AI Agent Examples and Use Cases for Enterprise Contact Centers

Alexander Teusz
Authors name: Alexander Teusz
AI Agent Examples and Use Cases for Enterprise Contact Centers | Cognigy
18:35
Table of Content :
  • Intro

  • What are AI Agents?

  • Types of AI Agents

  • Use Cases of AI Agents in Contact Centers

  • 8 Examples of AI Agents in Contact Centers

  • The Future Of AI Agents

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Intro

Enterprise businesses know that customer needs are more complex and demanding than ever before. Faced with users who expect omnichannel experiences, personalized service, and instant support, businesses must find ways to provide effective customer service without hamstringing their budgets. 

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, can transform enterprise workflows and provide automation at scale with the deployment of dedicated AI Agents. These autonomous agents speed up common service processes, augment your existing teams, and bring unparalleled levels of cost-efficiency to your customer service processes. 

But what are AI Agents actually used for? In this guide, we’ll explore genuine use cases that show you how AI Agents are deployed in enterprise organizations. We’ll also demonstrate some real-world examples from some of Europe’s most exciting businesses.

What are AI Agents?

Not to be confused with pre-AI chatbots (see our AI Agent vs Chatbot guide for more), AI Agents are autonomous agents that can operate within your business to streamline manual processes and improve efficiency. They typically utilize a combination of different AI technologies, such as:

  • Conversational AI: Gives the AI Agent the ability to understand natural language and communicate with customers.
  • Generative AI: Allows the AI Agent to generate content in response to user or business needs. For example, an AI Agent can use GenAI to create a detailed call summary almost instantly upon completion of a customer service call.
  • Agentic AI: This new technology gives AI Agents more autonomy and independence by granting them the ability to dynamically reason their way through tasks and to create and pursue goals without human intervention. 

Together, these different types of AI result in an AI Agent that can automate your organization's internal and external processes. These AI Agents are able to directly interact with customers or your human team, call on short and long-term memory, learn from their experiences, personalize interactions, identify sentiment/patterns, and make decisions designed to best meet user needs.

Types of AI Agents

AI technology has advanced rapidly in just a few short years, with many different ‘types’ of AI Agents becoming available. These ‘types’ are largely technical terms that refer to how an AI Agent may work – for example, model-based agents or utility-based agents. 

For an enterprise, however, the technicalities behind these different types are largely irrelevant. For your organization, you should instead consider AI Agents to split into two ‘types’: NLU-based Conversational AI and Agentic AI. 

NLU-based Conversational AI Agents detect intent and follow predefined dialogue flows. They are process-driven and ideal for narrowly defined tasks that need to keep a user on a certain path – such as submitting an insurance claim. 

Agentic AI Agents are goal-based and can dynamically solve problems by deciding when to use specific tools and services. They can collaborate with other AI or human agents and pursue their own pathway to successful completion. 

In most circumstances, enterprise businesses should combine both types of AI within a composite AI Agent. This allows you to have control over strict processes when needed, but also to have adaptability and personalization for more complex situations. Learn more about this in our guide to AI Agent types.

Use Cases of AI Agents in Contact Centers

AI Agents can tackle many different organizational roles – from narrow, low-complexity tasks that consume lots of time to more complex, multi-stage processes such as direct customer support. 

To show you how autonomous AI Agents can be utilized in your organization, we’ll look at some general use cases and then explore real-world examples from enterprise brands that have embraced the power of AI…

Identification & Verification

Almost every customer service case involves identifying or verifying a customer. An AI Agent can speed up this process by answering the call instantly with no wait times or hold queues and then asking the customer to provide the necessary information via voice or text. The agent can guide the user through every stage and ask any clarifying questions required to eliminate errors. 

Once the AI Agent has the information, it can verify or authenticate the user by interacting with your CRM system in the blink of an eye. Once confirmed, the agent can then either pass the case to a human agent to take over – or even pass it to another AI Agent acting as a customer support agent. 

Considering the low complexity and highly repeatable nature of ID&V, it is one of the most ideal starter use cases for businesses new to automation and can save valuable minutes at the start of every call. 

Customer Support Agent

Thanks to the rapid advancement in AI technology over the past few years, AI Agents can now offer human-like conversational experiences that allow them to interact directly with customers. This means you can eliminate wait times, improve self-service outcomes and cut costs dramatically by implementing customer service agents to work alongside your human teams.  

AI Agents can handle the majority of customer service tasks, including answering customer cases via both voice and text calls, identifying user needs, creating contextual responses and then defining and following a goal-oriented workflow to quickly resolve a customer’s request.

Unlike outdated chatbot technology, which was prone to error whenever a customer strayed from a specific pre-programmed workflow, AI Agents can act dynamically to adapt to unique conversations and can either carry out tasks themselves or escalate a case to a human agent. 

