How to find
the right
contact center
agent desktop

Every day, thousands of people sit down at their workspace, put on their headset and look at what's shown on their contact center agent desktop. What they see—and the extent to which they can take action on it—can make or break the quality of customer experience that a brand delivers.

As questions and complaints begin to pour in, agents are expected to supply answers and solve problems quickly. However, that becomes more challenging when they're forced to do detective work by searching for the right data across many other systems. These could include customer relationship management (CRM) tools, an internal knowledge base and even shared drives.

In some cases, the best resource could also be another employee working in a separate department. Tracking these subject-matter experts down can add to wait times and customer frustration. In fact, Gartner® recently found that 60% of customers will seek service in third-party sources of information not owned by the company, even if they're less credible or trustworthy.¹

Agents might get equally frustrated by spending the majority of their time on manual, repetitive tasks such as inputting the same data into multiple applications. This could be among the reasons why the Wall Street Journal reported that the number of job postings for contact center workers late last year was five times bigger than February 2020.

These factors suggest it's time for organizations to reassess the contact center agent desktop they're providing to their teams. In doing so, they should be looking for the following features and functionality:

Having a customer's name, contact details and purchase history might become table stakes as organizations seek to provide agents with greater knowledge to deepen the brand's relationship with each interaction. The right contact center desktop will integrate with and synthesize data across a range of disparate sources.

This could include not only CRM and knowledge bases but also publicly available data, such as that provided on social media platforms. In fact, according to research conducted this year by Frost & Sullivan, 90% of firms in the retail sector alone are investing or planning to invest in social media analytics by 2023.² An analyst at Forrester suggested that customer service leaders should also use other forms of unstructured or "dark" data “to drive customer experience and employee experience initiatives.³spected.

If people are truly an organization's greatest asset, ask yourself where you want agents to focus their time and abilities. Without agent desktop automation, they'll likely be filling in fields in an application that could otherwise be pre-populated. They might be walking customers through customer satisfaction or net promoter score questions that might be better sent as an e-mail or text message.

Generally speaking, any steps that are repeatable and don't require critical thinking skills mean agents may not be able to prioritize customers' needs and wants. Combining AI and robotic process automation (RPA) could help reduce human agent interaction time by 40%, while using voice recognition technologies for authentication could reduce the average call length by four percent. The time-savings from your contact center agent desktop can free up agents to focus on up-sells, advisory services and proactive retention.

Customer self-service options can also be included as part of an agent desktop automation strategy. Chatbots, for instance, can take low-level work off an agent's plate while opening up opportunities for other business benefits. Researchers looked into the role of chatbots in customer service and concluded that chatbots can help boost satisfaction, intent to repurchase and positive word-of-mouth.

According to one survey, turnover is the largest expense for the customer experience industry, with 1.2 million U.S.-based agents leaving their jobs each year. One of the most cited reasons is poor training, which can also contribute to poor performance and burnout. Also, the majority of surveyed agents who considered themselves "poorly trained" were also pessimistic about their career.

The days or weeks of training that service agents receive when they're first hired is really only the beginning. As they spend more time on the front lines dealing with customers who reach out, they may need to learn from a wide range of stakeholders. That doesn't mean they can routinely leave their cubicle and get advice from product managers or other agents, though. In fact, they might not be sitting in a contact center cubicle at all.

Deloitte Digital published a report that said 77% of service leaders are either adopting or accelerating work-from-home programs. Collaboration features will therefore become a critical element in a contact center agent desktop, so agents can tap into a myriad of expertise and data sources, as a part of ongoing training experiences so that they can effectively serve customers.