Six Tactics for Employing Great Universal Agents

"Universal agents" are customer service representatives who can operate with whatever level of flexibility your company needs. It’s a trendy concept; having agents who are able to handle any call from anywhere at any time on any topic is the Holy Grail of contact center efficiencies.

The universal agent model is a great idea as it creates obvious efficiencies by allowing agents to play a variety of roles. However, implementing an effective universal agent model involves several critical considerations. They may sound difficult to achieve, but many call centers have successfully implemented a universal agent program by identifying, understanding and achieving these milestones. Some day soon all contact centers may be measured against the customer service levels being achieved by call centers with universal agents.

1. A universal agent must know all of the transactional processes that could take place in the contact center to be proficient in the use of all the tools necessary to handle any type of customer interaction. That means he or she must understand every application (billing, inventory, CRM system, etc.) and, more important, how each call flows through those applications, as well as how to use all of the tools through which they can communicate with the customer (live chat, e-mail, instant messaging, voice).
2. A universal agent must have a single point of access to all the mission-critical applications and tools required by the agent to effectively complete a customer interaction and matching the contact center’s particular set of process flows.
3. A universal agent must be provided with a well-designed unified service desktop solution that should leverage your existing applications – the last thing you want to do is “rip and replace” your big CRM or billing and inventory systems and create a bigger mess.
4. The universal agent desktop should be thin-client – particularly if you are considering outsourcing, off-shoring or at-home agents, as you don’t want to have to install and consistently update applications on every single machine.
5. The universal agent platform should be easily adaptable and able to be personalized to reflect the tastes and, more important, the role of the agent. The desktop should dynamically change to present different content and tools depending on the role a universal agent is playing.
6. Customer inquiries to your universal agent should be driven by call type. You should be able to allow agents to actively choose their role depending upon the call type, or configure it so the correct desktop for the call type is automatically displayed based on a selection made in the IVR system, the phone number dialed or driven by rules in a skills-based routing tool.

Flexibility is a key trait of successful universal agents and the systems that support them should be highly flexible as well. There is no point embarking upon a universal agent program only to shackle the agents with a chaotic desktop and laborious processes, which will quickly eat up your efficiency gains. Start with the desktop; you will make your life – and the lives of your universal agents – much easier.

By Cindy Curtin, director of Global Product Marketing & Communications, Jacada, ccurtin@jacada.com

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"Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor."

-- Truman Capote

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