Desktop Analytics Ease Call Center Management

To find efficiencies and improve the quality of customer service being offered, many organizations are turning to analytics to find in-depth intelligence into operations that the human eye may be incapable of spotting. Increasingly, this is being done at the desktop level, where complex work days full of tasks can be analyzed to see how employees are interacting with an organization’s technology.

In the contact center, employees must interact with a number of technologies and applications, often moving between them regularly to find information, complete transactions and ensure they are current and up-to-date. According to a recent blog post by Monet Software CEO Chuck Ciarlo, the relationship between call center agents and call center technology plays a significant role in how well customer service expectations are met, and desktop analytics provides a means of analyzing how well that relationship is working, and where it could use some improvement.

It’s particularly critical in the schedule, which can make or break a contact center. An efficiently prepared schedule, based on a forecast, can ensure that the contact center has the optimum number of employees working on the right contact media to meet customer expectations, but without overages that can lead to wasteful overstaffing. It’s not only important to monitor the schedule when it comes to calls, but also when it comes to non-telephone work, says Ciarlo.

“More and more call centers are now seeking out this visibility by implementing a desktop analytics tool,” he writes. “The ideal solution will provide a configurable means to capture, measure and analyze performance related to non-call related tasks, KPIs and metrics across applications and multiple process steps. This information then automatically feeds into workforce management for more accurate forecasts and schedules.”

Improving the accuracy of the forecast, and therefore the schedule, should be the goal for all contact center managers. The information gathered can then be used to build more realistic schedules that account for all activity, call and non-call. By having a better grasp on how agents interact with their desktop environments to perform daily tasks, contact center managers can go a long way toward improving productivity, prioritizing customer support quality and find-tuning best practices. 

Edited by Stefania Viscusi