Beware the black box in agentic CX

AI has moved into the contact center faster than anyone built the tools to watch it. Now, we’re starting to see the effects of this discrepancy show up in organizations. 

In a recent survey Parloa conducted with Metric Sherpa (opens in a new tab), 94.7% of CX operators said they trusted their customer experience metrics. Yet at the same time, 89.5% also said they believe there’s at least one area of their customer experience they still can’t see into.

This isn’t surprising.

CX operators have spent years perfecting human-driven CX metrics like average handle time, containment rate, and agent conduct. What they haven’t yet figured out is how those metrics reflect in AI agent-driven CX. That’s where AI vendors must step up and guide customers in understanding exactly how their AI agents are operating and performing. 

In order to do this, vendors need to take AI out of its proverbial black box. 

At Parloa, we’re focused on providing our customers with full visibility into how their AI agents work, so they can build a customer experience program that delivers satisfying results for both customers and board members. This means alerting teams the second an AI agent goes off script, providing tools to make the change in real time, and creating dashboard metrics that tell the full customer story, from the customer’s perspective. 

Here’s a closer look at what that all means:

Keep a close eye on compliance

If an AI agent doesn’t adhere to industry regulations, nothing else matters. 

Yet our survey found that 78.5% of operators have no specific metric for tracking hallucinations or factual accuracy. 

That’s a serious gap. 

The EU AI Act enacted earlier this year requires high-risk AI systems to prove their accuracy. It can be assumed that similar guidelines will soon follow elsewhere.

Like showing your work in middle school math class, companies need to be able to trace back to why AI agents produced the results they did. 

That’s why Parloa launched Parloa Lens earlier this year, to light up the inner workings of AI agents. With Parloa Lens, AI-powered evaluations run across every conversation, not just a sample, so compliance risk, quality failures, and scope violations surface at the moment they happen. With Parloa Lens, one compliance incident stays to one incident, and agent performance reports mean teams are always audit-ready.

Take action as soon as you see the need for improvement

Knowing something went wrong is one thing, actioning on it is another. If a vendor opens their box enough for you to know when something is amiss, but still requires you to submit a ticket and wait for them to fix it on your behalf, all you’re left with is your hands tied to progress. 

Should a Parloa AI agent get stuck, Parloa Navigator provides a line-level recommendation your team can accept or reject as soon as the issue is brought to light. Your employees, the ones who are already talking to your customers every day, are the ones who fix what isn't working, just like they would before AI was in the mix.

And it’s not only when something goes wrong. Once you're confident in one AI agent’s performance, you should be able to expand into new use cases and markets at a pace that’s relevant for your business, not your vendor’s. When AI vendors open the box on agent performance, you’re able to scale your agentic CX strategy to become one that delivers tremendous business value, on your schedule.

Get a pulse on the full customer experience

CSAT only tells you part of the story. As our survey found, customers know there’s more to the narrative.

Because while CSAT may show the customer satisfied with the resolution, there is a lot that happens between the customer picking up the phone to dial and hanging up at the end. When AI vendors open that box, you see the full picture of your customer’s experience, gaining valuable insights into exactly what they’re experiencing. You can see things like where in the conversation customers got frustrated, where their sentiment changed, as well as uncover important insights into why they’re calling in the first place. 

When the box is opened, your automed support doesn’t just cut costs, it opens the door to new revenue as you learn more about what resonates (and doesn’t) with customers.

Know exactly what you’re paying for

When a vendor defines what “outcome” means in your contract, it also decides what your AI agents optimize for. This is extremely important to be aligned on from the start. If the outcome is containment, for example, an agent can hit its target by avoiding a handoff to a human agent altogether, which may end up meaning that while the conversation closed, the customer still has questions. Containment climbs, but CSAT drops; and each time this happens, customer loyalty erodes. Your return on investment shows up in churn rather than revenue.  

Consumption-based pricing, on the other hand, ties dollars to agents' actions, which you can see when the black box is opened. You’re able to forecast spend by multiplying volume by average handle time, and you can make the necessary changes to your agent without worrying about how it will affect your monthly invoice. With consumption-based pricing, you stay focused on seeing your return on investment reflected in revenue, and there’s little to dispute when the monthly invoice rolls around.

Parloa doesn’t want you in a box. We want you confident.

At Parloa, we’re committed to ensuring you’re not confined to a box closed off by our rules and perspective. You know your customer best, and we want you to feel in control of how your automation affects their experience. That’s why we took a different approach to building Parloa. 

With Parloa, you’ll feel: 

• Confident in your compliance and trust. Catch risk the moment it happens and fix it, with audit-ready reports on every agent's performance.

• Confident in the end experience. See containment, CSAT, effort, and overall conversation quality together, and dig into exactly where customers hit friction.

• Confident your agents will keep improving. Accept a line-level fix on the spot, with no forward-deployed engineer standing between a problem and its solution.

• Confident in your strategy. Know which agents to build next, backed by what your customers are telling you, not a vendor's roadmap.

Ready to gain full confidence in your agentic CX strategy? Talk to Parloa.