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Today, companies are increasingly adopting new strategies to improve the customer experience and profitability while lowering operational costs. Desktop automation is one such strategy, as it removes the barrier that the myriad of existing applications can present to a call center agent trying to deliver exceptional customer service, and thus empowers agents to provide faster, more personalized service to every customer, all while increasing operational efficiency.
Let’s take a look: Top 5 benefits of Unified Agent Desktop Benefits
- Shorter Call
- Reduced Training Costs
- Improved Customer Experience
- Improved Accuracy
- Personalized Customer Experience
1. Shorter Calls
According to ContactBabel, 85% of contact centers demand agents use multiple applications within a single customer call, with 49% requiring agents to access 3 or more applications. Therefore, an agent’s desktop set-up is quite an important factor in the length of time it takes agents to achieve call resolution. By automating an agent’s desktop and unifying the applications utilized by them onto a single screen, it thus dramatically reduces the time it takes to navigate a large number of systems. In fact, studies show there is 20 – 30% reduction in average handle time. A lower AHT enables contact center agents to direct their focus more on the customer, increasing sales revenue and boosting the overall customer experience.
2. Reduced Training Costs
It’s no secret that call centers suffer a large attrition rate compared to other industries. Did you know that, according to the United States Bureau of Statistics, call center agents stay at their job an average of only one year, while global agent turnover in large call centers can be as high as 49% annually! As typical on-boarding training can last for two to six weeks, the high rate of turnover can be a huge drain on call center resources. Since desktop automation means much less to learn and remember, it can reduce training time and costs by 50%, thus freeing call center agents up to focus on the customer experience, while providing a feeling of value and appreciation that can go a long way in keeping call center agents on board long term.
3. Improved Customer Experience
It’s critical that your customer experience design and customer service capabilities are prepared to meet the expectations of today’s customers. However, too often agents struggle to cope with the behavior and complexity of many applications and these applications were simply not designed with the goal to deliver the optimal customer experience. With desktop automation, the array of existing applications are harmoniously blended into new customer friendly workflows and tasks that empower agents to focus on the customer instead of wasting time dealing with time-consuming system navigation and data entry. In addition, desktop automation can also provide agents quality assurance guidance, such as next-best-action and compliance monitoring.
4. Improved Accuracy
Speaking of, while data entry tasks may be on the low end of company priorities, it remains one of the most crucial day-to-day tasks of daily business operations. All sales and customer data are heavily dependent on data entry, which means data entry errors can actually be some of the costliest. Wherever a company employs people, there’s the potential for human error, and the reality is many data entry positions are still held by humans. Desktop Automation is the key to reducing all the error-prone tasks of customer service agents by taking over all the repetitive and error-prone data entry and system navigation tasks with accuracy and speed. By streamlining all the error-prone tasks and optimizing application navigation on the desktop, desktop automation enables the whole organization to operate more efficiently by reducing rework and the costs associated with errors.
5. Personalized Customer Experience
Today, one of the main expectations regarding the customer experience is its level of personalization. According to Accenture, 73% of consumers prefer to do business with retailers that use their personal information to make the shopping experience more relevant. Desktop automation provides real-time, personalized, contextually relevant intelligence about the people customer service agents are helping. In addition, as a byproduct of fully optimizing the way customer service agents interact with their desktop, regardless of channel, they will have more positive energy to personally engage customers, resulting in happy, loyal customers and agents!
The ability to create new customer-centric processes from existing applications by unifying all knowledge bases and communication channels makes desktop automation the perfect tool for every company aiming to deliver great customer experience. The choice is yours!
[About the author]
Dylon Mills is the Director of Marketing Content Strategy & Development at Uniphore. As such, Dylon’s main responsibilities are to strategize, create and deliver content for Uniphore’s product portfolio that align with the global Go-To-Market strategy, corporate positioning, and marketing campaigns. Dylon’s prior work experience includes Product Management at one of the top Fortune 500 Technology companies, Symantec Corporation. Outside of work, Dylon enjoys problem-solving and any project that includes building/tinkering with tools. Dylon holds a BS Consumer Economics from the University of Georgia.