What is Agent Assist Software? (and 3 Examples)

Customer-facing workers deal with a growing challenge: providing a quality experience to customers while resolving technical issues rapidly and professionally. Enter Agent Assist Software, an AI sidekick for your customer support teams that supports your agents in real-time.

Let’s cover why these tools are rapidly becoming essential for your business.

What Is Agent Assist Software?

Agent Assist Software (AAS) refers to AI-driven customer experience (CX) tools and capabilities that support customer-facing (CF) agents. You can broadly break AAS down into two types: 

• Standalone software deployed alongside or over top of existing tools.
• AAS features bundled with other products such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Contact Center as a Service (CCssS).

Who uses Agent Assist Software?

AAS supports your frontline agents. This includes inbound and outbound agents, sales, IT help desk, and support agents, but isn’t limited to them. Anyone, human or digital, who interacts with your customers, current or potential, can benefit from having AAS at their side. Some tools even provide IVR and Bot agents.

What does Agent Assist Software do?

These products aren't solving one big issue. They provide a suite of solutions for numerous pain points that CF teams deal with in every interaction, greasing the gears of every CF task. With less friction in the system, agents can get more done faster and at a consistently higher quality, ultimately improving customer satisfaction.

The most common feature of AAS is real-time assistance during interactions. The AI reads the context of the interaction and provides suggestions, tips, or resources. This can be AI-powered or use keyword triggers. When it detects an opportunity or keyword, the AAS can provide documents, support documentation, or conversation guidance like checklists and compliance reminders. 

AAS often includes tools that accelerate after-call work as well by providing templates or directions based on the context of the customer interaction. Some even transcribe the audio call and automatically generate a summary of the interaction. 

Anyone who's spent time with technical CF teams knows the challenge of documenting interactions quickly and accurately. AI Large Language Models (LLM) like ChatGPT are particularly suited for this kind of summarization, and lend valuable efficiency to post-call processes.

Benefits of Agent Assist Software

All those features might just sound like quality-of-life changes, and for sure they are. But when CF teams are handling thousands of interactions daily, these small improvements snowball into serious impacts.

That's the whole idea of AAS: it’s not just about the small improvements, it's about the cumulative effect of those improvements on the performance and consistency of CF teams. It creates a positive feedback loop of happier agents and happier customers.

• Automatically streamlining agent tasks on a micro scale means a significantly smoother experience for customers.
• Average Hold Time (AHT) drops because agents find answers faster or without any need to put the customer on hold. 
• Onboarding is accelerated with AAS guiding new agents through more complex cases without the need for direct guidance.
• Real-time intelligent compliance reminders reduce the risk of mistakes. 
• Smart reports and alerts allow CF team managers to respond to issues faster and with confidence. 
• Streamlined after-call work means more consistent documenting of calls and shortens the time needed between calls.

3 Stellar AAS options

PixieBrix

PixieBrix’s Customer Success tools include AI Copilot, Knowledge Base Management, Decision Trees, and Translation integration in a low-code overlay for any web app, providing scalable, customizable, and agile AI assistance for your CF teams. 

AI Copilot leverages the power of ChatGPT by eliminating the need for prompts, instead providing quick access to the most valuable functions that accelerate agent tasks. 

KB Assist provides real-time suggestions for your agents based on your existing knowledge base. In addition, if a gap is found in the KB, you can add the answers you provided to the customer during the interaction to the KB for future reference.

Decision Trees let you create accessible and comprehensive decision paths, guiding your agents through the right steps at the right time. 

Language Translation lets you support customers around the globe. Integrating directly to your CRM, it can connect Google Translate with its pre-built connector or bring your own with an API connector.

If you want a customizable solution that streamlines interactions without breaking the bank, start building with PixieBrix.

Five9 Agent Assist

A heavyweight in the cloud contact center market, Five9’s Agent Assist is a smart selection of scalable CX tools with a focus on boosting agent efficiency while providing feedback and insight to leadership.

On the agent side, it provides reminders, links, and interactive checklists they can use to keep interactions smooth and compliant. There are also automations for after-interaction work, including transcription and summarization of calls.

On the leadership side, Agent Assist’s AI provides real-time metrics and trends to team leaders, assists in reporting, and automatically identifies opportunities for agent improvement.

Five9’s Agent Assist is an upmarket option for organizations in need of a solution at scale.

IBM’s Watsonx Assistant

IBM’s resident AI Watson—which also made an appearance in our Top Enterprise Search Tools [Link to Enterprise Search Tools article] list for its unique visual approach to enterprise searching—can also fly copilot for your customer-facing agents, and again comes in with some unique features. 

In addition to the expected real-time assistance you can expect from an AI-driven AAS, Watsonx Assistant uses its own proprietary Natural Language Understanding (NLU) rather than an external language model like ChatGPT. It also includes a no-code visual builder for virtual assistants and bots that work either through text or voice.

When asked what it wanted to be included in this article, the Virtual Assistant returned these points along with links to videos and articles (see image above):

• Market-leading NLU by third-party metrics
• No code AI chatbots with voice capability
• Superior language comprehension that can ask clarifying questions and integrate and automate with your existing systems.

If having a Jeopardy-winning AI assisting your agents isn’t exciting enough, IBM boasts some impressive ROI and accuracy metrics that definitely are. 

And That’s Just Getting Started

With growing access to practical AI models, there’s no shortage of options for Agent Assist Software that has a solution for every situation. Now you have an idea of what’s out there and how it can help you deliver the best possible customer experience, every time.

Want to build your own Agent Assist Software—and any number of other solutions for your workflows? Check out PixieBrix to power up the heroes on your customer-facing teams.