How Can AI and Automation Help Contact Center Agents Thrive This Holiday Season?

As the holiday shopping season gathers pace, retailers are working extra hard to satisfy increased customer demand. There’s a strong emphasis on in-store teams, but contact center agents are also critical, serving as the touchpoint between retail brands and millions of customers grappling with online order issues, delivery delays and other complex questions.

Artificial intelligence and automation offer valuable opportunities to streamline customer service operations during this busy time. They do this by improving operational efficiency and enhancing agent well-being. With the right tools in place, agents are better positioned to deliver effective, personalized service and satisfy customers even as seasonal pressure runs high.

Enhancing Agent Effectiveness

AI and automation are vital tools for retail contact centers, particularly during the holiday season, as they help manage routine transactional tasks like tracking orders, clarifying billing terms, etc. All of which frees agents to focus on more complex interactions.

Customers reach out for human assistance when they need reassurance — whether it’s fixing an order problem or handling an urgent delivery concern. Only a human agent can offer the empathy and flexibility that customers depend on in sensitive or high-stakes situations. With automation managing many routine customer service requests, agents are free to give more attention to solving complex issues efficiently and making a positive and lasting impression on customers.

Streamlining Scheduling and Training

A big challenge during peak season is matching agent availability with customer demand. Minute-to-minute customer demand is impossible to predict, but automated demand forecasting tools can analyze historical data to approximate call volumes and adjust staffing levels accordingly.

More sophisticated technology tools go a step further, monitoring and responding to real-time call spikes and enabling dynamic scheduling to ensure agent supply consistently meets customer demand. By leveraging real-time automation to align staffing levels with this demand, retailers can minimize wait times, reduce customer frustration, and ensure smoother operations throughout the season.

Holiday peaks often require the rapid onboarding of seasonal agents as well as targeted training of all agents for seasonal deals and specific policies. Real-time automation can help by identifying idle moments that surface randomly across the agent population throughout the day and automating the delivery of vital training sessions directly to agents’ desktops precisely when agents aren’t on a call. Real-time automation helps ensure that agents are constantly up to speed on what they need to know to perform at their best.

Prioritizing Well-Being and Engagement

The importance of agent well-being has often been underappreciated, but fortunately that’s changing. Long shifts and high call volumes take a toll on agents, leading to stress and burnout. Powerful new AI-powered systems can monitor and compare performance trends across agent populations and the results can be leveraged to provide needed support to agents.

For example, agent burnout can be detected in advance by monitoring call handling data — e.g., call times, idle time, aux states, etc. — for patterns that indicate increased levels of stress. Machine learning can identify these patterns and flag them in real time, allowing team leaders to intervene and help at-risk agents, preventing costly attrition before it occurs.

This kind of proactive support improves engagement and helps keep agents motivated and focused. A well-supported workforce creates a positive ripple effect, as agents who feel cared for are more likely to deliver great service to customers. With the right balance of technology and human touch, retailers can provide faster, more efficient service without sacrificing the empathy and care that’s such an integral part of great customer experiences.

Jennifer Lee is the co-CEO of Intradiem, a contact center automation platform.