Dive Brief:
- Nearly one-third of customer service agents say they are likely to quit their current role within the next six months, according to a Verint survey released Tuesday. Verint, a customer service automation company, surveyed 1,000 agents at organizations with at least 300 agents.
- Most agents are on the lookout for positions offering hours that fit their needs, with 9 out of 10 saying that schedule flexibility is important when choosing a job.
- Just 8% of respondents said they fear being replaced by AI within the next three years, though nearly all expect the technology to change their role. Of those agents, 3 in 5 say they think their jobs will become more complex or technical.
Dive Insight:
AI is positioned to have a significant impact on some of the most common duties customer service agents face in their day-to-day work.
Much of an agent’s time is dedicated to tasks beyond directly interfacing with customers. Nearly half of calls require agents to spend time searching for information, according to the survey. Agents spend an average of 2.7 minutes per call on this part of the job.
“The biggest opportunity is using AI to handle the ‘busy work’ inside interactions — e.g. gathering context, surfacing knowledge, automating wrap up — so agents can focus on empathy and resolution,” Anna Convery, chief marketing officer at Verint, said in an email.
This is an area where AI is already helping agents save time, as more than half of customer support teams cited faster response and resolution times as one of the top benefits of the technology in a January Intercom survey.
The Intercom survey found that a top use case for AI agents in the contact center was automating manual work.
“AI removes routine work, which means agents increasingly handle more complex interactions that require judgement, emotional intelligence and exception handling,” Convery said. “The job becomes less about execution and more about decision-making and working effectively alongside AI, which raises the skill ceiling rather than the workload.”
Research has found that customer support where AI supports human agents, rather than AI handling the inquiry by itself, is preferable for customers as well.
For example, 88% of consumers report satisfaction with human-led digital customer service interactions, compared with 60% with AI-only interactions, according to a Verizon Business surveylast summer.
Consumers often want to talk to other people, not a machine. Two-thirds of consumers prefer human-led support, and under half say they don’t trust companies when they use AI alone to handle customer service queries, according to a March Pegasystems survey.