Email UsIs The Desktop Slowing Your Agents Down?
Bernie Kane, Director Infinity CCS
We spend a lot of time and money getting new and existing customers to call us, however, once connected, too many contact centres fail to provide their agents with the right tools to enable them to do their job effectively.
Many contact centre managers view the task of providing a dedicated contact centre application to their agents as daunting. Large scale system development, heavy involvement from IT and an extortionate investment. With specialist contact centre available, this does not have to be the case, many applications can be deployed out of the box and provide an immediate impact to the business and with inbuilt integration capabilities, these systems can leverage existing data and system functionality without the need to rely on heavy IT involvement.
Let us take a look at the common problems we face and how an Intelligent Agent Desktop can help:
Sorry my system is running slow today?
Most applications have been designed with a transactional focus, they are used to manage a particular product or service that you provide to your customer, i.e. an order processing system. These systems were originally created for use in the back office where current query times are quite acceptable. Transpose these into the contact centre where agents have a live customer on the end of the telephone and that acceptable delay seems like a lifetime.
Intelligent Agent Desktop applications are able to easily solve this problem by pre-empting the customer conversation. The front-end solution guides the agent along the most effective conversational path and as such, it know what information will be required at the next stage of the call. The search is therefore conducted in advance to ensure that the agent has all of the information already available when they get to that part of the conversation.
This simple step can dramatically reduce call durations at the same time as improving your customers perception of your service.
Can I just take your name again?
With many organisations offering their customer multiple products and services, agents are required to access multiple systems during the course of each customer interaction. More often than not, these systems do not have any front-end integration which means that agents have to manually retype information they have entered into one system, into the other system, or worse still, have to ask the customer for information again.
This is another issue that can be easily solved. With an Intelligent Agent Desktop, information can be collected from the customer in a logical ?customer centric? manner and then it is the Intelligent Agent Desktop that manages posting/updating this information into the vast array of other systems.
This not only reduces call duration, but it also dramatically reduces errors and provides the customer with a view that your organisations is completely joined up.
I do not have access to that information, I will have to transfer you
Probably the most annoying thing you hear from an agent and is probably due to one of two possible reasons.
The first is often the information available to an agent is determined by the system access that your organisation is willing to provide them. A customer enquiring if their payment has been received probably requires for the agent to have access to the accounts system which you do not want them to have. However, seeing a status flag or date associated with payment received is harmless and will enable you agent to quickly answer the customer?s question. It will reduce the workload of your accounts department.
An Intelligent Agent Desktop can help by acting as the secure interface into other system data that you would normally not want to provide to your agent. Out of the box integration and user-definable data mapping enables you to provide an all encompassing view of the customer. Information is securely pulled from all of the back-office systems providing them with the ability to answer all of the most common customer queries.
The second reason for the agent having to transfer you is often down to the fact that they are not multi-skilled across the entire spectrum of customer queries. Here the Intelligent Agent Desktop can help by providing the knowledge required by the agent in the front-end system. By understanding why your customers are calling you, you are able to build into the front-end application a set of prompts, guides or even scripts to help the agent through responding to a wider range of customer enquiries.
The Intelligent Agent Desktop is not the solution to all problems, however, I feel it is the single most value application in the contact centre, its ability to assist the agent when dealing with customer enquiries will increase productivity, improve results and through time saving, reduce costs.
To find out more about Infinity Agent Desktop click here.