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In today’s customer service landscape, contact centers grapple with increasingly complex technical inquiries, from hardware, connectivity and setup issues, to frustrating, troubleshooting issues. These challenges often lead to prolonged interactions, repeat calls, returns, replacements, churn and poor customer satisfaction. Traditional support tools, limited to text or voice inputs, frequently fall short in resolving such complexities efficiently. Enter Sophie Live Assist.
Sophie Live’s integrated Assist is a transformative feature designed to empower agents with visual context and real-time guidance. This enhances Average Handle Time (AHT), First Call Resolution (FCR), and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) while improving your bottom line by reducing returns, churn, and dispatches.
Tackling Troubleshooting: The Need for Visual Context
Technical issues inherently demand more time and resources. In an industry where 30-45% of contact center agents turnover annually, Tier 1 agents often lack the knowledge, skill, and tools to handle troubleshooting or technical issues.
Support calls generally benchmark in the 4 to 6 minute range. In contrast, technical support calls often have an average AHT of 7 to 10 minutes.
In other words, technical support calls are on average 45% longer than other support calls.
These extended interactions strain contact center resources and impact customer satisfaction and retention. Compounding the issue, customer retention drops significantly when a second call is needed.
Not only is this costly in terms of customer satisfaction and loyalty, but it also affects your contact center, as well as the operational costs associated with troubleshooting and technical support. These calls have a far higher chance of resulting in replacement parts or returns, as well as field service dispatches. When an inexperienced, Tier 1 agent orders the wrong replacement part, an unnecessary return or an ineffective field service dispatch, the cost of service skyrockets.
Sophie Live Assist: Empower Agents with Visual Intelligence
Assist is built into Sophie Live, providing agents with real-time visual insights into customer issues.
Let’s consider Tom. Tom is a Tier 1 contact center agent for an EV brand.
Sally, the customer, calls in to report that her new electric vehicle isn’t charging when connected to her home charger. She wasn’t sure about going electric, but her partner and the dealership talked her into it. She has only had the vehicle for two weeks, and her new home charger is brand new, installed by a private contractor and supplied by a third party.
Here is how Sophie Live Assist helps Tom solve Sally’s issue quickly and easily.
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Accurate, Fast Issue Diagnosis: Finding the Root Cause
Tom uses Sophie Live to see what Sally sees. As his partner, Sophie Live Assist helps Tom understand what he is seeing, identifying the root cause, and guiding him through the support process. Assist proactively helps Tom identify the make and model of the vehicle and the EV charger. Using the integrated chat, Assist asks Tom if he wants help troubleshooting this particular model charger. Tom types out that though the charger is plugged in, the vehicle is not charging.
Assist replies in the chat, asking to see the front panel of her EV charger. Assist confirms that the primary light is green, showing that the charger is correctly installed and configured. However, Assist notes that the “Charging” LED is not lit up. Assist then guides Tom to double-check that the charging cable is fully inserted into the vehicle charging port.
Sally checks her charging cable, and reports the cable is “in as far as it will go” but that it feels a bit loose. Using Sophie Live, Tom and Assist see that the cable looks like it may not be fully inserted. This is a common security feature on EVs.
Unlike traditional CoPilots, Assist didn’t rely on the Agent to accurately type out the make and model of the vehicle, the charging port standard, or the EV charging station manufacturer and model. Assist proactively watched the Sophie Live visual remote support session, visually collected the information needed, and quickly identified the root cause of the issue.
This dramatically improves time to resolution and first-time resolution rates. -
Rapid, Guided Solutions
Now that Assist has confirmed the issue, Assist offers to help Tom resolve the issue. As Tom is a new contact center agent, he uses Assist to guide Sally through the fix, in a step-by-step guided flow. First, Assist asks to see the vehicle key. Once the key fob is visually identified, Assist tells Tom have Sally double-press the unlock button. Then, Assist guides Tom to have Sally remove and reinsert the EV cable. Finally, Assist asks to see the EV’s in-dash system, visually confirming that the vehicle is indeed charging.
