Blog: AI in Action - Agent Soft Skills
Contact centers have invested considerable time, money and resources over the past decades looking to build a culture of efficiency and effectiveness. While the goal was clear, it was often compromised by technology – complex, siloed systems that often required custom coding.
Today, that vision is finally within reach. Cloud communications has made the vision into reality – a unified application that is designed to work everywhere with minimal training and support. Over the past three years, we’ve seen AI deliver even more – first with Conversational AI, then Generative AI and now Agentic AI. Much of the attention has been on automation through voice and digital bots. There’s been measurable improvements in metrics like handle time and first contact resolution, but despite these improvements, customer satisfaction hasn’t significantly increased.
The true differentiator isn’t just fast response times or faster calls — it’s the human connection made during each interaction. That connection is built on soft skills: empathy, active listening, ownership, and a host of other people-first capabilities that define a great customer experience (CX).
Ironically, while these soft skills are essential, they’re often the hardest to measure, coach, and develop at scale. This is where AI-powered solutions like Agent Assist and conversational intelligence step in as transformational tools.
The Human Side of CX: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Develop and Reinforce Agent Soft Skills
Here are some of the top soft skills every successful agent should master — and how AI can help reinforce them:
1. Empathy
AI tools can detect emotional tone in conversations and guide agents in real-time with more empathetic responses. This helps agents show understanding and care, especially during stressful or complex interactions.
Example: “It sounds like you’re frustrated — I’m here to help fix this for you.”
2. Active Listening
AI can analyze whether an agent is interrupting or speaking too much, then provide feedback on balancing listening and talking. It also summarizes customer intent, so agents can stay focused on the core issue.
3. Deliberate Effort to Understand
AI listens to the entire interaction and suggests clarifying questions if the agent may have missed something. This encourages agents to dive deeper before jumping to solutions.
4. Demonstrating Ownership
Through sentiment analysis and coaching tools, AI can flag moments where agents avoid accountability and recommend ownership-based phrasing, like “Let me take care of this for you.”
5. Effective Communication
AI provides real-time prompts and post-call feedback on tone, clarity, and jargon usage. This ensures agents communicate effectively with customers of all backgrounds and technical abilities.
6. Problem-Solving
AI Agent Assist tools surface knowledge base articles and suggest next steps on complex queries — empowering agents to resolve issues faster and more accurately, while learning as they go.
7. Patience
AI doesn’t just monitor words, but pacing and tone. If an agent is rushing or sounding tense, AI can gently prompt them to slow down or offer calming strategies mid-call.
8. Adaptability
By analyzing call trends and customer preferences, AI helps agents quickly adjust their approach to different customer types, products, or channels — from phone to chat to email.
9. Time Management
AI assists agents in prioritizing tasks, staying on-topic, and efficiently managing calls — reducing unnecessary talk time while still delivering quality service.
10. Positive Attitude
AI can detect negative language or tone and encourage more constructive, upbeat phrasing. This creates a more positive environment for both the customer and the agent.
11. Cultural Sensitivity
With natural language understanding, AI can flag potentially inappropriate or misunderstood phrases and guide agents on using culturally inclusive language.
12. Resilience
AI-driven performance dashboards provide data-driven encouragement. By recognizing effort and improvement — not just outcomes — AI helps boost agent morale and reduce burnout.
In the traditional contact center environment, this was done via a rigorous training program, then leveraging supervisor monitoring or quality management off recordings. This can be effective, but unfortunately, it’s not scalable. In a typical contact center where each call has a six minute average handle time and each agent takes 50 calls per day (five days per week), organization were lucky to coach on five interactions per agent per month. To make to worse, random selection of interactions meant that the truly exceptional or problematic calls were unlikely to be heard.
Turning AI into a Soft Skills Coach
Unlike traditional training and quality management, AI-enabled coaching is:
- Real-time: Prompts and suggestions happen during live interactions.
- Scalable: Every agent receives consistent guidance and feedback.
- Personalized: Insights are tailored to individual strengths and areas of improvement.
- Non-intrusive: AI works silently in the background without disrupting the customer experience.
Why it Matters
The ROI of developing soft skills is clear:
- Higher Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
- Better Employee Experience (EX)
- Increased First Contact Resolution (FCR)
- Lower Attrition and Training Costs
- Greater Brand Loyalty
At Cloud Design Solutions, we help organizations integrate cloud-based AI tools like Agent Assist to cultivate these skills across their contact center teams. The result? Stronger human interactions — powered by smarter technology.
Let’s build a contact center where AI strengthens what matters most: the human touch. You can learn more with Guides on the Essential Insights and Benefits of Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) and Artificial Intelligence.
💬 Contact us today to explore how AI can elevate your agent experience.