Customer service is one of the key drivers of business success, directly affecting competitiveness. In recent years, companies have begun to integrate AI agents into their contact centres. These systems have become a genuine strategic tool for driving revenue growth and improving customer retention.
To understand their value more clearly, it’s worth looking at the evolution of customer service.
The first contact centres relied entirely on human operators. Their role was to quickly and effectively resolve customer queries, ensure a positive experience, and foster brand loyalty.
But as businesses and customer bases expanded, several challenges appeared:
- Long waiting times during peak hours
- Human factors such as fatigue, errors or lack of knowledge
- High costs to maintain large teams
Automation became a natural step in the transformation of customer service as companies sought ways to reduce costs and increase efficiency.
The first chatbots: benefits and limits
Technology made it possible to automate part of customer service. Early chatbots replaced human operators in routine tasks, such as answering FAQs or providing information.
This helped businesses save resources, but it also revealed clear limitations:
- Rigid scripts built around pre-defined questions and answers
- Repetitive or unnatural dialogues
- Inability to understand long or unstructured messages
- Frequent escalation to a human operator for anything beyond simple queries
According to Gartner, by 2020, only 15% of customers preferred interacting with chatbots, citing repetitive dialogues and a high number of unresolved issues.
LLM-powered chatbots: extended capabilities and new challenges
The next stage brought chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs). These systems could identify user intent in longer messages and respond more flexibly. However, they still had weaknesses — sometimes generating irrelevant or incorrect information.
This phase in the history of customer service evolution didn’t last long, as a new generation of AI agents arrived, reshaping how intelligent assistants are built.
Unlike earlier systems, AI agents represent a major leap forward. They can:
- Choose and use external tools or services to complete tasks
- Hold natural, adaptive conversations that match the tone of the user
- Understand complex and unstructured queries
- Continuously learn from new data to improve service quality
- Deliver faster, more autonomous and flexible support
For businesses, AI agents can handle up to 90% of standard requests without human involvement. They personalise service based on each customer’s history, speed up response times, ease the load on human operators, and free staff to focus on more complex issues.
McKinsey reports that companies using AI agents reduce service costs by up to 40% while increasing customer satisfaction by at least 20%.
Today, AI agents are more than just a trend. They drive the growth of customer experience by helping companies stay closer to their customers, solve problems more efficiently and save resources.
Let’s say a customer contacts a furniture retailer’s support centre with this message:
“Hello! I’d like to move the delivery date of my last order from 15 September to 19 September and cancel the ‘Floor delivery’ service.”
A classic chatbot would identify only the first part — rescheduling the delivery — and follow a fixed script. The customer would have to remind it about the second request, which could easily cause frustration.
In contrast, an AI agent would handle both requests at once. Thanks to its LLM foundation, it understands natural language variations, manages multiple tasks within a single conversation, and executes actions rather than simply providing information.
As a result, the customer’s issue is resolved in one dialogue window, automatically and without human intervention — leaving a positive impression and strengthening loyalty.
If you’re at the beginning of your AI transformation journey, consider using platforms designed specifically for building AI agents. These solutions already include the essential tools, integrations, and analytics systems.
For example, Tovie AI Agent Platform is fully adapted for large and medium-sized businesses, allowing for quick, secure, and resource-efficient integration.
Key benefits of Tovie AI Agent Platform for contact centres:
- Deep automation: seamless integration with CRM, ERP, messaging apps, web chat, and telephony to eliminate communication gaps.
- Scalability and reliability: handles thousands of customers simultaneously, answers complex questions, and operates 24/7.
- Flexible configuration: tailored to the needs of different industries and business models for next-generation customer service.
- Quality control and analytics: real-time performance tracking, data-driven optimisation, and complete insight into customer dialogues.
We build agentic systems tailored to your specific challenges:
Smarter e-mail processing for insurers & banks. Turn unstructured emails into structured data automatically added to your CRM and cut handling time by up to 40%.
AI agents that take over post-call tasks end-to-end to cut processing time and improve accuracy.
Automate repetitive tasks like renewals, payments, reports and compliance updates. Reduce manual effort by 35–50% and cut lapse rates through proactive retention.
Ready to see what AI agents can do for your customer service? Start your journey with Tovie AI Agent Platform