Virtual Assistant

AI Agents can become dynamic virtual assistants for your customers to use to self-serve tasks related to your business. For example, you could create a retail virtual assistant that fields stock queries, offers in-store assistance, and provides personalized recommendations to help a customer decide on their next purchase. 

AI Agents are not tied to a specific platform, meaning AI virtual assistants are incredibly accessible to your audiences since they can be accessed by customers across a range of channels, from voice or text chat to social media platforms like WhatsApp. The assistant is available 24/7 and can communicate fluently in 100+ languages, allowing customers to interact whenever they want to and in their native tongue. 

Outbound Virtual Agent

AI Agents are now advanced enough to handle outbound calls to customers. The AI Agent can gather information and take action in a similar fashion to inbound agents – but with far more agency. For example, an automotive manufacturer could build an AI Agent that proactively reaches out to customers when it notices an upcoming service date. The AI Agent wouldn’t just remind customers of this date – it could also guide them through the process of booking their car into a servicing facility. 

For a long time, AI Agents were usually only used for inbound calls due to the more defined, pattern-driven behaviour of common customer service calls. Now, with Agentic AI helping grant a whole new level of flexibility, AI Agents can be used to conduct proactive outbound calling for your business. This can help generate leads, improve ROI, and solve customer problems before they arise, preventing future inbound service calls. 

Agent Copilot

AI is not meant to replace human teams but to augment them. They can be deployed to act as internal support agents that streamline tasks and make human agents more efficient. They accomplish this by providing utility at every stage of the customer service process:

  • Pre-call: AI Agents can instantly answer a call and begin qualifying the customer. This helps prevent any frustrations related to long wait times or hold queues and allows the AI Agent to begin understanding the problem and taking care of any ID&V requirements. Once satisfied, the AI Agent can pass the case smoothly to a human who gets a full contextual handover to answer the call fully equipped. 
  • Mid-call: Thanks to a combination of Conversational AI and Generative AI, the AI Agent can listen in on the call and provide live translation, identify sentiment, and offer real-time advice to the human agent based on the caller’s needs.  

Post-call: After the customer is satisfied, an AI Agent can automatically summarize the case to fit into your business’s preferred case template. This saves human agents valuable time at the end of every call and enables them to move on faster from each case, resulting in more calls being answered every day.

8 Examples of AI Agents in Contact Centers

AI Agents are already transforming customer service processes for businesses around the world. Here are some compelling real-world examples of fantastic contact center automation from Cognigy’s clients. 

Toyota Drives Customer Support Forward

Toyota has a reputation for producing innovative and reliable vehicles. To help customers extend the life of their cars and to reduce the strain on internal customer service teams, Toyota worked with Cognigy to deploy a team of AI Agents to help provide comprehensive self-service options to users. 

This support even extended to their vehicles – with Toyota developing an “E-Care” AI Agent that is directly connected to a car’s onboard electronics. The agent proactively contacts customers to alert them about repair or servicing requirements. 

By reducing the overall burden of service calls on customer teams and preventing minor issues from spiraling into major ones, Toyota’s AI Agents have helped customers feel more valued, promoted safer driving experiences, and reduced the burden associated with manual service bookings. Read more about this case study here. 

 

Frontier Airlines Takes Off With AI-Driven Customer Service 

Frontier Airlines struggled to find staffing that supported the irregular phone demands of its users. Making a bold decision, the airline has switched off telephone service in favor of digital chat supported by AI Agents. 

The AI Agent validates reservations and provides quick links to allow customers to make changes to their bookings. Able to engage with hundreds or even thousands of conversations simultaneously helped Frontier Airlines revolutionized customer service by providing instant, efficient support to customers whenever they needed it. 

With booking changes no longer tied to lengthy, delay-prone phone calls, customers became far more satisfied with Frontier Airlines – leading to a sizable increase in its Net Promoter Score (NPS). 

Read more about how AI Agents can actively improve customer experiences in the full Frontier Airlines case study. 

AI Agent For Bosch Benefits Human Agents

Bosch is a multinational enterprise with a vast team of employees based in lots of different countries. Recognizing the potential of AI Agents to streamline day-to-day tasks and enhance the efficiency of their existing human employees, they worked with Cognigy to find a solution. 

Bosch adopted Cognigy.AI as their AI platform and created the Bosch Chatbot Suite, which supports over 90 different use cases within the organization. One of the best examples of this includes Bosch Power Tools, which has integrated Cognigy’s Agent Copilot into contact centers to listen in on calls, analyze sentiment, suggest the next best action to human agents, and perform an automated wrap-up. 

Another great example is the ROB HR AI Agent, which provides personalized HR support to companies and allows them to self-serve simple yet essential tasks like updating bank account details or learning more about company policies. 

