Go BackTime for a new approach for contact centre agent desktops?
Sabio is an innovative contact centre services company focused on delivering exceptional customer contact strategies and solutions. Sabio offers business consulting, systems integration and managed services and has worked with many major organisations including egg, Enterprise Rent-a-car, ING Lease, Newport City Council, Leeds City Council, Pitney Bowes, Scottish Widows, Sky, Student Loans, Travelex and Yorkshire Building Society. Visit http://www.sabio.co.uk/ for more information.
Sabio's Founding Director Adam Faulkner suggests that it's hardly surprising so many organisations struggle to deliver effective customer service when they make it so difficult for their contact centre agents to do their jobs properly.
According to research from ContactBabel, today's typical UK contact centre operators regularly require their agents to use anything up to ten different IT applications during or after a customer call. These applications might range from CRM solutions, customer management systems, credit card payment and accounts applications to CTI, ticketing and complaints handling. And it's not like these applications aren't important, they all support important contact centre processes - and that's before you've even started to factor in the standard agent desktop applications such as email, word processing, spreadsheets and a web browser.
This can place unreasonable pressure on agents, and is creating an increasing barrier for organisations in delivering better service to customers.
For contact centres this is proving to be a growing challenge, as most of these applications are essential for the effective running of their operation. So the question we're now facing is not one of application reduction, but more how can we actually help our agents to use these different applications more effectively by 'detoxing their desktops'.
Too much focus on technology training
It's hardly surprising then that so many organisations struggle to deliver a high quality customer experience when they're making it so difficult for their agents to do their jobs properly. This sheer variety of applications means that organisations are spending too much of their valuable training time on teaching agents to use all of these different systems, and that often doesn't leave enough time during an agent's introductory training to concentrate on essential customer service skills and techniques.
For many more traditional organisations the urgency of this issue has intensified with increasing competition from organisations operating through self-service and Web-based channels. These businesses have been able to build customer service infrastructures from the ground-up, and don't have the heavy investment in legacy applications that more established organisations need to maintain. So while contact centres have always demonstrated a hunger to optimise performance through incremental technology and process improvements, the agent desktop has always been one area that was generally considered too complex and costly to tackle.
Helping the agent to see what's important
Working with the latest user interface technology, however, there's now an opportunity to build a new generation of contact centre desktops that can provide both agents and supervisors with composite, functional user interfaces that can easily be tuned to specific contact centre tasks.
Using a powerful Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach, organisations can now turn multiple agent applications with diverse user interfaces into much cleaner, more intuitive agent desktops.
By aligning different contact centre processes around customer requirements, we have seen organisations cut call times in half, freeing agents to spend more time with customers. This, in turn, contributes to a more positive user experience, delivering improvements in customer satisfaction, and for a far better environment for both callers and agents alike. We've also found that such an 'intelligent' desktop approach can significantly reduce the amount of time agents need to spend on initial IT training - speeding their time to competency.
Making customer interactions more effective
While user interface technology is a key enabler here, there's also a requirement for best practice contact centre process and integration skills to ensure that organisations can optimise their agent desktops and achieve real productivity improvements within their contact centres.
At Sabio our consultants work with customers to develop a library of best practice contact centre process templates that can then be used to deliver clear, linear end-to-end processes that help organisations to deliver more effective customer service from a user-centered perspective. Once these are in place we can then work to build up an intelligent agent desktop that places all the information that agents might need for a call on a single screen.
Key characteristics here include a single user interface with a consistent look and feel, headline customer data across all screens, context-sensitive agent prompt bars, integrated telephony functions, a simple toolbar to launch standard agent processes, and a customer histories window with the latest transaction details easily visible. Organisations can also specify context-sensitive process information and even a real-time agent tickertape display to provide agents with immediate visibility of their quality and performance scores.
Unlocking investment from existing applications
Such an approach helps organisations to leverage their existing investment in enterprise applications, re-using their core data and business logic without the need for any invasive integration or complex development. Unlike other optimisation initiatives that only help to shave seconds off average call handling times, the latest generation of optimised desktops can deliver major improvements in agent performance - and that translates directly into a better experience for the customer.
