit your entire technology stack and talk to your development team to ensure you have all data and privacy requirements documented and ready to present to an AI provider. There may be some additional requirements that need to be programmed into your AI Agents, but an experienced AI partner will be able to guide you through them to keep your enterprise safe and compliant. 

Test and Optimize Regularly

AI Agents enable an incredible level of data analysis across your business. They also learn and evolve over time, which means you should regularly review data and performance to optimize your AI Agents and get more from your implementation. 

Build Your AI Agent With Cognigy

AI Agents represent a revolution in how enterprise organizations can scale their operations. To stay ahead of your competitors and offer customers cutting-edge experiences, work with Cognigy today. 

We’re experts in AI Agent design and implementation, and we work with many enterprises recognized worldwide to optimize their customer service processes, reduce costs, and improve ROI. Learn more about how we achieve this in our guide to contact center automation. 

Take a demo today to see how AI Agents can work for you – or call our team if you’ve got any other questions you want to ask.