When an agent hits the floor of a busy outsourcing call center, he or she is bound by time. The ticking clock keeps on checking the productivity of the agent. On days they are superman and on others they turn out to be just an average person. In any call center, the call resolution time taken by an agent is recorded by the management.
Often the incentives and appraisals of an agent depend on the number of successful problem mitigations. In any other sector quality is given more stress then quality, but not in the contact center settings.
The management has to assure maximum call answering from their agents alongside quality services. As you can well understand it is a difficult art.In such a scenario the agents will take any help they can get. It has been seen that many under performing agents fail because of the complexity of work.Today’s agents have to not only make calls, answer incoming calls and settle issues through voice, chat or email support, they have to handle various sophisticated software too. In such a scenario desktops can be the worst enemies to an agents productivity. So, here is a friendly guide to arrange the desktops of agents involved in the help desk support services.
- Everything in One Place: The agents in a contact center have to interact with many customers in a day and use several applications to check data, provide solutions or escalate an issue. Industry related studies suggest that an average agent has to use 6-7 applications during the working hours. All the applications have different interfaces and features. So, it severely affects the agent productivity. In the past, integrating all these applications together could cost a fortune for the organizations. But the modern desktop integration tools can be easily used to merge all the applications at one place and create a dashboard with single screen.
- Auto Navigation: Modern contact centers utilize the soft phone applications or computer telephone integration (CTI) to take the volume of calls. When a call comes in through these systems, the agent gets some basic information about the caller. But to get detailed information, the agent has to open and search in other applications. This will make the customer wait, which is never ideal. So, integration of soft phone application or CTI with agent applications is a great way of minimizing the hassles for the agents.
- Eliminate Repetitive Tasks: When a new customer calls in, the agent has to take down all the information and put it into the system. This is the problem; the same information has to be put in various application windows. The repetitive copy and pasting tasks creates chances of errors which can prove costly in the long run. Such repetitive tasks do not help in agent’s work satisfaction too. So, it is wise to synchronize all the applications. With automation technologies, data put into an application can be replicated automatically across all others.
- Compliance Automation: All the agents have to meet the client and government compliance needs. Compliance needs may ask for log call activity, credit verifications, understanding of mandatory disclosure documents, etc. Now, the compliance needs will vary from one customer to the next. So, the agent has to understand the compliance needs and then perform tasks likewise. This can increase the call handling times. Agents can be helped by automating the compliance data and bringing it on the agent computer screen in the form of workflow. Such automation will save significant time.
- Offer Data Automation: Up-selling and cross-selling processes are falling out of favour. Though the agents are able to earn revenues, but the call handling times often frustrates the clients. The agents too have their work cut out. After calling the customers, they have to repeatedly look through the applications to find accurate information about the offers. This can increase the call times drastically. With the automation of offer related data, all the information would be in front of the agents’ eyes, thus saving time.
With these minor modifications to the agent desktop, the contact centers can boost the agent performances significantly.