5 Ways AI Agent Assist Tools Make Customer Service Reps’ Jobs Easier
Your reps lose minutes to manual work on almost every call. Here are five specific ways AI agent assist tools can give that time back.
Key takeaways
AI agent assist tools support customer service reps during and around live interactions, surfacing context, answers, and coaching in the flow of work so the rep does not have to stop and search.
Verint’s The State of Agent Experience 2026 report found agents gather interaction context on 57% of calls (3.2 minutes each time), search for knowledge on 45% (2.7 minutes), and finish after-call work on 54% (3.0 minutes). Verint calls this the “hidden tax” on every interaction.
In the same survey of 1,000 contact center agents, 31% said they are likely to leave their role within six months — so daily workflow friction is a retention problem, not only an efficiency one.
Five practical fixes: deliver context on transfer, automate knowledge retrieval, automate the after-call summary, coach in the moment, and give reps control of their own schedules.
Verint reports that together, AI agent assist tools can reduce a typical seven-minute call to around three and a half minutes.
AI agent assist tools make customer service reps’ jobs easier by removing the manual work wrapped around every interaction: gathering context, searching for answers, and writing up notes once the customer has gone.
The scale of that work is measurable. Verint’s The State of Agent Experience 2026 report, based on a survey of 1,000 contact center agents, found that agents gather interaction context on 57% of calls and spend 3.2 minutes doing it. They search for knowledge on 45% of calls (2.7 minutes) and complete after-call work on 54% (3.0 minutes).
That is the hidden tax on nearly every conversation. Below are five ways to remove it — and what each one can do for handle time, quality, and retention.
What are AI agent assist tools?
AI agent assist tools support a human rep during and around a live customer interaction. They give guidance in the moment, surface the right knowledge, and automate the admin that follows the conversation.
The category usually covers four things:
- Real-time guidance — next-best-action prompts, objection handling, and nudges while the conversation is still live
- Knowledge retrieval — one curated answer instead of a list of search results to read through
- Post-interaction automation — summaries, notes, and dispositions written for the rep rather than by them
- Copilot or desktop assist — customer history and self-service context delivered into a single view
How is AI agent assist different from an AI agent?
An AI agent handles an interaction on its own. AI agent assist sits alongside a person and makes their next few seconds easier. Most contact centers will run both: automation resolves the routine, and reps take the complex, emotive conversations that are left.
That shift is already visible. In Verint’s research, 94% of agents expect AI to change their role within three years, and 61% expect to handle more complex and technical work as a result. Which is why the support wrapped around the rep matters more, not less.
See How Verint Copilot Bots Increase Agent Capacity
Why does the contact center agent experience affect performance?
Because the friction agents feel every day shows up in your cost base and in your customer numbers. Verint’s The State of Agent Experience 2026 report found that 31% of the 1,000 agents surveyed are likely to leave their role within six months.
The reasons they gave are workflow reasons, not pay. Unrealistic performance expectations (47%) and a lack of schedule flexibility (45%) came out as the biggest frustrations in the role.
And attrition is expensive before you count anything else. Verint’s research report, The Perception Gap: Scheduling Flexibility in Contact Centers, puts the cost of replacing a single agent at $10,000 to $20,000 – between $3 million and $6 million a year for a 1,000-seat operation.
What does manual work cost in capacity?
Add up the hidden tax and it lands at roughly nine minutes of manual effort spread across a typical rep’s calls: 3.2 minutes gathering context, 2.7 minutes searching for knowledge, and 3.0 minutes on after-call work. At scale, that is capacity you are already paying for and not getting back.
How does it reach the customer?
A rep who is reading notes, hunting through a knowledge base, or typing a summary is not fully listening. Customers repeat themselves, hold times stretch, and quality slips. When experienced agents leave, newer hires handle interactions more slowly, which pushes handle time and queue length up again.
5 ways AI agent assist makes customer service reps’ jobs easier
Start with the moments where reps lose time and confidence, then automate those specific moments rather than the whole job. Verint takes a modular approach here: rather than one large tool, each of Verint’s AI-powered Copilot Bots automates a single micro-workflow, so you can deploy the piece that fixes your biggest bottleneck without redesigning the desktop.
