Empower Agents with the Information
they Need … Now!

By John Broderick
CEO, Cicero Inc.

We expect a lot from our customer service representatives or agents every day. On every customer interaction we expect them to be knowledgeable, consistent, and to provide exceptional service from the moment they log in to the time they log out. We expect them to learn quickly, make decisions to support the business, as well as handle difficult customer situations professionally when they arise. Unfortunately, we often forget how difficult their jobs are, but when we put ourselves in their shoes, we begin to have a better understanding of their daily challenges. We begin to understand how our agents work, what they have to work with and, most importantly, what our customers experience.

If you sit down with your agents, you will quickly learn how they use or do not use the tools at their disposal to make each customer interaction a success. You will see what different agents use, how they adapt tools differently from their training, and where they may have created other workarounds to get the job done. This might include copying customer data to Notepad or sticking Post-It notes around the edges of their monitor as “reminders” of difficult workflow tasks. These shortcuts, workarounds, and individually-created processes might be fine in some situations provided the agents can deliver quality service. Unfortunately, this scenario ignores the realities and challenges that exist as contact centers work to:

• Reduce costs
• Shorten average handle times
• Streamline workflow and overall operations
• Reduce new hire and ongoing training time
• Enforce business rules and promote selling opportunities
• Provide consistent, quality service from all agents

In addition to this environment, contact centers are further limited by shrinking budgets and other organizational pressures. One way of addressing these issues is to provide agent guidance with desktop integration. Agent guidance provides an integrated environment where people, processes, and technology come together; focusing on automation, productivity, and customer satisfaction.

Integration and Agent Guidance

Desktop integration provides a cost effective, flexible framework to unify end users, business processes and technology into one cohesive environment; optimizing how technology is used in each customer interaction and then improving how all three work together. Eliminating unnecessary steps and workarounds, you can look at desktop integration as being a conduit that unifies, simplifies, and automates processes. With desktop integration, you can use existing technology and procedures to provide greater guidance and procedural compliance to agents precisely when and where it is needed. Using desktop integration to provide agent guidance, your agents are supported through:

Real Time Assistance – Where guidance is required, desktop integration can be used to provide both context sensitive help and data-specific alerts. Leveraging industry standard help tools, it can provide general-purpose, yet context sensitive, help for any stage in the business process. Such help may be guidance on the task the agent is expected to perform for any given process step, a script to be followed, help for a particular field or validation of field data to prevent mistakes. It may also contain answers to questions a caller might be expected to ask at a particular stage in the process.

Desktop integration can also provide data-specific alerts, prompting the user when specific conditions apply. For example, the person integrating the desktop applications may specify a call-out to detect a past-due account and bring it to the agent‛s attention through a message pop-up, a rolling notification bar, or simply highlight a particular field (or any combination of these). Alerts may be based on a particular condition or a combination of factors.

Improved Training – By integrating applications in a task-oriented, consistent manner, users typically experience a significant reduction in new and ongoing agent training time and are more frequently able to complete unfamiliar processes. These factors alone often reduce - and sometimes eliminate - the need for additional guidance for new agents.

A Composite, Well-Organized Desktop – Behavior is directed by the task-oriented composite desktop using existing applications. This allows existing applications to be grouped into appropriate views. Each view represents a step in a business process and may contain one or more applications. Views may be selected by a tab within a book, where books represent a collection of views required to complete a business process. Tabs are usually selected in the order in which they are displayed and so agents are led through a process without having to navigate specific applications. Each view may also be associated with help files and when particular views are selected by agents, the applicable help screen/text displays to assist with the relevant views and processes.

Automated and Streamlined Navigation – Desktop integration can perform navigation across applications on the users‛ behalf. This not only optimizes agent productivity (fewer keystrokes, no skipped steps in a workflow), but also can reduce training requirements by automating navigation across difficult to navigate applications (such as a series of 3270 screens), as well as help ensure consistent actions. The agent sees the relevant data at all times instead of navigating to find that data.

Providing additional guidance to agents should be a priority in any contact center. After reviewing actual business processes and how agents work, contact center management can integrate existing technology to support the agents during customer interaction. Agent guidance such as providing automated pop-ups, scripting, navigation, and organizing the desktop in views reduces the need to create workarounds. In addition, it eliminates unnecessary workflow steps, which not only makes the agents’ jobs easier but also improves customer satisfaction. Desktop integration is the most cost effective solution to provide agent guidance because it uses existing applications and focuses on improving how agents use these tools to perform tasks.