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Contact center agents in most major businesses are now faced with a chaotic customer service desktop. After years of technology and application investments, as well as years of mergers and acquisitions, the desktop for the typical customer service representative is an overwhelming cluster of un-integrated applications and tools. This complexity means many customer service representatives are so distracted by the process of using these systems they don’t have the time or the patience to focus on the customer’s service needs. This complexity often results in frustrated agents, long call times and a poor customer experience.
Contact center professionals are seeking more effective ways to deliver superior service, which is why unified desktop solutions are fast becoming one of the industry’s hot technology revolutions. A unified desktop brings all of the tools and business applications together to create a seamless, agile and intelligent view of the information the agent needs to successfully service the customer. By reducing the complexity of today’s customer service environment, a unified desktop can significantly reduce operational costs and improve agent satisfaction, which then results in a much better customer experience.
The increasing number of applications on the agent desktop has resulted in system interaction becoming a significant proportion of average handle time. Unifying all the desktop applications enables the reduction or elimination of manual system navigation and allows agents to get to the information or functionality they need more quickly. The reduction of mouse clicks and keystrokes directly results in a reduction in average handle time.
Increasingly, customer service agents must be prepared to handle any type of customer inquiry. Often, each agent must be trained on every system that could be used during the course of a customer interaction. Once all desktop applications are unified at the desktop, instead of agents being required to learn entire applications, they have to focus only on learning the functionality specifically needed to complete a process.
The job requirement for today’s customer service agents is overwhelming – agents are expected to maintain a pleasant tone of voice when responding to an irate customer and to be familiar enough with all products and services to recognize a cross-sell opportunity when one arises. By delivering agents only the relevant information for a certain call type, agents no longer feel like they have to be systems experts. Agents are able to focus on creating a positive customer experience rather than wrestling with systems. This leads to less frustrated, more satisfied agents. And since agent satisfaction is inextricably linked to customer satisfaction, happier agents mean happier customers.
For years, contact centers have tried 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. Rather than rip-and-replace systems or costly integration, unifying the agent desktop is the more realistic approach to the single view of the customer. Unified desktop technology allows you to maintain customer information in native systems, but consolidate the information into a customer snapshot at the desktop, creating a single view without costly back-office systems integration.
When companies unify the agent desktop, it enables the entire contact center to be more productive. Using single sign-on, agents are able to log into all of their applications with a single ID and password. The agents’ time to productivity in the mornings and after breaks dramatically increases. In addition, first call-resolution rates should also increase as the information the agents need to complete a customer transaction becomes easier to locate. Reducing the number of applications on the desktop also enables the elimination of redundant data entry, resulting in reduced error rates.
Unified desktop technology uses Web services to allow companies to easily combine their own applications (technically termed “composite applications”) that are powered by the functionality and information in their 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. Companies are no longer trapped in the traditional dilemma of having to choose between building a completely new application or buying a packaged application.
Contributed by Adit Moskovitch, Global Contact Center Analyst for Jacada. Jacada WorkSpace provides agents with a single interface to access the multitude of disparate systems and resources needed to effectively perform his or her job. |