Five places to look first:
- Hand reps the context before they say hello
- Stop making them hunt for answers
- Take after-call work off their plate with AI call summaries
- Coach reps in the moment with real-time agent assist
- Give them real control of their own schedule
1. Hand reps the context before they say hello
Agents gather interaction context on 57% of calls, at 3.2 minutes a time. Most of that is re-asking questions the customer has already answered in self-service.
A contextual transfer uses AI to decide the next-best action at the start of an interaction — route to an agent, schedule a callback, or send an SMS — and delivers customer history and self-service context to the agent who picks it up, cutting the need to ask the customer to repeat themselves and saving around 30 seconds per call (Verint, internal research).
2. Stop making reps hunt for answers
Reps search for knowledge on 45% of calls and spend 2.7 minutes on it. The problem is rarely that the answer is missing. It is that the answer is spread across several systems and written for a policy team, not for someone with a customer waiting.
The Verint Knowledge Automation Bot uses generative AI to summarize search results into a single curated answer, designed to be read and acted on mid-conversation. This means fewer tabs, less silence on the line, and more consistent answers between your newest rep and your best one.
3. Take after-call work off their plate with AI call summaries
After-call work lands on 54% of calls at about 3.0 minutes each — the admin tax reps mention most often, and the one that keeps them from the next customer.
The Verint Interaction Wrap Up Bot uses generative AI to write the summary and notes when the conversation ends. This can save up to 60 seconds on a seven-minute call, with summaries that are more consistent and less prone to bias than hand-typed notes.
4. Coach reps in the moment with real-time agent assist
Coaching that arrives in next week’s one-to-one cannot help with the call happening now. As automation takes the routine work, what is left for reps is more complex and more emotive — exactly the interactions where in-the-moment support counts.
The Verint Coaching Bot offers targeted, non-disruptive guidance: next-best action, soft skills prompts, or a sales suggestion at the right moment, reducing call duration by up to 45 seconds (Verint internal research).
5. Give reps real control of their own schedule
Not every fix happens inside the call. A lack of schedule flexibility was the second biggest frustration agents named (45%), and in Verint’s The Perception Gap report, 70% ranked flexibility as a top factor when choosing a contact center job.
The Verint TimeFlex Bot lets agents change shift start and end times, move a shift, or split it across days without going through a manager, while the bot protects service levels.
See What Real-Time Guidance Does for Your Agents
How Verint helps contact centers make agents’ jobs easier
Most contact centers are not short of good people. They are short of capacity, because too much of the day goes to work that does not need a human at all.
That is the problem Verint’s AI-powered Copilot Bots are designed for. Each Copilot Bot takes one micro-workflow — the transfer, the knowledge lookup, the wrap-up, the coaching moment, the schedule change — and fits into the workflow your agents already use.
The compounding effect matters more than any single metric. Reps who are not fighting their tools handle more conversations, handle them better, and are more likely to still be there next quarter.
Start with the one that costs your agents the most time. Then add the next.
Frequently asked questions
Agent assist tools are AI-powered capabilities that support a human contact center agent during and around a live customer interaction. They provide real-time guidance, surface relevant knowledge, deliver customer context, and automate after-call work. The aim is to remove manual effort from the agent’s workflow rather than to handle the interaction for them.
No. Agent assist tools work alongside agents, unlike autonomous AI agents that handle an interaction end to end. Most contact centers use both: automation resolves routine contacts, and human agents handle the complex or emotionally sensitive ones with AI support in the background.
It depends on the workflow being automated. Verint reports that AI-generated call summaries can save up to 60 seconds on a seven-minute call, that delivering self-service context at transfer can cut around 30 seconds, and that real-time guidance can reduce call duration by up to 45 seconds. Verint also reports that used together, its AI agent assist Copilots can reduce a typical seven-minute call to around three and a half minutes.
After-call work is the admin an agent completes once a conversation ends, such as notes, summaries, and dispositions. Generative AI can draft that summary automatically from the interaction itself, so the agent reviews rather than writes. Verint’s research found agents complete after-call work on 54% of calls, spending about three minutes each time.
They remove the daily friction that drives people out. In Verint’s The State of Agent Experience 2026 report, 31% of agents said they were likely to leave within six months, citing unrealistic performance expectations (47%) and a lack of schedule flexibility (45%). Automating repetitive work and giving agents more control over their schedules addresses those causes directly — one multinational insurer using the Verint TimeFlex Bot reduced attrition by 30%.
Ready to Take the Manual Work Off Your Agents’ Plate?