Cisco AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center: Agent's guide to using Real-time Assist

Real-Time Assist is a Cisco AI Assistant feature designed to support you during live customer interactions by continuously understanding the conversation context, identifying customer intent, and instantly providing relevant recommendations. It guides you in real time by suggesting what to say or do, helping you navigate complex procedures, and even initiating workflows automatically.

Benefits

Improved workflow: Real-Time Assists reduce the need for manual searches and help you resolve customer issues quickly.
Reduced after-call work: Complete recommended actions during interactions, decreasing post-call workload.
Consistent service: Access quick, relevant responses that help you perform at the level of your most experienced colleagues, ensuring a high standard of service.
Increased confidence: Handle diverse customer queries confidently, knowing you have intelligent support.
Enhanced communication: Receive instant suggestions to improve conversation flow and clarity, helping you communicate complex information effectively.

Benefits for agent personas

New agents: Acts as a real-time mentor, accelerating learning and ensuring best practices from day one, boosting confidence and reducing onboarding time.
Skilled agents: Reduces the need to consult others or transfer calls, especially during busy periods or when handling diverse queues, making complex scenarios easier to manage.
Tenured agents: Streamlines work by reducing reliance on external support, allowing focus on complex problem-solving and delivering exceptional service, rather than routine information retrieval.

Prerequisites

Your administrator must enable AI Assistant features for your organization.
Notifications must be enabled on your Agent Desktop.

Accessing and using Real-Time Assists

How Real-Time Assists work

Watch this brief video that demonstrates how Real-Time Assists can help agents during a live conversation with the customer.

The AI Assistant provides you with real-time, contextual assists during both inbound and outbound voice interactions, as well as inbound digital (chat/email) conversations. These assists dynamically adapt as the conversation evolves, ensuring you always have the most relevant guidance. The AI Assistant not only recommends answers from your organization’s knowledge bases and workflows (as defined by your administrator during setup), but also provides assistance on next steps and recommended actions, helping to automate workflows and streamline your work.

When a customer asks multiple questions, the AI Assistant offers comprehensive suggestions to address all aspects of their query. For immediate context, the customer’s most recent question is displayed with each suggestion in the AI Assistant widget. All suggestions remain visible in the widget until the interaction concludes. If you are handling multiple interactions, the widget intelligently displays suggestions only for your active conversation, helping you maintain focus.

You can view the source of any suggestion by clicking the Source button in the widget. Additionally, you can provide feedback on suggestions by clicking the thumbs up or thumbs down icons to indicate whether the guidance was helpful.

For Voice interactions

Follow these steps to access, review, and apply Real-time Assist when handling voice calls:

1	Log in to your Agent Desktop and set your availability to Available.
2	Accept an incoming voice call or initiate an outbound voice call. The AI Assistant notification will appear in your desktop interface. For voice calls, conversations are transcribed in real time in the Live Transcript tab. For more information, see Enhance efficiency and communication with real-time transcripts.
3	Open the AI Assistant by clicking the notification, then click Get Assistance. You can request Real-time Assist at any point during an active interaction by clicking the AI Assistant icon, even if you missed or dismissed the initial notification.
4	Review the suggested text assists in the AI Assistant widget carefully before using them. These suggestions are AI-generated, so it’s important to ensure each response fits the specific customer situation and maintains accuracy. Always verify that the information is appropriate before sharing it with the customer.
5	The AI Assistant provides guidance on what to say. Use the information provided by the AI Assistant to respond to the customer in your own conversational style. Adapt the guidance as needed to ensure it fits the specific situation and communicates clearly.
6	Continue the conversation, using suggestions to address queries efficiently.

For digital (chat/ email) interactions

Follow these steps to access, review, and apply Real-time Assist when handling digital interactions like chat or email:

1	Log in to your Agent Desktop and set your availability to Available.
2	Accept an incoming digital interaction (chat or email). The AI Assistant notification will appear in your desktop interface, and the AI Assistant will monitor chat/email text from the start of the interaction.
3	Open the AI Assistant by clicking the notification, then click Get Assistance. You can request assistance at any point during an active interaction by clicking the AI Assistant icon, even if you missed or dismissed the initial notification.
4	Review the suggested text assists in the AI Assistant widget carefully before using them. These suggestions are AI-generated, so it’s important to ensure each response fits the specific customer situation and maintains accuracy. Always verify that the information is appropriate before sharing it with the customer.
5	The AI Assistant provides suggested text assists that you can use directly or edit, if required. To use as-is: For chat interactions: Click the Copy icon in the widget to copy the suggestion. For email interactions: Copy the suggested text response to your email draft. To modify: If required, you can edit the suggestion to better suit your communication style or the customer's needs before copying or sending it.
6	Continue the conversation, using suggestions to address queries efficiently.

What's next?

In addition to real-time conversational guidance, Real-time Assist can recommend and help you execute specific actions directly within your Agent Desktop. To learn more about this capability, refer to the Understand and manage AI-suggested actions article.