Top 5 'No-Brainer' Technology Investments for 2010 - Unified Desktop 

7th December 2009

Unified desktop: how to achieve exceptional customer service and reduce costs

Guy Tweedale, Senior Vice President EMEA Operations, Jacada

Consumers now have more choices than ever. Innovation has led to a state of parity among products and services that are of equally high quality, usefulness, appeal and cost. In the eyes of the customer, service has now become the key differentiator.

At the same time cost control is critical to success. Unfortunately, many organisations are blindly pursuing cost reductions in their contact centres as the way of delivering an increase in shareholder value, regardless of the impact on customer service. Even though anything that takes away from the effectiveness of customer service is detrimental to customer satisfaction. And anything that reduces customer satisfaction and loyalty will, now or very soon in the future, negatively affect revenues and profitability.

Is it possible to achieve quality customer service and be profitable at the same time? Yes, if an organisation is able to simplify its agent desktop.

Many contact centre agents need to use 20+ applications for each customer call. As many of these systems were built to meet specific departmental needs - marketing, operations, finance, etc - rather than those of the call centre, the resultant misalignment with the natural flow of a customer call means that agents can end up navigating through more than 60 screens per call.

A unified desktop eliminates this complexity by bridging together the disparate systems and providing an intelligent, contextual view of customer data. Additionally, if based on non-invasive technology it is not necessary to rip out and replace the complex and expensive systems at the heart of a business. And yet it can make contact centre agents happier, increase efficiencies and customer loyalty, reduce costs.basically improve your performance against all of the metrics you are measuring.

Cost Savings: Simplifying the desktop and aligning applications with the flow of customer calls drastically reduces call handling times, enabling your agents to service more calls. The increase in efficiency means a decrease in costs. Furthermore, the simpler the desktop, the easier it is for agents to learn, thereby reducing training and ramp-up costs.

Customer Loyalty: You can increase your customer loyalty by changing the quality of the interaction, which is made possible when agents are able to focus on the customer, rather than clunky systems. One bad interaction with a contact centre agent can destroy all the customer loyalty your company has worked hard - and spent much - to earn.

Agent Satisfaction: Agent satisfaction has a significant impact on costs in a myriad of ways (eg direct costs of churn, above-average absenteeism rates or through the impact on efficiency and effectiveness).

A major reason for agent dissatisfaction is the difficult systems and technology they must work with to do their jobs. Simplifying the desktop will, therefore, have a huge impact on agent satisfaction, and by extension, customer satisfaction.

You can spend millions making lots of changes and implementing lots of software in the pursuit of contact centre performance improvements. Yet by one action - simplifying your desktop - you can do it all, improving your performance in terms of increasing customer and agent satisfaction scores and reducing your costs.

www.jacada.com

Date - 07/12/2009