September 16, 2011
Webinar - Take Back Control of the Agent Desktop to Optimize the Customer Experience
By Susan J. Campbell, TMCnet Contributing Editor
The primary focus within your contact center should be to optimize the total customer experience. At the same time, you still have to balance the competing goals of controlling cost and managing risk or adhering to compliance within the industry. This complicated dance is simplified when you take control of the agent desktop.
This archived webinar, “Take Control of the Agent Desktop to Measurably Improve the Customer Experience”, which originally aired on Monday, August 29, 2011, focused on the importance of the customer experience and how companies tend to find themselves fighting a losing battle within creased complexities and disconnected technologies.
These elements complicate things when contact center leaders are not in control of the agent desktop. Essentially, they are not in control of the customer experience. Time is easily lost and customers become frustrated (or leave for the competition) as agents ALT_TAB their way through disconnected applications, copy and paste across multiple systems and search siloed information.
In such situations, agents typically enter the same data over and over in different systems as interoperability is lacking. They also spend valuable time at the end of every customer call simply entering notes regarding the tasks they just performed. Frustration mounts when they have to ask callers for the same information twice, or put the customer on hold or give excuses while they search for answers.
Kerry Bodine, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester (News - Alert) Research and Vikas Nehru, vice president of Product Marketing at KANA, provide keen insight into the common issues that exist within the contact centers as companies try to create the ideal customer experience.
“Key drivers of poor customer experiences often include the neglected call center, one that isn’t integrated with other channels, producing disjointed operations and data, as well as an inconsistent customer experience,” said Bodine. “Call center agents can be treated like slave labor and call center managers give agents hard metrics to try and meet.”
Focusing on agent tools has huge benefits, including a reduction in AHT, an increase in customer satisfaction, acceleration in training time and improved agent retention.
It’s important to identify opportunities for change within ALT_TAB, Knowledge and Decisions. Reduce ALT_TAB opportunities that agents access the most often and leverage the customer data you have or can get; the best knowledge retrieval opportunities to automate are those that require agents to do research; and the best decisions to automate are those that are regulated, need to change frequently for competitive or product-mix reasons, and require more complex business solutions.
You really can change the customer experience in the contact center, but you must first take back the agent desktop. Explore this archived webinar and learn how today!
Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan’s articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Jennifer Russell
