In our previous piece, we explained how your customer service agents could benefit from Insight Panels. For agent productivity. For customer experience.

From helping them find the right information faster, to knowing what a customer’s already tried so they can exhibit near-psychic skills, an Insight Panel offers a lot of potential to alleviating the stressful job of helping unhappy customers and improving the support experience.

But is that all they can do? Nope! Here are six more ways a company can make use of an insight panel, whether it’s extending the panel’s use beyond customer service contact centers and deeper into the organization, or applying it in a completely new use case. 

What Is An Insight Panel?

In case you missed it, let’s do a quick recap on how Insight Panels support agent assistance.

An insight panel provides contextually driven AI-powered recommendations to a user (consumer, customer service agent, etc.) from any relevant application or knowledge source right within their flow of work.

Fed by a unified index, an insight panel can offer more relevant results than could be returned from the just search criteria alone. Behind the scenes, machine learning and artificial intelligence are working to make each search more relevant.

The result is typically better agent productivity during each interaction.

A screenshot shows athenahealth's insight panel implementation
athenahealth’s implementation of the Coveo Insight Panel in Salesforce puts information at agents’ fingertips.

The panel, shown above as a column inside a support agent portal, builds a personalized table of results for each agent — sometimes referred to as knowledge assist. With an Insight Panel, contact center agents can quickly find answers or complete difficult, time-consuming tasks. 

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6 Insight Panel Use Cases for AI Agent Assist

Here are six additional ways an Insight Panel can be used, outside of the typical customer support scenario. 

Marketing & Sales Support

A salesperson preparing for a customer visit enters the lead details and visit information into their CRM system. From there, an Insight Panel integrated with that CRM panel can pull together support materials — such as a flip book, business value assessments, or a sales pitch deck — that match the prospect’s needs. 

If that information is available inside the CRM, the panel can also display which materials have already been presented to this lead.

A photo shows two marketers looking for information on a screen

With all of this information at their fingertips, the salesperson can drill down into the details presented to determine if it matches the current prospect’s needs. They can even tailor the insights to the stage that an opportunity is in. 

For example, the exploration stage may require early pitch decks, whereas more advanced stages require insights about negotiation clauses and product data sheets. The same can be done for marketing purposes, where an Insight Panel can surface related content assets using captured lead information — moving targets, prospects, and even current customers along the sales funnel.

Agent Assist for Field Service & Dispatch

Even in our connected world, field service is a fact of life. Not everything is fixable with the click of a button. Insight Panels can provide support for field service engineers (FSEs), all the way from dispatch to job completion. 

Consider the initial call: we have more than the caller’s location and a description of the problem. With an Insight Panel, dispatchers know which engineer is the best choice based on work history, seniority, and even current location. 

As the dispatcher creates a work order from case information within a field service management system, the Insight Panel brings up all FSEs currently available, their distance from the current customer, and ranks them by their experience dealing with the current issue. This display is based on the description of the problem as inputted by the dispatcher. The dispatcher can then select an FSE and drill into their profile to find out more information.

A photo depicts a field support person making a radio call

Additionally, suppose the call is from a repeat customer. In that case, the insight panel can display the equipment the customer called about. It can also search incident logs to find matches with previous incidents and resolutions experienced by other customers. The insight panel accomplishes all of this simply by searching records that the provider already maintains for general billing purposes. The FSE has a great deal of information before arriving at the job site. 

Once dispatched, an insight panel can display manuals and other resources related to the current work order to help the FSE resolve the problem faster. This information is displayed without additional input, and is based on details already maintained on the customer. If the information needs to be corrected, the FSE can make the correction, and the insight panel is updated automatically. 

Faster dispatch of the FSE who can do the job in one trip increases customer satisfaction, repeat business, and better social media ratings—while making the FSE’s job easier. It’s a win for agent assist, all around.

Documentation Finder

Be it automobiles, helicopters, or anything in between, machinery is manufactured and assembled using various components from different vendors. Finding the right procedure to diagnose and fix a problem part often involves trial and error—a costly and time-consuming process. 

Insight Panels can use the serial number, manufacturer data, and other information about a given device to search libraries of available information and return the most appropriate solution. This search can include manuals, incident reports, and solutions to problems with similar symptoms.

Everything in one place for the tech to get the job done. 

Whether it’s someone at a service desk, a mechanic in an auto shop, or a technician repairing cell phones, an Insight Panel can shorten the amount of time needed to find a solution.

Retail Customer Service

When repeat customers come to a shop, how do you reward their loyalty? If you have some identifying information about the customer (such as name or phone number), an Insight Panel can search for their previous purchases and help retail salespeople provide a higher level of personalized customer service. 

With a positive customer service experience, 89% of consumers are more likely to make another purchase. Sixty-three percent of consumers expect businesses to know their unique needs and expectations, while 76% of B2B buyers expect the same. 

An Insight Panel can show the salesperson the customer’s purchases, which informs what questions to ask about a particular purchase, refill a usual order, or suggest related products. Insight Panels delivered via a mobile sales device allows the salesperson to provide the kind of service customers want and expect. 

Responding to Request for Proposal (RFP) 

Responding to RFPs is a necessary but time-consuming task for some businesses. A large part of the task is gathering information from a variety of sources, from the resumes of personnel who will staff the job, to previous work in the same space. Then there’s the process of identifying partners to help complete the work. 

These tasks all require finding appropriate documentation. 

An Insight Panel can be integrated within an existing RFP process or document creator, surfacing information related to the requirements of the RFP at hand. For instance, searching for ‘personnel with 5+ years of experience in PaaS’ can show an ordered list of candidates. Each of these profiles can be further drilled-down into with a click for more information. 

The Insight Panel can also surface previous statements of qualification or even matching solutions, depending on what’s needed. Saving RFP responses in the CRM of choice can provide a searchable library of reusable content. 

Finding a Healthcare Provider

When looking for a healthcare provider, it’s important to find one that matches your requirements. Most insurers provide an application to search their provider list according to criteria such as specialty, location, and whether they accept your insurance. 

While this sorts through a large amount of information, it leaves the customer with the tedious task of finding out which of the presented providers is right for them. Customers often open up a new window and search the web for more information. 

With authenticated users, healthcare insurers and other companies have a lot of stored information. An Insight Panel can take this information — such as pre-existing conditions, prescription medications, vital statistics, etc. — and  provide deeper insight about the presented providers, besides just meeting a searcher’s basic needs. For example, if the patient is pre-diabetic, which providers have expertise in diabetes or weight loss?

A screenshot depicts agent assist showing doctor information superimposed over a map of those doctors' locations
With an insight panel, finding the right doctor nearby becomes infinitely easier.

It’s tedious to research each individual doctor on the presented list and tease out the appropriate information from reviews and other sources. Instead, with an Insight Panel, we can automatically structure a query using the information maintained on the customer and return relevant information that gets the searcher to an answer, faster. 

Notice that we didn’t rely on the member to provide anything but basic information. The Insight Panel was created based on information we already knew about the member’s profile and history. The results save time and provide a better chance of treating emergent conditions early, saving treatment costs.

Choose the Right Agent Assist Technology for Your Use Case

Insight panels have a wide variety of uses but have some things in common:

  • Take known information and boost the search query results to present the most relevant information
  • Search information sources inside and outside the company
  • Provide information without switching applications

Across use cases, Insight Panels reduce the time to find the actionable information. The above are just a few examples of how an Insight Panel can augment an application or search.

In our next piece, we’ll discuss how to best structure an Insight Panel. An especially important but difficult task considering the limited amount of space available!

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What to Consider When Designing an ‘Insight Panel’