Real-Time Agent Assist: Benefits, Working Principle, and Best Platforms

Real-time agent assist gives contact center agents instant AI-backed guidance during live interactions to address customer needs and boost conversion rates.

When contact center agents are interacting with customers, it is a decisive moment. A well-informed interaction will lead to conversion, repeat purchase, or higher customer satisfaction.

Many times, agents are underprepared or don't have instant access to the right information, which leads to a poor customer experience. That's where real-time agent assist steps in.

A real-time agent assist is an AI-powered assistant that provides real-time guidance to agents during interactions. It uses machine learning and natural language processing to interpret customer queries during live calls and provide smart suggestions to agents for faster and effective communication.

To better understand, let's consider the scenario of a live customer call experience with or without real-time agent assistance.

Overall, if you have worked as a customer support agent, you will find the AI agent assist bot to be an invaluable tool for more effective interactions and faster response times.

Let's explore the key benefits of real-time agent assist, its working principle, and the best platforms to implement it.

Part 1. Benefits of Real-Time Agent Assist

Did you know 64% of customers prefer to purchase from brands that meet their needs in real time? However, 62% of CX leaders acknowledge that they are behind in providing the instant experiences that their customers want.

Being a customer support agent means multitasking. You must perform several tasks simultaneously, such as searching for answers, exploring multiple systems, providing satisfactory solutions, and maintaining the continuous flow of conversations.

Real-time agent assistance gives agents an extra hand and brain to speed up their activities. How? Check out the benefits to learn the game-changing influence of AI agents:

1. Real-Time Decoding

Real-time agent assist acts as a live interpreter during customer interactions. It listens to the live conversation and decodes the issue or requested service. This decoding reduces misunderstandings and leads to faster resolution.

2. Instant and Contextual Guidance

Imagine having a knowledgeable co-pilot during every customer interaction. An agent-assist bot offers instant and contextual guided scripts to the agent. Instead of putting the customer on hold and finding the solution, agents are able to offer prompt responses.

3. Faster Issue Resolution

No need for long calls or waits for follow-up calls. Real-time agent assistance provides immediate access to relevant information and suggested actions. This helps agents to resolve issues faster and within a single interaction.

4. Offer Efficient Solutions

How many times have we received unsatisfactory responses from customer support agents only because the agent is unfamiliar with the asked query?

New hires or agents unfamiliar with particular services may be unable to offer customers efficient solutions. A live AI agent assist eradicates this concern by providing authentic guidance to agents and empowering them to offer efficient solutions.

5. Improve Productivity and Lower Agent Stress/Turnover

Contact center agents deal with high levels of stress, as 59% of them are at risk of burnout. Moreover, the average call center turnover rate is 30-45%.

Real-time agent assist is the virtual assistant every customer support and sales representative needs. It reduces the repetitive steps agents need to take to pull the required information. Plus, it provides guided scripts, which reduces the cognitive load on agents and helps them handle complex queries with confidence.

All these attributes of agent assist improve productivity and lower agent stress/turnover.

6. Fast Training of New Employees

New employees need time to onboard. They need proper training to be able to listen, understand the product/service, get familiar with the tools/processes, and handle customer queries.

Real-time agent assistance boosts new employees' performance and confidence. Its live guidance and contextual prompts shorten the learning curve and help them deliver quality support from the first day.

7. Reduce Operational Costs

Organizations can save significant operational costs when agents have a virtual assistant by their side. As mentioned above, AI agent assist improves agent productivity, resolves issues faster, minimizes extensive training programs, reduces turnover rate, and more. All these factors lead to reduced operational costs.

8. Identify Upsell and Cross-Sell Opportunities

What if a customer is inquiring about a basic plan, but their needs align with the advanced solution? Real-time agent assist is beyond an issue resolver. It can spot upsell and cross-sell opportunities and guide the agents to seize those opportunities.

Part 2. How Real-Time Agent Assist Works

Think of real-time agent assist as a whispering coach for your customer support teams. It listens to the conversations, analyzes the information with AI, and provides live guidance to the agent.

Now, the question is how the agent assist bot manages to provide accurate recommendations to the agent in real time by doing all the analysis and research in seconds.

Let's break down the working principle of real-time agent assist:

Step 1. When a call between the customer and the agent begins, the real-time agent assist starts working in parallel. It processes the speech through three stages, i.e., automatic speech recognition, spoken language understanding, and recommendation analytics.

Step 2. In the first stage, the tool performs automatic speech recognition (ASR). It converts speech to text in real time and prepares it for the next stage.

Step 3. In the second stage, the extracted text and speech go through the spoken language understanding (SLU) round. Here, the tool analyzes the text and speech based on various factors, like tone, language, etc.

Step 4. In the third stage, the text and speech undergo the recommendation analysis round. Here, the tool analyzes what the customer intends to ask, researches the relevant information from the knowledge base, and prepares the most appropriate suggestions for the agent.

Step 5. Lastly, the suggestions appear on the agent screen.

That's how a typical real-time agent assist facilitates a support representative with real-time recommendations. If the conversation is through live chat, the AI agent assist can provide context-aware response suggestions for quick replies.

Part 3. Top Real-Time Agent Assist Platform 2025

Considering the changing customer expectations from customer support teams and the growing digital advancements, there are many real-time agent assist platforms.

