How AI-powered virtual agents enhance efficiency in contact centres.

Modern digitally-savvy consumers expect artificial intelligence (AI)-powered interactions across the customer journey when engaging with contact centres today, demanding natural, fluid interactions that closely mimic conversations and experiences with human agents.

Moreover, operators must find ways to contain costs while still ramping up capacity to deal with rising call volumes.

CX innovation.

In response, contact centre operators are leveraging AI to craft conversational experiences with basic chatbots and more advanced virtual agents, driving the rise of immersive digital customer experiences (CX).

The 2025 Zendesk CX Trends report reveals that 70% of CX leaders are reimagining their customer journeys using AI tools to drive CX innovation.

According to findings, two-thirds of CX leaders believe chatbots can build a stronger emotional connection with their customers as AI transforms chatbots into advanced skilled digital agents, capable of revolutionising consumer interactions and CX by facilitating personalised, instant and interactive experiences.

The report highlights their ability to mirror brand styles and evaluate a customer’s feelings and desires as features that enable them to deliver tailored, accurate responses.

Boost capacity.

While rule-based chatbots can field a large volume of common contact centre engagements by addressing repetitive issues with predefined scripts and rules, infusing AI into these frontline engagement capabilities can drive significant efficiency gains by offloading call volumes from live agents.

Assigning intent and outcomes to the phrases customers use most often when contacting the contact centre can help operators develop automated direct dialogue capabilities that can deliver AI-powered self-service support and transactional engagements.

Using open natural language processing (NLP) interfaces, these conversational AI models allow users to interact with the chatbot using natural language, rather than requiring specific commands or keywords.

Contact centres that require more advanced automation can leverage conversational AI capabilities embedded in virtual agent solutions to effectively handle most of the more complex automated engagements that contact centres currently field.

By analysing sentiment and intent, AI-powered virtual agents can field more complex tasks and requests. These capabilities enable virtual agents to handle a wide range of interactions in an intuitive and user-friendly manner.

Importantly from a capacity perspective, investing in AI-powered virtual agent capabilities creates scalability. Virtual agents delivered from the cloud can handle a massive volume of inquiries simultaneously, with the ability to scale on demand to meet rising call volumes on the fly.

The resultant reduction in call hold times and improvement in average handling times (AHT) from automated chatbot and virtual agent solutions can deliver significant improvements in call volume capacity and engagement efficiency by shortening response and resolution times, which significantly enhances CX.

Moreover, automation and AI-powered virtual agents and self-service chatbots provide a further boost to contact centre efficiency by freeing agents from mundane and menial tasks that add little value to the customer or the business.

This allows these human resources can spend more time on the most complex or sensitive conversations and interactions, where they can add greater value to customers and the business.

Intelligent routing.

Virtual agents can also intelligently route inquiries to the most relevant and appropriate live agents based on the customer's needs and the agent's expertise.

They can also escalate complex issues to live agents seamlessly, ensuring that customers receive the right level of support. This capability improves first-contact resolution rates and reduces the number of transfers within a contact centre to elevate CX.

Always-on customer service.

In addition, consumers today expect immediate support and 24/7 service from contact centres, which is where AI-powered agents offer a distinct advantage.

Chatbots can field basic engagements, responding to customers after working hours when they make common requests, providing automated answers, and accurate and helpful information, or direct customers to relevant resources and information in a help or FAQ centre.

More advanced virtual agent solutions leverage automation, data analytics and machine learning (ML) to provide the round-the-clock availability needed to support front-line engagement at any time of day.

These solutions also have the ability to allocate unresolved issues or queries to agents for resolution the following business day if required.

AI in contact centres.

Combining high-performing live agents with AI-powered virtual agents has the potential to deliver future-ready frontline customer engagement capabilities that increase customer loyalty and improve customer satisfaction.

These benefits provide an important advantage in a marketplace where the battle for the hearts and minds of customers and share of consumer spend is becoming increasingly competitive.

The efficiency gains and operational benefits offered from AI-powered virtual agents can also help to contain rising costs while also supporting better resource utilisation in an environment where cost reduction has become a non-negotiable for contact centre operators.