We’ve all heard or experienced horror stories—some of them legendary—about epic failures in customer service. My friend Denise shared one with me about trying to resolve what seemed like a relatively simple software problem.

First, she spoke with an employee in Atlanta in the U.S. who couldn’t help and routed her to India. No success there, either. Denise repeated her problem to the next employee and the next, as she bounced to the Philippines, Ukraine and Ireland. Nine interactions later, she was routed back to Atlanta. There, she waited on hold several times while two different people conducted research. Overall, it took 2.5 hours to identify the problem and 45 seconds to fix it.

It was a massive waste of time and the longer it continued, the more of a joke it became for Denise as a customer. Yet, she told me that she felt for those employees because it wasn’t a joke for them. They were clearly trying everything in their arsenal to help.

But their arsenal was slim.

Poor Customer Service Hurts More Than Customers

Most customers who need to interact with a business prefer to serve themselves. But when they do speak to someone, they expect that person will know all about their journey up to that point. They should also know how best to help the customer as the conversation progresses.

Even your strongest employees will have differing skills and gaps in product knowledge. Virtual agents are rapidly filling in some of these gaps by handling mundane and repetitive tasks. Beyond that, their value has been inconsistent, in part due to lack of integration with other systems and channels, such as voice. They have also lacked the ability to decipher the nuances of voice and tone, a skill we take for granted with people. In other words, they haven’t been the collaborators that employees need.

Things are changing.

The New World of Agent Assist

The AI-powered Agent Assist is part of a new Genesys and Google partnership that blends AI and Google voice interaction technologies with Genesys automation and predictive routing to help customer service employees.

By actively listening and analyzing the content and context of a live interaction, Agent Assist provides employees with prompts, hints, tips and even special offers based on dynamic interpretation of what is needed. It places all this information right on the desktop. Employees can snooze the virtual assistant or click an icon and ask a bot to step back into the conversation.

In Denise’s scenario, these virtual assistants could have researched and analyzed data on similar problems and presented the solution much faster. In addition to speeding problem resolution, Agent Assist uses machine learning to predict more ways for employees to serve the customer, including product up-sell.

Building stronger employee engagement with customers reduces turnover and saves on training. Imagine how this technology could help new employees, in particular, enabling them to skip some up-front training and support customers faster. The Agent Assist “bot consultants” act like supervisors to help all employees continually learn on the job, as they need it.

Get More Details in our Interactive Webinar

Join us for an interactive webinar with Genesys product executives. They’ll share details on how Genesys and Google technology augment the employee experience with the first AI‐powered virtual assistant—plus many other Winter 2018 Innovations released by Genesys in the past six months.

You can also participate in breakout sessions for a deeper dive into Genesys Agent Assist and more. With plenty of time for Q&A, you’ll have a jumpstart on using AI to gain better business outcomes faster.

Watch the webinar on-demand now.