Smarter Support Starts Here: Empowering Agents with Intelligent Guidance

Marissa Alvarez

August 07, 2025

The contact center can feel like a pressure cooker. Customers have demands (and feelings), and managers have high expectations.

When customers seek assistance with complex, emotionally charged issues, they expect an agent who can solve their problems quickly.

Managers need agents to hit their KPIs and keep things moving along smoothly. That means low average handling times, high first-call resolution rates, and top-notch customer satisfaction scores.

And if that’s not enough, agents are forced to juggle so many systems while on live calls that even a circus clown would be impressed, just to find the information and context they need.

All too often, agents are left to figure it all out alone–and that stress can take its toll. And agents still only receive feedback on a small fraction of their interactions. Even worse, more than half of the customers who have a bad experience won’t even take the time to complain about it. They’ll just jump to a competitor instead.

If businesses want to improve the customer experience, they need to examine whether their contact centers are equipped for success.

After all, bad CX today means fewer customers tomorrow.

Agents are still the beating heart of CX.

Self-service and basic AI functionality (like chatbots) now deal with the simplest customer questions. But complex issues? Difficult calls? Upset customers? Those still get routed directly to human agents.

This makes every interaction more urgent, emotional, and complex than it would’ve been just a few years ago. That’s why it’s more critical than ever for agents to operate at their best—and for contact centers to focus on retention, because tougher questions demand more experienced agents. That means the smartest investment you can make is in AI tools that are specifically created to amplify agent performance and delight customers. That’s where intelligent guidance comes in.

Think of intelligent guidance like a personal assistant for your contact center folks. It’s an AI-powered solution that sifts through all the data in all the systems (that your people previously had to juggle) and then provides agents with the insights they need to have better customer conversations. Think customer context, next-best action recommendations, sentiment analysis, and more.

That means empowering your agents with real-time, data-driven guidance—so they’re equipped to deliver the right response at the right moment, every time.

For example, if a customer mentions job loss as their reason for canceling a subscription, the system can prompt the agent to offer a deferred payment plan option—if that option has proven effective in similar cases. Intelligent guidance doesn’t just analyze the current interaction; it draws on patterns from countless past conversations to recommend actions that have consistently led to positive outcomes.

You don’t need AI to do it all. AI should be helping agents do what they do best, with less stress. That’s why 8x8 has partnered with Creovai to offer 8x8 Smart Assist. It’s a seamless layer of AI-driven, real-time guidance that meets agents in the moments they need it most.

8x8 Smart Assist with Creovai.

8x8 Smart Assist’s real-time guidance combines AI-driven insights with workflow automation to walk agents through customer interactions. It offers dynamic checklists, next-best-action recommendations, and contextual coaching prompts to enhance efficiency, ensure compliance, and increase customer satisfaction.

And it does it all without breaking up the agent experience. In fact, that’s why 8x8 and Creovai’s collaboration was a thoughtful, albeit obvious choice.

It would never be good enough to just tape two solutions together. To reinforce 8x8’s commitment to delivering best-of-breed innovation without compromising the simplicity and reliability of a single-source solution, we worked with Creovai to build a seamless integration right into our contact center experience. This approach delivers the benefits directly to the agents who use it every day—no jumping around, no juggling.

Just results.

How we do it:

Prompts are contextual, scripted when needed, and always evolving.
Agents get the next-best action while the conversation is happening.

8x8 Smart Assist delivers:

Live retention guidance.
Dynamic compliance scripting.
Escalation alerts tied to sentiment.
Embedded QA markers for wrap-up automation.

Leading a cultural vibe shift in the contact center.

Don’t get it wrong: Performance boosts are crucial for businesses looking at the bottom line (duh). But building up agent confidence, fostering a more positive culture, and ultimately RETAINING your people for the long haul is how you get to better business outcomes.

With Smart Assist, we’re working on more than just driving better business metrics. We’re thinking about transformation.