Get a clear example of how Bosch Power Tools’ AI Agent works to serve customers in this video demonstration.

 

Mobily Simplifies Customer Support With Conversational AI Agent

Mobily is a telecommunications provider based in Saudi Arabia with over 1.2 million customers. As it grew, the brand’s contact center began to struggle with the weight of customer demand across multiple social media channels. To help with this, the team began looking into Conversational AI as a potential solution. 

Working with Cognigy, Mobily deployed a Conversational AI Agent that could answer customer service queries across various social media channels and connect them with a human agent when required. This enabled Mobily to slash waiting times, with the AI Agent responding in just 6 seconds compared to the previous human response time of 20 minutes. 

“What we liked most about Cognigy.AI was the connectors and low-code capability that it offers, which allows the CX team to build the conversations by themselves without the need for heavy IT involvement. This leads to a faster time to market, and the ability to release more services and conversations” - Mubarak Alharbi, Digital Experience General Manager at Mobily. 

Read more about Mobily’s AI Agent in the full case study. 

Mister Spex Brings Clarity To CX

Mister Spex is an online optician serving over 7 million customers. The team wanted to explore automation and recognized the value in automating their existing phone channel over trying to introduce a new one. 

Analyzing their existing telephone calls, the brand spotted an opportunity to automate simple inquiries focused on finding out where a customer’s order was. They deployed an AI Agent that was trained in all common customer queries and could quickly handle their problems by connecting with the CRM – or route to a human agent if needed. 

By automating its phone services to quickly verify customers and progress their queries, Mister Spex has saved over 30 seconds on every call and improved overall customer satisfaction. 

Read more in this full case study. 

E.ON Energizes Operations With Best-in-Class AI Agents

E.ON’s Digital Technology team, EDT, is responsible for driving digital innovation across the company. As one of the world’s most recognizable energy companies, E.ON has a staggering user base of more than 50 million customers across the globe – all of which want to access customer service in different ways, including traditional telephone calls, chat, and social media messaging.

 This demand can quickly drain resources and cause inefficiencies. E.ON’s EDT sought a scalable solution that allowed them to develop AI Agents that could be seamlessly deployed to both phone and digital chat channels.

Working with Cognigy, the EDT team created an intuitive AI Agent platform that non-technical users could quickly grasp and would allow a team of AI Agents to serve customers instantly across chat, voice, and phone channels. 

E.ON quickly became a leader in automation and slashed workloads for customer service departments, achieving a 70% automation rate across more than 2 million customer calls served by 30+ AI Agents. Read the full case study here. 

Complex Inventory Queries Addressed By AI Agents For Lippert

Lippert is a manufacturer of components for the caravanning, marine and rail industries. Due to the complexity of customer queries, which often required in-depth product knowledge, Lippert’s customer service team was spending too long on every call, making any attempt to streamline support virtually impossible. 

Lippert worked with Cognigy to develop an AI self-service solution to help customers get the answers they needed to highly specific use cases such as part pricing, product availability, and order status tracking. With a comprehensive library of resources and knowledge to call upon, the AI Agent can accurately answer many common customer queries.  

By eliminating the need for lengthy calls for every service query, Lippert has driven an 80% reduction in overall costs when compared to a human agent. Read the full case study to learn more or watch the video below. 

 

Henkel Provides 24/7 Stain Support For Customers

As a global FMCG manufacturer, engaging with customers and securing loyalty is an ever-important consideration for Henkel. In a unique example of how AI Agents can best serve customer needs, the team at Henkel worked with Cognigy to deploy a customer-facing AI Agent that could help customers with stains. 

Compared to panic-laden queries typed into search engines, Henkel’s agent offered a far more efficient way of diagnosing stains. Available 24/7, the AI Agent can recognize over 2,500 types and then provide accurate, reassuring treatment options to help customers in their moment of need. 

This is a narrow example when compared to broader customer service automation – but it’s a great reminder of the power of Conversational AI to provide engaging, reliable customer support based on clear requirements. 

Click here to learn more. 

The Future Of AI Agents

There’s no stopping the evolution of AI Agents – brands across the globe must begin adopting AI-driven customer support or risk being left behind. 

From basic processes such as ID&V to more complex customer interactions, automated agents now offer instant response times, dynamic problem-solving, and humanlike conversational abilities – all of which help drive customer acceptance rates higher. 

If you want to slash wait times, reduce AHT, improve productivity, and lower costs, talk to Cognigy today to see how AI Agents can help you. With experience working alongside some of the world’s biggest enterprise organizations, we’ll guide you through every step of the journey and help you automate efficiently in every area of your business. 

Book a demo to see how Cognigy.AI can work for you.