Human-AI Collaboration in the Contact Centre: How AI Copilots Empower and Augment Agents

Human-AI collaboration is becoming a hot topic in the contact centre.

Whenever new, cutting edge technology emerges, it’s often met with a combination of excitement, and concern. The attitudes people have towards artificial intelligence – particularly the latest generative, conversational, and agentic AI solutions exemplify this balance.

On the one hand, plenty of companies are already investing in AI, saying it helps enhance productivity and efficiency, improve customer experience and reduce costs. In fact, Gartner says that by 2026, the deployment of conversational AI tools in the contact centre will help to reduce agent labour costs by around $80 billion. That might be great news for business leaders, but it obviously creates concerns for agents, who believe AI could render them obsolete.

The good news? The reality is that AI isn’t really reducing costs and improving business outcomes by eliminating the need for agents. What it’s actually doing is making agents more efficient and successful – amplifying their skills, and streamlining increasingly complex interactions.

Here’s what you need to know about the benefits of human-AI collaboration in the contact centre.

Human-AI Collaboration: The Benefits for Contact Centre Agents

As adoption of artificial intelligence in the contact centre continues to grow, managers, supervisors, and agents alike are beginning to recognise the opportunities. A report published in 2024 even found that 65% of agents actually want real-time help from AI during customer interactions, and 95% say that AI tools help them to resolve customer issues faster.

Here are some of the key ways that human-AI collaboration empowers agents.

1.      Streamlining Knowledge Retrieval

No matter how well-trained your contact centre agents are, they still need to search for information regularly to ensure they’re troubleshooting, and addressing issues correctly. Unfortunately, searching for the right information – particularly across a range of disconnected tools, is time-consuming.

Agents can spend crucial minutes just tracking down the right data, which causes frustration for customers. Fortunately, human-AI collaboration can help. AI copilots excel at tapping into various knowledge bases and business systems, to surface relevant data in an instant.

They can identify customers based on their names and surface CRM profiles, or recognise keywords and look for related content in a database. This reduces the time that agents need to spend jumping between different applications and tools. Plus, based on the in-depth analysis of a conversation as its happening, as well as evaluations of previous discussions, AI can suggest next best-action guidance to staff, guiding them through each stage in a discussion.

2.      Unlocking Valuable, Objective Insights

Data is crucial to developing stronger customer experiences, and if there’s one thing that artificial intelligence excels at – it’s data analysis. Investing in human-AI collaboration gives you an opportunity to provide every agent, supervisor, and manager with a data analyst, ready to share valuable insights from every discussion.

AI tools can summarize interactions and understand customer sentiment, helping business leaders to identify factors that can harm or improve customer satisfaction rates. It can scan through historical information and surface recommendations about how to improve future service methods. Plus, some solutions can provide insights to agents in real-time.

For instance, the NICE Enlighten AI bot for agents leverages AI-powered analytics and machine learning to suggest relevant solutions to customer problems, and provide tips on how employees can improve their relationship with each customer. Based on AI insights, companies can even make more intelligent decisions about how to train employees, or which team members may need extra support.

3.      Scaling Personalisation Strategies

71% of customers expect highly personalised experiences when they interact with a company – but personalising each interaction can be difficult for an agent. They need enough time at the beginning of interaction to learn about a customer and their preferences so they can adapt accordingly. This can lead to slower levels of service, and bottlenecks in the contact centre.

With human-AI collaboration, scaling personalisation strategies is much simpler. AI tools can review each customer’s profile instantly, at the start of a conversation, and suggest responses to questions that are personalised to their needs. They can even identify ways to improve the customer experience by suggesting relevant product upgrades, or determining the right time to follow up with a customer.

Intelligent tools can also help employees to adapt to changing customer expectations in other ways. For instance, if an AI copilot detects signs that a customer is stressed, they can advise agents to adjust their tone of voice to help de-escalate the issue. Alternatively, if a customer is struggling to address a problem over the phone, the AI system could suggest moving to a text-based discussion.

4.      Ensuring Omnichannel Consistency

McKinsey says that 2025 will be the year when companies need to go beyond their basic omnichannel service strategies – taking a proactive approach to creating truly seamless experiences for customers. While many modern organisations know they need to be available to serve their customers on various channels, they often struggle to deliver a consistent experience as people move from one platform to the next. This leads to frustration and complexity for customers.

AI copilots can help minimise this issue. These solutions can preserve the key components of a conversation or previous discussions with a customer as they move across channels, summarising previous data for agents to use as they deliver service. They can also share guidance with agents on best practices to use across all channels – which reduces the risk of inconsistencies.

Additionally, because AI agents are integrated with a company’s existing knowledge bases and resources, they can reduce the risk of agents making errors. They’ll surface information directly from approved resources for every discussion, so human agents are less likely to give the wrong advice.

