Top 5 Reasons to Unify Your Desktop

Have we reached a point where the technology we implement in the contact center has become more harmful than helpful?

As contact center technology investments increased, spending on customer service agent tools, such as scripting and quality monitoring, and business applications, along with CRM and ERP applications, skyrocketed. While all of this technology has led to improved efficiency, many of us are starting to see the negative effects from these technology investments. A prime example – the complex agent desktop that many of us now find in our operations.

Due to an increasing number of applications being inherited by the contact center from other business areas, agents are confronted with 5, 10, even 20 applications for a single customer interaction. As a result, information takes longer to locate and agents become more focused on system navigation rather than interacting with the customer. This complex environment is fast becoming a key driver of agent dissatisfaction and is zapping the humanity out of the agent-customer interaction.

The realization of the desktop complexity problem is resulting in a rise in the number of unified desktop projects in the contact center. Here are five reasons often cited for unifying agent desktops:

1. Reduce AHT and communication costs. The increasing number of applications on the agent desktop has resulted in system interaction becoming a significant proportion of average handle time. Unifying all your desktop applications enables you to reduce or eliminate manual system navigation and allows your agents to get to the information or functionality they need more quickly.
2. Reduce agent training and improve agent satisfaction. Because increasingly contact center agents must be prepared to handle any customer inquiry, often, each agent must be trained on every system that could be used during the course of a customer interaction. Once all your applications have been unified at the desktop, instead of agents being required to learn entire applications, they only have to focus on learning the functionality specifically needed to complete a process.
   
   It’s difficult enough to ask agents to maintain a pleasant speaking voice when responding to an irate customer and to be familiar enough with all of the company’s products and services in order to recognize a cross-sell opportunity when one arises. Should we really expect our agents to also be system experts? By training agents only on the functionality they will need to perform their jobs, they no longer feel like they have to be systems experts. This leads to a less frustrated, more satisfied agent and happier customers.
   
3. Achieve the single view of the customer. Many applications have promised the ability to achieve the single view of the customer – typically with high failure rates. Why? It is a monumental task to pull all your customer data into one single system. Unifying the agent desktop is a realistic approach to the single view of the customer, allowing you to maintain customer information in native systems, but consolidating the information into a customer snapshot at the desktop, and creating a single view without costly back-office systems integration.
   
4. Increase overall contact center productivity. Using single sign-on, your agents are able to log into all of their applications with a single ID and password. Your agents’ time to productivity in the mornings and after breaks dramatically increases. In addition, first-call resolution rates should also increase as the information your agents need to complete a customer transaction becomes easier to locate. Reducing the number of applications on the desktop also allows you to eliminate redundant data entry, resulting in reduced error rates.
   
5. The tools are now available. Using Web services allows you to build your own applications (technically termed “composite applications”) that are powered by the functionality and information in your existing back-office systems. With composite application tools, operations and IT work together to design a unified desktop application that fits to your contact center’s particular set of process flows.
   
   The unfortunate truth is many contact center operators are unaware this cost-effective option now exists. You are no longer trapped in the traditional dilemma of having to choose between building a completely new application or buying a packaged application. You can now design your own application that makes use of your existing technology investments while vastly improving how the information and functionality in those systems is accessed and used by your agents.
   

Contributed by Adit Moskovitch, global contact center market analyst for Jacada. Learn more about unified desktop technology at www.jacada.com.

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"Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition, there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes."

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