The rapid growth in smartphones, social media and video has created new channels — many of which are handled separately than the traditional call center, causing inconsistent customer experiences. Today’s customers, especially the digital natives, seek immediate response to issues and are no longer satisfied with slow service or delayed response. They expect immediate connectivity and response to their questions and want consistent service and recognition regardless of the channels they choose.
This more complex support environment often leads to mistakes as CSRs toggle back and forth among several applications to deliver an answer to a customer. Additionally, customers are often put on hold while waiting for the CSR to process a transaction. An intelligent unified desktop software greater reduces processing time and improves accuracy of CSRs. Customers enjoy faster and more accurate answers resulting in a positive experience.
Most existing unified desktop software supports only telephone transactions and neglects the rapidly emerging channels of social and mobile application support. Unified desktop software vendors include CRM vendors such as Salesforce and Amdocs that link to the core ACD software and provide customer information directly to agent desktops when a call is received. Additionally, dedicated software, vendors such Pegasystems offers business process management and supports unified desktop software for handling complex business processes by automating programming and workflow. Pegasystems Business Process Management offers premise based and cloud solutions and is excellent tool for high-end complex customer support operations. It is one of the few vendors supporting multiple channels on their unified agent desktop.
LiveOps a cloud based customer service organization recently announced a new integrated agent desktop that supports all channels including social called LiveOps Engage. All channels are visible on a single screen, which improves agent productivity and delivers a seamless customer experience. Importantly, LiveOps has built in quality control that allows managers to review agent’s messages on social and other channels before messages are posted publically. LiveOps demonstrates solid innovation in this area that will attract more customers and help sustain its strong year- over- year growth in cloud customer service.
There is little doubt that for customer support operations to improve performance in today’s complex environment that a unified agent desktop is an essential tool. It improves the customer experience, increases accuracy, supports more personalized interactions and reduces processing time. I expect to see significant growth in unified desktop software for a multiple channel customer experience in 2013.