5.      Reducing Repetitive Tasks

According to some studies, the number of repetitive, monotonous tasks contact centre agents need to do each day is one of the main reasons so many of these employees hate their jobs. Most professionals want to spend their time and effort on valuable, creative tasks that make a difference – not just adding information to a database or updating records.

Human-AI collaboration allows agents to pass repetitive and boring tasks onto copilots, so they can focus on what matters. An AI copilot can handle things like summarizing a call at the end of a discussion, assigning action items, taking notes, and more. This means that agents can pay more attention to what’s happening during a call, and spend less time on wrap-up work after.

For contact centre agents, using AI for automation leads to better job satisfaction, higher levels of engagement, and a reduced risk of burnout. For business leaders, it opens the door to process efficiency improvements that enhance performance and reduce operational costs.

6.      Transforming Training with Human-AI Collaboration

Contact centre employees need regular training to ensure they can effective use new technologies, avoid security and compliance risks, and strengthen relationships with customers. But not every employee needs the same type of training. AI systems are excellent at analysing the performance metrics and activities of agents, identifying their strengths and weaknesses.

These tools can use what they learn about each employee to suggest training recommendations to supervisors, or even share coaching tips with staff members in real-time. The result is a more personalised, efficient, and effective training strategy.

Human-AI collaboration can even optimise onboarding strategies, making it easier for companies to provide new employees with the tips, guidance, and resources they need to excel in their roles. For instance, Palo Alto Networks uses copilots to support onboarding strategies, saving around 351,000 hours on initial training initiatives.

7.      Improving Resource Allocation

Optimising resource allocation isn’t just important for companies who want to cut down on costs. It’s also essential to improving employee experiences. An AI copilot built into your CCaaS technology can help you to forecast future staffing needs and understand customer service trends, so you can allocate the right number of employees to each channel on different days.

This reduces the overall risks associated with overstaffing and understaffing in the contact centre, while also making it less likely companies will overwhelm their teams with too much work. That’s important at a time when over half of all contact centre agents are at high risk of burnout.

Human-AI collaboration can also make it easier to implement flexible working strategies. When an employee tries to switch shifts with a colleague or change their schedule, AI can step in to ensure that there aren’t any gaps in your team.

Use Cases for Human-AI Collaboration in Different Industries

So, what do the benefits of human-AI collaboration in contact centre and customer service environments look like in practice? Here’s a quick insight into how companies in different industries can use AI to empower their agents and improve customer service:

• Banking and Finance: In the finance sector, Copilots can help agents analyse previous customer interactions, and real-time conversations to identify opportunities for personalisation. They could even help consultants and advisors deliver better recommendations to customers based on risk levels and preferences.
• Government: In the government space, agents can use the proactive conversational abilities of AI copilots to help deliver intuitive guidance to customers. They could use Copilots to send updates about public services and events to citizens in real-time.
• Telecom: In the telecom space, Copilots will help customers to solve common issues, like problems with call connections, autonomously. This reduces the number of repetitive calls that agents need to deal with, allowing human employees to focus on more valuable tasks.
• Travel: In the travel space, AI systems can analyse comprehensive knowledge bases and suggest relevant information and tips during calls. For instance, the KLM Royal Dutch Airlines agent can access and share real-time flight information with agents.
• Healthcare: In healthcare, Copilots can act as a virtual triage system, ensuring agents are routed to the correct channels and professionals. Supervisors can integrate Copilots with their electronic health record system, and receive feedback on where to improve routing strategies.
• Technology: In the technology sector, copilots can provide agents with the most up-to-date information on products and solutions, as well as status updates and troubleshooting techniques. They’ll also empower customers to address their own common issues faster.

Upgrading the Contact Centre with Human-AI Collaboration

AI copilots and autonomous agents aren’t here to replace the human contact centre agent. They’re the intuitive and reliable tools that companies can use to automate the repetitive processes that agents hate doing, and augment team productivity. Human-AI collaboration ensures that the genuine people in a contact centre can accomplish more with less – achieving higher levels of efficiency and productivity.

What’s more, these tools can help business leaders get the most out of their resources too – helping them to make intelligent training decisions, improve onboarding processes, and even optimise the allocation of human resources to different channels.

Although there are challenges to overcome when it comes to implementing AI copilots into the workplace – such as managing data security and privacy standards, and encouraging business-wide adoption – the right strategy can make a world of difference in the modern contact centre.

The key to success is finding the AI vendor that can support and guide you through the implementation and optimisation process. Here at TechGrants, we can help guide you towards AI innovators who can ensure you make the most of the AI revolution, without overlooking the importance of keeping human beings in the loop.

Even better – we can also help you access the funding you need to invest in not just cutting-edge AI technology, but flexible contact centre solutions and training strategies too. Contact our team today to learn more about how we can support your human-AI collaboration initiative.