When being empathetic is your full-time job, burning out is only human.
Few people are more aware of this than customer service representatives, who are tasked with approaching each conversation with energy and compassion — whether it’s their first call of the day or their 60th. It’s their job to make even the most difficult customer feel understood and respected while still providing them accurate information. Oftentimes that’s a tall order, resulting in frustration on both ends of the call.
But over the last few years, an unlikely aide has come forward: artificial intelligence tools designed to help people tap into and maintain “human” characteristics like empathy and compassion.
One of these tools is a platform called Cogito, named for the famous Descartes philosophy Cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). It’s an AI platform that monitors sales and service calls for large corporations (among them, MetLife and Humana) and offers employees real-time feedback on customer interactions.
During a call, an employee may see Cogito pop-up alerts on their screen encouraging them to display more empathy, increase their vocal energy, speak more slowly or respond more quickly. Interactions are scored and tracked on internal company dashboards, and managers can gauge, instantly, what different members of their team may need to work on.
As a call center representative in MetLife’s disability insurance department, Conor Sprouls uses Cogito constantly. On a typical day, he takes anywhere from 30 to 50 calls. Each one lasts between five and 45 minutes, depending on the complexity of the issue.
Sprouls’s first caller on the morning of Sept. 12, 2019, was someone with an anxiety disorder, and Cogito pinged Sprouls once with a reminder to be empathetic and a few times for being slow to respond (not uncommon when looking for documentation on someone’s claim, explains Sprouls).
When Cogito first rolled out, some employees were concerned about constant supervisor oversight and notification overload. They were getting pinged too often about the empathy cue, for example, and at one point, the tool thought a representative and a customer were talking over each other when they were in fact sharing a laugh. But Sprouls says that the system gets more intuitive with every call. As for over-supervision, call center conversations are always recorded and sent to supervisors, so it’s not much of a change.
In fact, Cogito may even offer a more realistic reflection of performance, says Sprouls. “A supervisor can’t be expected to listen to every single call for each of their associates, so sometimes when we’re just choosing calls at random, it could be luck of the draw — one associate could be monitored on an easy call, and another could be monitored on a hard one,” he says. “Cogito is going to give you the end result: who needs to work on what. I think the way a lot of us really look at Cogito is as a personal job coach.”
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