1. Insight-driven onboarding and coaching = more skilled agents.

Hiring and training new agents is costly and time-consuming, particularly in an industry with an annual turnover rate of 30-45%.

Inexperienced agents often struggle with problem-solving and deep product knowledge, negatively impacting customer experience metrics. While coaching can help, excessive time spent in training sessions reduces the time agents have to assist customers, increasing operational costs.

Intelligent guidance can help streamline the learning process by filling in knowledge gaps in a more personalized way. For example, one agent could be great at talking to people and empathizing, but sometimes they forget the order of operations for solving certain issues. Smart Assist would help that agent with deeper knowledge and context, and the agent could keep using their interpersonal superpowers to resolve issues.

It's like having access to "phone a friend" when you can't answer a question on a game show.

This approach reduces the need for exhaustive onboarding, lowers training expenses, and minimizes errors that would typically be addressed only in post-call reviews.

2. Get a handle on agent burnout.

Burnout is high among people working in contact centers. 87% of agents reported high or very high stress levels, and over half said they’re emotionally drained from their work.

Intelligent guidance helps create a less stressful work environment by reducing uncertainty and pressure. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that people perform better when they’re happier (and they’re way less likely to quit).

3. Better customer experiences—not just some of the time, but every time.

Unsurprisingly, a customer’s experience is often dependent on who they get connected to. Inexperienced agents are more likely to place customers on hold while they search for answers. If no answers are to be found, they’re likely to transfer the call to someone more knowledgeable, often causing frustration and information loss along the way. Meanwhile, they’re expected to do more than just resolve the issue. They’re expected to make an unhappy customer happy again.

Take it from Simon Black, Chief Operating Officer of Creovai:

"[...] that agent is trying to deal with four different applications. They're trying to deal with an angry customer, and they're supposed to be able to turn that converstation into a positive experience. So they're having a very tough job"

Smart Assist helps remove those obstacles and makes it easier to deliver positive customer experiences. It takes best practices from seasoned agents and integrates them into real-time workflows. These insights help all agents—regardless of experience level—navigate complex interactions with confidence, reducing hold times, unnecessary escalations, and inconsistent service quality.

Connect happy agents to the idea of better biz metrics. Bonus: This improves every downstream metric (FCR, CSAT, AHT) and reduces rework.

4. Better business performance.

Intelligent guidance doesn’t just improve agent efficiency; it also drives key business outcomes.

Perfect the pitch: Contact centers that also work in sales can boost their win rate by identifying which arguments work best for which customers and then building scripts around pitches that have been proven to succeed.
Lower costs: Operations teams can pinpoint factors that over-extend call times and use intelligence guidance prompts to help agents operate more efficiently, reducing overall handling time.
Keep your customers for the long haul: Sometimes, customers threaten to leave. With conversation intelligence, CX teams can figure out which “please stay with us!” offers work best—and then prompt agents with those offers in real time.

Contact centers generate vast amounts of unstructured data from customer interactions. Intelligent guidance solutions like Creovai’s helps transform this data into actionable insights, enabling agents to deliver higher-quality service while also achieving better business results.

One U.S.-based BPO put Creovai to the test, and the impact was clear: “Agent Assist is so important to us because it allows us to resolve customer problems quickly while accurately capturing information about the interaction. We’ve found giving our agents this real-time guidance translates to higher resolution rates, faster completion of service, and fewer errors,” said the company’s president.

Conclusion: Happy agents = better service = loyal customers.

The bigger picture: A smarter, more human contact center.

Self-service options can solve many basic customer issues, but human agents are still a vital part of the contact center. A recent study found that 68% of customers still prefer speaking with a live representative.

Companies that want to keep their customers happy need to focus on keeping their agents happy, too. Intelligent guidance equips agents with the knowledge and tools they need to excel, improving customer satisfaction, reducing costs, and strengthening overall business performance.

8x8 Smart Assist is just the start. Creovai and 8x8 are building a roadmap where the best AI and the best people work side by side—at scale.