Traditional CoPilots rely on text, and help navigate to support articles. This requires agents to juggle multiple open tabs or windows, toggling between the service session and knowledge resources.
More advanced CoPilots offer as much as 7 or 8 steps of guidance, typically in a single chat message. Agents easily lose track of their progress, or may try to continue on top step 4, when in reality, the next-best-action is to switch to a different flow alltogether.
Unlike CoPilots, Assist provides contextual next-best-action-style guidance. Assist actively monitors the support session, and dynamically recommends the optimal next step based on the flow of the call. This helps improve service quality, speed, and customer experience. And it helps to reinforce Tier 1 contact center training.
With Sophie Live Assist, Tom (a new agent), and Sally (a new customer) were able to successfully, easily and quickly resolve a highly technical issue. Tom, who is primarily trained on the electric vehicle, may have blamed the EV charger manufacturer or installer. Sally would then have to contact each of them, and wait for them to dispatch a technician. This would have been a unnecessarily frustrating service experience. As she was already skeptical about going with an electric vehicle, Sally would have be more likely to trade in the EV, and tell her friends about how frustrating EV ownership can be.
By using Sophie Live Assist, powered by Visual Agentic AI, Tom was able to quickly and easily avoid this entire headache. At the end of their visual remote service session, Sally gives her service experience a five star rating, impressed that the EV brand is taking an innovative, visual approach to service.
Quantifiable Benefits: Enhancing Key Metrics
Sophie Live Assist has demonstrated significant improvements in critical contact center metrics:
- Average Handle Time (AHT): By facilitating quicker diagnoses and solutions, Assist helps reduce AHT, aligning with industry best practices.
- First Call Resolution (FCR): Assist’s Visual Agentic AI enables agents to resolve issues during the initial interaction, boosting FCR rates.
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Efficient and effective resolutions enhance the overall customer experience, leading to higher CSAT scores.
Furthermore, Assist helps multiple downstream and upstream business metrics well beyond the contact center.
- Reduce Dispatches: Visuals help to correctly identify the root cause and the optimal resolution flow, assist in preventing unnecessary dispatches, and ensure that job requirements are accurately captured for better first-time-fix rates (fewer repeat dispatches). This not only saves tens of millions of dollars in operational overhead, but it also substantially reduces the brand’s carbon footprint.
- Fewer Returns, Replacement Parts: By helping agents visually identify and resolve issues, Assist reduces returns, and ensures that the right replacement parts are sent to the customer.
For example, a premium vacuum brand found that customers and inexperienced agents generally struggled to correctly name and identify which part was in need of a replacement. To address this issue, they sent a variety of parts to each customer. However, by visually identifying which specific part was in need of replacement, the brand substantially reduced their cost of part replacement.
- Higher LTV, Reduced Churn: Happy customers stick around and stay loyal. Unhappy customers cancel subscriptions and return new purchases. By helping contact center agents quickly and easily resolve customer issues, Sophie Live Assist helps to optimize the customer lifetime value and prevent new customer churn.
Rapid, Flexible Deployment: Pre-Trained and Custom AI Models
Sophie Assist supports a flexible deployment approach, designed to meet each organization’s unique needs. Those looking for instant deployment can easily enable Sophie Live Assist with pre-trained or vertical-specific AI models. Enterprises that want their Sophie Live Assist trained on their unique content and service flows, integrated into their backend systems, or empowered with advanced capabilities can take advantage of our customized, enterprise-grade AI solutions.
Redefine Contact Center Support with Sophie Live Assist
As customer issues are becoming increasingly complex, traditional support tools and text-based CoPilots are no longer sufficient. Sophie Live Assist closes the Tier 1 service gap by providing agents with the visual tools they need to understand and resolve troubleshooting and technical issues efficiently. Already field-tested and proven among Fortune 500 brands, Sophie Live Assist not only improves operational efficiency but also elevates the customer experience, unlocking growth at scale.
Embrace the future of customer support, where complexity is met with clarity, and every issue finds its resolution. Book your demo of Sophie Live Assist today.
