Fixing the Bottleneck at the
Agent Desktop

By Keith Dawson
Senior Analyst
Frost & Sullivan

There is a disconnect between the tools that contact center agents use to do their job, and the expectation their managers have of their job performance. They have an awesome battery of tools in their arsenal – tools that provide information, options, alternatives, suggestions, and directives. But the question really is, how can they perform well in an environment that’s too dense, too crowded with information to be really agile?

Even as the agent population is critical to customer satisfaction and retention, they are a significant resource chokepoint in contact centers. Current thinking is that on average the cost of labor in contact centers can run as high as 70-80% of ongoing expenses.

The problem that arises is that the perception of customer value and the reality of agent value are out of whack. They aren’t cared for by the same group of people within an organization (agents are considered an operational issue and customers are considered strategic). That puts different budgets into the mix, different organizational competencies, and different people’s priorities. But in order to run a contact center operation as a strategic customer-valuing operation, you have to bring those two variables — customer value and agent value — into alignment.

You can see it in the tension between these two cost centers: not only are you paying to maintain both agents and customers as part of your base, you’re paying to acquire both sets of people. On-boarding agents is a complex, expensive and overlooked component of operations. And again, it’s a separate domain from acquiring customers. Interesting, though, that the acquisition of a customer mirrors the process of acquiring an agent – the customer has to be enticed, flirted with, incented, trained in how to navigate your systems, and then maintained through a series of mutually beneficial transactions.

Is there a Solution in Technology?

In some senses, contact centers have been grasping at this problem for decades. The series of technological improvements that have been developed since the 1990s has always had at its core the integration of different streams of information in order to make the most effective use of them at the point of the interaction. But of course, the point of that interaction always was, and always will be, the very human, very fallible agent.

The more integrated the technology has become, the higher the expectations we have for it. The original tools that promised to bring different parts of the customer experience together were CTI, and then a few years later, CRM. CTI was a structural fix for the historic inability of phone systems and computer networks to talk to each other. It had, has, a lot going for it, but unfortunately its most obvious manifestation is in screen pop – bringing information about the caller directly to the agent desktop at the same time that the voice call is transferred to the agents phone set. Wonderful application, except that when it doesn’t work perfectly you end up with a customer who has to repeat himself over and over giving his name and account number to each person he talks to. Still, CTI opened the floodgates to integrated data streams and to the idea of multiple applications at work at the same time on the agent desktop. The agent desktop began its transformation at that point from a simple scripted workspace into a data portal that relied on multiple systems. Each system, whether a back office application, or a CRM info system, or a threshold-based alert tool, vied for attention. Each piece of the puzzle is a worthy addition to the mix – but unless they are all carefully weighted and information parceled out in understandable contexts, then the agent is ultimately at risk of seeing important pieces of information as just another bit of data fog.

The problem becomes magnified as the context for the customer interaction becomes more complex. When you add in details of the customer experience that come from an IVR system, for example – not just the identifying IVR information, but actual transaction processing information that the customer now expects to travel along with the call when he transfers out to a live agent. – when you add that in to what the agent is supposed to be able to parse, you can see the horror that can result when all the pieces aren’t in the right place. Each data-fog-related mistake might be small, but they add up when spread across an agent’s career or across a center’s agent pool.

In this context, data fog slowly creeps in and undermines the continuous improvements you think you are making by adding more data streams, more complex and important data applications to your agent’s arsenal. And that brings us to the unified service desktop. One fix for this problem is to take the entire array of applications that make up the confused fog and integrate not just their functions, but the direct way that agents interact with them. It is important to get control of the mental focus, the actual attention of the agents so that they can do what they do best – empathize with and connect to customers.

Is there a solution in culture and management?

Any technology change has an impact on a company’s culture, and managing that culture change is at least as important as managing the actual technology, if you want any of the positive impacts to stick.

For example, changing the way information is formatted and delivered to agents at the desktop is going to require you to change the way you deliver training. It’s going to affect the decisions you make in how you report metrics to reps – dashboards, scorecards, reports, questions of real time or near real time, all these things need to be reconsidered in light of the end goal. The same goes for information that passes up to supervisors and management, even outside the contact center. Streamlining, making consistent interfaces will all have the result in the corporate culture of giving people better insight. This can be dangerous if the context is not carefully tailored to their specific information needs. A little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing; more people will want to weigh in with opinions and recommendations. While this is good in theory, it must definitely be managed to prevent chaos.

Management has to buy in both to the underlying rationale, and to the commitment to see it through with resources and time. The rationale, remember, was a strategic one, to bring the customer experience in line with realistic agent resources. Management’s commitment, and the buy in of IT, is critical to any realistic solution to the bottleneck.

One of the key elements that set the unified service desktop idea apart from past approaches to this problem, like CTI and CRM, is that those who implement it understand that it has to be non-invasive. This applies to the technology and the operations. You don’t want to have to build a customized integrated environment at great cost in money and time in order to have your applications play well together at the desktop. And you don’t want to have to retrain your agents to use a new “modified” so called “easier” version of their existing apps because you want to change the screen layout. We’re not just talking about fixing the screen – we’re talking about untangling the underlying applications in a noninvasive software layer so that you can also then untangle your workflows and business processes. These two go hand in hand, and won’t really work if you don’t attend to both needs.

Unifying the service desktop and fixing the agent-based workflows let you collaborate with the customer, and at the same time collaborate within the enterprise to produce a coordinated approach to goals and expectations.

WFM tools have to inform QM; QM must inform training; training bears on hiring and HR; HR must be able to fill seats for spikes and variables; marketing must inform HR and WFM; and so on. It goes circles around in a virtuous feedback loop that reinforces best practices.

What’s great is that we are fortunate to be working in a moment when the tools are precisely poised to take advantage of the desire of all those constituents to work together. Not many centers have fully fleshed this out. Those that do will have a distinct competitive advantage.