In today’s contact center, after-call work (ACW) has become a significant source of time wastage. To collect valuable call insights and data, agents often must create artificial pauses, take breaks between calls, skip summaries altogether, or put customers on frustrating, interruptive holds.
Agents spend approximately one-third of their total time engaged with consumers working on post-call admin activities such as updating customer profiles, typing up call summaries, or logging data – all of which hinder their overall productivity, reduce the amount of time spent on hitting goals and revenue targets, and even worse, lower the quality of customer experience.
But as with so many business and customer engagement challenges, AI is changing the game. There are now solutions for maximizing agent productivity and outcomes while also maintaining efficient average handle times (AHT) metrics, keeping wait times low and delivering quality CX. One of these AI-powered solutions is Automated Call Summarization.
Let’s take a look at how you can use this AI capability to increase agent productivity while maintaining AHT.
Huge Value Comes From Consistently Accurate Call Notes
Good post-call notes are critical for agent experience, outcomes & efficiency in the contact center:
- Improved customer service: When agents have detailed notes about previous customer interactions, they can provide more personalized, efficient service for all future interactions.
- Better documentation: Quality notes accurately document details of a customer’s issue, question, or complaint, are invaluable if/when legal issues or other disputes materialize.
- Seamless call handoffs: Sometimes customers need to be transferred to a different department. Accurate notes help the new department by providing a clear picture of the issue so they can move quickly to a solution.
- Enhance regulatory compliance: Highly regulated industries may require that all customer conversations and interactions be recorded. Having detailed notes on hand helps contact centers adhere to these mandates.
Why Automate Agent Notes with Call Summarization?
Having good quality, highly accurate call notes is necessary, but if AI isn’t being leveraged to automate and reduce the manual nature of note-taking, time and precious human resources are being wasted.
On average, agents spend at least one-third of total call time on post-call activities. Data shows some agents spend up to 6 minutes on after-call work such as updating customer profiles, typing up call summaries and logging info in their CRM or electronic health record (EHR) systems.
Time spent on after-call work varies greatly across inbound, outbound & blended agents, as well as use case and industry. But even using the lowest-end of the ranges (as in the Collections agent example below), it’s clear that exorbitant agent time is being wasted on after-call work. Multiply that number of hours by months or a year, and it’s easy to see how decreasing your AHT by as little as a few seconds could bring MASSIVE savings to your organization.
This example clearly demonstrates the value of automated call summarization. It enables agents to move through calls faster, improving overall productivity. When your contact center increases agent productivity, it also improves revenue outcomes and decreases payroll costs. Other than data, payroll is arguably a contact center’s greatest cost. Every minute of agent time is precious— and as shown in the SouthCity National Bank example, expensive.
Contact centers need agents that produce revenue. Instead of wasting precious agent time on tasks that don’t generate revenue, agents should be focused on engaging with customers for:
- Selling, cross-selling & upselling
- Collecting payments for on due/past-due invoices
Put simply, wasting valued agent productivity on non-revenue generating tasks means wasting revenue opportunity.
How Does Acqueon Call Summarization Work?
Here’s a sample post-call Call Summary generated automatically by Acqueon Summarize:
Benefits of Using a Call Summarization Feature
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Data Collection
Automating call summary creation provides a significant advantage in terms of data collection. Collected call summary data offers more detail and context, along with improved accuracy compared to manually taken notes and summaries.
Examining post-call data can provide insight into product issues, desired feature enhancements, details on how customers specifically use the product, and more. Mechanizing the summarization process also ensures that no important details are forgotten or missed. -
Customer Experience
By using a call summarization feature, contact center agents can focus on customer needs and provide more personalized responses to customers by having past summarization historical data available for every call. This can lead to a better overall customer experience, as customers are more likely to feel heard and understood.
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Quality Control
Call summarization features can also be used to monitor and evaluate contact center performance. By analyzing the summaries of conversations, contact center managers can identify areas for improvement, such as gaps in training or common customer complaints.
Close the Books on After-Call Work with Acqueon Summarize
It’s clear that automated call summarization creates ROI, competitive advantage and operational efficiency. It lets agents focus on creating amazing experiences for customers and prospects, increases efficiency by eliminating after-call work, and automates the note-taking process with powerful AI.
To learn more about how you can maximize agent productivity with Acqueon Summarize, request a demo today.