Excellent customer service is a business imperative, but it’s also getting more costly. A recent McKinsey survey highlights that 57% of customer experience (CX) leaders anticipate up to a 20% increase in call volumes over the next few years – and 80% of organisations are investing in generative AI to manage the volume and keep CX costs low.
But generative AI isn’t a replacement for human agents. While AI makes customer service more efficient and scalable, the human touch remains indispensable for handling complex queries, unique or emotionally charged issues, and other sensitive situations. Human agents can read between the lines, understand context, and respond with a flexibility that AI isn’t yet capable of replicating.
Yet it’s also possible to leverage these same skills to improve AI outputs as well.
Adding value on the front lines of CX
A study of over 5,000 contact centre workers found that generative AI tools could help customer support agents boost performance by 14% on average, and by as much as 35% for lower-skilled workers.
Generative AI can make inferences rather than relying on rote instructions. That means it can learn from examples of successful support resolution and detailed prompts that harness the skills of experienced agents. This training gives LLMs additional context to identify the best possible response, improving automated responses and helping newer customer service agents get up to speed at the same time.
That not only reduces the cost of manual support for rote questions, but also improves customer satisfaction scores for newer agents who can review successfully resolved chats to understand customer needs.
Proto’s partnership in the Philippines
In the Philippines, the Information Technology & Business Process Association (IBPAP) reports that the BPO industry aims to create 1.1 million jobs over the next six years, reaching $59 billion by 2028. The industry is embracing generative AI as a transformational tool that studies show can boost agent performance by 14% on average.
Proto is pioneering human-AI collaboration in the Philippines through a partnership with Confabia, training skilled customer service agents to become prompt engineers.
With Proto’s AICX Platform, these agents can:
- Use their customer support expertise to write generative AI prompts ****that tailor chatbot responses to business objectives and customer needs.
- Train the chatbot with examples of chats from highly-skilled customer service agents with experience successfully resolving customer queries.
- Modify chatbot prompts as business and customer needs change over time, using analytics to identify opportunities for continuous improvement.
This gives experienced agents the opportunity to become problem-solvers and learn new skills they need to succeed as generative AI transforms the customer service industry. They can harness their understanding of the capabilities and limitations of AI, business objectives, and customer service skills to continue to add value to automated chats.
Hire agents in the Proto AICX Platform
With our proAgents feature, you can hire agents in the platform to scale your customer service team, allowing you to get up and running with human-centred chatbot improvements based on live interactions.
A collaborative human-AI ecosystem lets you outperform standard AI chatbots and provide more human customer experience. Try Proto today to learn more.
