Solutions

AI agents for contact centres

An AI agent handles a customer conversation on its own, in voice or in chat, and hands over to a person when it should. Australian contact centres are being sold at least four different products under that one name. We help you work out which of them your operation can use, what it will contain, and what it will cost per resolved contact.

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The technology

What an AI agent in a contact centre actually does

The term covers four different products. Most vendors sell at least two of them and call both an AI agent, which is why quotes so rarely compare cleanly.

Voice agents that answer the call

A voice agent picks up, works out what the caller wants, and completes the routine work: booking changes, account balances, order status, triage before a queue. The number that decides the business case is containment, the share of calls finished without a person. Vendors quote containment from their own reference customers. Yours will land somewhere else, because your callers and your systems are different.

Agent assist during the conversation

Live suggestions, knowledge retrieval and next best action shown to the agent while the call is running. It lifts consistency on complex enquiries and shortens ramp up for new starters. Adoption is the risk worth planning for, because anything that adds a second screen to a busy agent tends to get ignored by week three.

Automated wrap up and summaries

Notes, dispositions and CRM updates written by the model at the end of each contact. After call work commonly runs between twenty and sixty seconds per contact, so this is usually the fastest payback of the four and the easiest to measure honestly.

Automated quality scoring

Every interaction evaluated against your own scorecard rather than a sample of six per agent per month. Coaching conversations stop being an argument about which calls were chosen, and quality trends become visible by queue, by agent and by contact reason.

The decision

The AI in the platform you already own, or a specialist layer

Every contact centre platform now ships AI features, and specialist vendors sell a layer that sits across whatever platform you run. The two quotes arrive at similar numbers while covering very different scope.

The AI built into your platform

One vendor, one contract, one support path, and features already wired into the routing and reporting you use. Capability tends to trail the specialists by a release cycle or two, and Australian availability trails the American schedule again on top of that. It fits operations where AI is a useful addition to the platform.

Suits existing platforms, modest volumes, no separate integration

A specialist AI layer

Deeper conversational capability, a faster release cadence, and models tuned for the harder call types. It adds a second vendor, a second integration and a second support relationship, and it needs someone named to own the prompts and flows after go live. It earns that where automation is the business case for the whole project.

Suits high volumes, complex intents, automation as the business case

The process

How an AI agent selection runs with us

Five stages, from your contact reasons through to a rollout measured against the baseline you started with. You sign directly with the vendor you choose, and the advisory service costs you nothing.

Find the contact types worth automating

We take your contact reasons by volume and by handling time and pick out the ones where automation is realistic. Most contact centres have three or four intents that carry a large share of the volume and repeat closely enough to hand over. Starting anywhere else is how these projects stall in month four.

Baseline the numbers you will be judged on

Containment, average handling time, transfer rate, after call work, cost per contact and customer satisfaction, measured before anything changes. Without that baseline there is nothing to hold the vendor to twelve months later, and every claim about the AI becomes a matter of opinion.

A shortlist that includes the platform you already own

The AI in your current platform goes on the list beside the specialists, scored on the same criteria. Sometimes it wins, and that is a legitimate outcome that saves you an integration, a contract and a support relationship.

A pilot on real traffic with exit criteria

One defined intent, a defined share of live volume, a defined period, and success criteria agreed in writing before it starts. Pilots without exit criteria run indefinitely and get renewed on sentiment rather than on the numbers.

Commercial terms, then a measured rollout

Pricing model, behaviour as volume grows, ownership of the prompts and flows, data residency and the exit terms. Then rollout, with the same six numbers measured again against the baseline so the business case can be settled with evidence.

Due diligence

What we check that an AI demonstration will not show

Every AI demonstration works. It is built on clean audio, a scripted caller and a sandbox that always answers. These are the checks that decide whether it still works on a Tuesday in your queue.

Containment measured on your own calls

Demonstration containment comes from scripted calls. We ask for a test against a sample of your own recordings before anyone signs anything.

Where the conversation data is processed

Which country the audio and transcripts are processed and stored in, how long they are retained, and whether your customer conversations are used to train the vendor models.

What happens when the agent gets it wrong

Escalation rules, guardrails, and what the caller actually hears when the model cannot answer. This is where the reputational risk sits, and it is rarely on the slide.

Latency measured on Australian calls

Response delay decides whether a voice agent feels like a conversation or like a hold. We measure it from Australian networks rather than from the vendor environment.

Recognition accuracy on your caller base

Speech recognition accuracy moves with accent, line quality and industry vocabulary. We test it on the people who actually ring you and on the words your business uses.

How the pricing behaves at volume

Per minute, per session, per resolution or per seat. Each behaves differently as volume grows, and the cheapest model at pilot size is often the dearest at full rollout.

What the agent is allowed to do

Reading a knowledge base is the easy half. We check what the agent can write back into, which systems it can act on, and what breaks when one of them is upgraded.

Who owns it after go live

Whether your own team can change a prompt, a flow or an escalation rule, or whether every adjustment is a professional services request with a lead time and a price.

Common questions

Asked on most AI agent projects

The questions that come up in nearly every first conversation about contact centre AI, answered without a qualification call first.

What is an AI agent in a contact centre?

An AI agent is software that handles a customer conversation on its own, in voice or in chat. It works out what the customer wants from natural speech, completes the task in your systems, and passes the contact to a person when it should. An older IVR or keyword chatbot responds to a menu, where an AI agent responds to whatever the caller says.

How much do AI agents for contact centres cost in Australia?

Voice is usually priced per minute, digital per session or per resolved contact, with a platform fee and implementation on top. Rates vary widely by vendor and by how much work the agent is doing. The figure worth comparing is cost per resolved contact against what a human handled contact costs you today.

What proportion of calls can an AI agent handle?

On well chosen intents, containment commonly lands between twenty and fifty per cent of total call volume in the first year, and higher on narrow transactional queues. Vendor case studies quote the top of that range. The realistic figure depends on how repetitive your contact reasons are and how readily your systems give the agent the data it needs.

Will AI agents replace our contact centre team?

In most Australian deployments the AI absorbs the routine, repetitive contacts and the human team moves onto the complex and the sensitive ones. Headcount effects show up more often as reduced recruitment and less overtime than as redundancy. Planning that role change early is what separates the deployments that stick from the ones quietly switched off.

How long does it take to deploy an AI agent?

A single intent pilot on a platform you already run can go live in four to eight weeks. A multi intent voice deployment with system integrations is a three to six month programme. The schedule is usually set by how quickly the agent can be given access to the systems it has to read from and write to.

Where does our customer conversation data go?

That varies by vendor, and it needs settling before signature rather than after. We establish which country the audio and transcripts are processed and stored in, how long they are retained, whether they are used to train models, and how all of that sits against your privacy obligations and any commitments you have already made to your own customers.

We are vendor funded and completely free to your business. Always focused on the right outcome.

Work out what AI can actually do in your contact centre

We map your contact reasons, baseline the numbers, shortlist the platforms that fit, and hold the pilot to criteria agreed before it starts. You sign directly with the vendor you choose, and our service costs you nothing.