Good summaries are essential to a well-run CX organization. They provide a snapshot of customer interactions, distilling essential customer information into concise summaries that give agents quick customer context and contact centers rich analytics data. However, not all summaries are created equal. Below, we’ll explore what summaries are, what makes a good summary, and why they are invaluable for modern CX organizations.

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What Are Summaries?

In the context of CX, summaries are condensed representations of longer customer interactions that capture the essence of customer-agent conversations, distilling critical information for reference and analysis. They can be created manually or automatically, and they serve various purposes within a contact center.

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Good Summaries Create Value

Not all summaries are created equal. Some are created by agents manually. Some are automated. And the quality of automation can vary drastically. When done right, with precise and context-rich information, good summaries at scale can yield surprising value. Quality summarizations delight customers, empower agents, and give you a clearer picture of what is really driving the successes and areas for improvement in your organization. Here’s how it works:

1. Delight Customers

Customers want to feel recognized and understood quickly. Good summaries ensure that agents can greet customers with appropriate and relevant context and customer information, along with recognition of their past interactions and issues with the brand. This leads to more efficient and personalized customer service, reducing frustration and elevating customer satisfaction.

2. Boost Agent Happiness and Effectiveness

For agents, good summaries provide agents with essential customer background information, allowing them to address issues more effectively. Armed with context, agents can tailor their approach to get to customers’ core problems faster. When summaries are automated, they reduce the time agents spend on manual summarization, leading to a reduction in overall Average Handle Time (AHT). That means more time helping customers and less time doing after-call work. This makes agents happier while solving customer problems more quickly.

3. Generating Valuable Business Data

Summaries serve as a goldmine of data for CX organizations. They help track interactions, identify problem categories, evaluate sales efforts, assess agent strengths and weaknesses, analyze customer sentiment, and monitor high-level initiatives. This summary data is crucial for making informed decisions and holds value for various facets of the business. For example, when a specific problem consistently arises within a product, it can be communicated to the product team to ensure they are aware of and can consider addressing it. It’s a great starting point for automating and improving more of your contact center activities.

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Obstacles to Creating Good Summaries

Despite the myriad advantages offered by good summaries, many CX organizations have to overcome various obstacles to get there. Here are some examples:

• Manual Entry Takes Time: Many agents are still required to create manual summarizations, which distracts them from their core responsibility of assisting customers. The result is inconsistent quality and incomplete, often unusable data.
• Rushed Summaries: Agents frequently contend with aggressive AHT goals, leading them to hurriedly complete summarization tasks or even skip them altogether to meet performance targets. This rush compromises summary quality and accuracy.
• Agent Frustration: Agents already dealing with challenging situations find summaries to be an additional burden, extending the time required for each interaction, while trying to adhere to shorter call times. This frustration can contribute to already high agent attrition rates.
• Inconsistent Quality: When hundreds of agents create summaries from scratch, the quality can vary widely, leading to unreliable data and unusable summaries.
• Under-Reporting: Relying on agents to accurately represent both positive and negative aspects of interactions can cause critical key performance indicators to go unnoticed.

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Where to Start?

To improve your summarization efforts, consider these high-level best practices:

• Tailor the questions you ask in summaries to what is important for your business.
• Optimize for humans by making questions clear and easy to answer.
• Designate a resource to monitor and extract key insights from summaries.
• Implement a Generative AI solution to automate and enhance your summarization process.

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While implementing some best practices can improve summaries, a modern summarization solution can provide accurate, exhaustive, and data-rich summaries at scale. It’s the key to fully realizing summarization value. Here are some high-level points to consider:

• Structured Data and Enrichment: Seek configurable structured data capabilities and ensure availability from the start. Additionally, explore data enrichment options for insights valuable to technical leaders in areas like compliance, service optimization, and new product introductions.

• Handling Multiple Contact Reasons: Verify that your summarization solution effectively supports multiple contact reasons, enabling precise tracking of individual issues within interactions or over a customer's lifetime.

• Generative AI vs Extractive AI: Extractive AI is commonly used but may lack data consistency and flexibility. In contrast, Generative AI offers flexibility, high-quality summaries, and structured data generation.
• CCaaS, Point Solutions, and Key Selection Factors: Be aware that large CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) vendors may impose limitations on flexibility. Smaller AI point solution vendors might not meet enterprise requirements. And small CCaaS vendors can be costlier and less interoperable. It's crucial to select a partner in line with your strategic objectives and possessing strong AI expertise. Building a DIY solution presents challenges and extended development timelines.

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Want more? Read our exhaustive eBook.

Curious to dive deeper into summarizations? Download our summary-focused eBook “The Modern CX Guide to Summaries,” the ultimate guide to revolutionizing CX with generative summaries. Dive in to explore best practices, technologies, and solutions that promise to deliver comprehensive summaries effortlessly. Improve agent efficiency, gain valuable business data without sacrificing agent focus, and harness the full potential of your customer interactions.

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Conclusion

Good summaries are the backbone of a well-functioning CX organization. They provide essential context, improve agent efficiency, and offer valuable business insights. However, achieving high-quality summaries at scale can be a challenge. With the advent of modern Generative AI summarization solutions like ASAPP AutoSummary, CX organizations can break the tradeoff between cost and quality, ensuring accurate, data-rich summaries that drive customer satisfaction and business success. Don't miss out on the opportunity to transform your CX organization with the power of great summaries.

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About ASAPP

ASAPP is the AI-native software for contact centers, and ASAPP exists to end bad customer service. We help customer service leaders unlock their full value by minimizing costs & inefficiencies, improving agent compliance & productivity, and surfacing actionable insights while helping you deliver a great customer experience. Our customers are large enterprises who care deeply about leveraging AI to transform CX by delivering unprecedented cost savings and maximizing customer delight.

Want to learn more about ASAPP and how they can help your team? Request a Demo

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