Below, we have shortlisted the top five platforms worth considering in 2025:

#1 Awaken CoPilot - Guide and Coach Agents Live

Awaken CoPilot is an AI-powered agent assistant powered by Microsoft Azure's OpenAI capabilities. It can listen and transcribe live interactions, identify entities, extract and analyze intents, and provide real-time coaching and alerts to agents. It is designed to handle the heavy lifting for agents and improve their productivity.

Key Features

• Real-time listening and transcribing interactions
• Easy-to-use intent builder to customize your intent analysis
• Pull out entities (such as name, address, etc.)
• Real-time coaching and alerts for agents
• Automated conversation summaries
• Real-time alerts on crucial details
• Integration with other tools

Simply put, Awaken CoPilot provides a dynamic enterprise AI agent that guides agents and helps deliver exceptional customer interactions.

#2 Cresta Agent Assist - Real-Time Hints, Precise Answers, and AI Summaries

If you want to cut down on training time and give every agent superpowers, Cresta Agent Assist is what you need. It is an advanced and intelligent real-time agent assist that provides agents with precise and accurate answers for all types of conversations. It unifies your knowledge sources and delivers accurate proposed replies to agents.

Key Features

• Real-time guidance and next-best action suggestions
• Entity extraction
• AI interaction summaries
• Guided workflows
• Real-time hints and reminders
• Integration with CRM/chat/telephony/knowledge systems
• Smooth Scalability

Cresta Agent Assist eliminates the need for searching or guesswork, reduces agent typing by over 50%, and ensures a satisfactory customer interaction.

#3 Level AI Agent Assist - Turn Every Agent into a Top Performer

Level AI Agent Assist is another complete and AI-powered virtual assistant for agents. It provides real-time guidance and instant access to required information to help agents resolve issues faster.

Key Features

• Real-time guidance
• AI summaries
• Instant access to the knowledge base
• Built-in manager assist to let managers monitor agent interactions, coach agents, handle complex issues, and maintain a positive customer experience
• Automated post-call summaries and quick insights on performance to help improve skills
• Sentiment analysis from past conversations for self-serve coaching

Overall, Level AI Agent Assist provides the support agents need to improve productivity and manage workload. It also lets managers monitor agents' activities properly.

#4 Observe.AI Real-Time Agent Assist - Visual Checklist and Alerts for Agents

Observe.AI Real-Time Agent Assist is a feature-packed tool for agents to get in-the-moment guidance and coaching. It lets agents have a visual checklist during every conversation to offer consistent services. It can also configure AI-powered visual alerts to help agents correct negative sentiments, hold time, etc.

Key Features

• Real-time guidance and coaching
• Visual smart scripts and checklists for consistent services
• Intelligent handoffs from virtual agent to human agent
• Alerts and prompts about hold time, negative sentiment, etc.
• Centralized knowledge base
• 360-degree view for supervisors
• Automated after-call summaries

In short, Observe.AI empowers agents to have consistent and winning agent behaviors for effective customer and sales experiences.

#5 GPTBots - Real-Time Agent Assist with ChatGPT and All LLMs

GPTBots is another powerful real-time agent-assist platform that leverages ChatGPT and LLMs to drive agent efficiency. It lets you create an LLM-powered agent assistant trained with the corporate knowledge base, including internal knowledge, APIs, and databases. This agent assistant can then help agents access timely corporate information and handle customer interactions with the right knowledge on the go.

GPTBots helps deploy highly customized AI agents based on your needs. You can choose from your preferred LLMs and create a specific AI agent for customer support, marketing, enterprise search, etc.

The unique aspect of GPTBots is that you can build and deploy an AI chatbot on your website, social media, or other communication platforms. This chatbot will become the first point of contact for customers and help resolve issues on its own. It only directs complex issues to human agents. This way, agents can save time on repetitive queries.

Overall, GPTBots equip agents with the right agent assist, which is an intelligent, responsive, and LLM-backed agent assistant to drive efficiency and improve customer interactions.

FAQs

1. What are the 5 types of intelligent agents?

The five types of intelligent agents in artificial intelligence are: simple reflex agents (which respond to current stimuli with set rules), model-based agents (which use memory of past states), goal-based agents (which act to achieve specific goals), utility-based agents (which choose actions based on maximizing overall satisfaction or utility), and learning agents (which adapt and improve through experience).

2. What is the difference between agent and bot?

An agent is more advanced and versatile than a bot. A bot is usually a programmed application that performs repetitive and specific tasks. In contrast, an agent is designed to assist humans by handling complex interactions, processing data, or making decisions.

3. What does an agent assistant do?

An agent assistant is a multitask tool that can provide real-time guidance, next best action, proactive alerts, guided script, and much more. It acts as a virtual assistant that agents need to save time in repetitive tasks and offer customers faster responses.

Conclusion

Real-time agent assist is a stress-reliever for support representatives and an effective strategy to enhance customer satisfaction. With the accurate implementation of agent assist, organizations can improve productivity, reduce operational costs, and lower turnover. All it depends on is integrating a top-notch AI agent assist bot. Therefore, choose the right agent assist platform and let your support agents have the confidence and speed to deliver exceptional service.

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