Happier Employees, Happier Customers: Improving Contact Center Experiences by Upgrading Internal Tooling

The desktop is where today’s knowledge workers spend the vast majority of their time, especially those in customer service and client-facing roles that rely on CRM software and other third-party apps to resolve customer issues. But with limited screen real estate, the desktop can quickly become cluttered, pigeonholing operators into complex workflows to accomplish daily tasks.

This dynamic is particularly pronounced for call center agents. These users must interact with a wide array of powerful applications to handle functions from analyzing and categorizing customer issues to troubleshooting problems and completing associated reporting tasks. Keeping them happy and productive means empowering them to make the most of these capabilities – and today, the stakes are higher than ever.

This industry has a high attrition rate – the average call center reports 30-45% employee turnover annually, with a few sources, such as Bloomberg, citing up to 80% for some verticals. Rising call volumes and demands, intensified by mounting pandemic-induced pressures, have led to increased agent burnout. According to a 2021 report from Calabrio, 33% of call center agents are considering leaving their company within a year — and 50% plan to leave within three years. Inevitably, this low retention rate results in a loss of institutional knowledge and experience, as well as exorbitant amounts of time and money recruiting and onboarding – on average, new agents take 24 days to onboard, costing the firm up to $6,000 per seat.

Unsurprisingly, these high departure rates are often attributed to an overarching frustration among agents that their companies do not equip them with the right tools to overcome pervasive customer service challenges. In the current economic client, retaining clients – and, by extension, the support professionals who serve them – has become an increasingly crucial priority, so businesses have been looking inward to assess their systems and how they can be improved to maximize experience and performance.

Throughout the workday, agents often find themselves rapidly cycling between multiple apps, such as CRMs and sales pipeline management tools, when attempting to extract specific data points from a vast sea of customer information. This repetitive toggling leads to an abundance of “dead time” on calls (up to 50%), which is highly detrimental to the health of call centers. Within this highly demanding environment, without the proper internal tools, agents’ response rates slow, service quality tends to slip, and customer satisfaction rates inevitably drop – all due to time wasted navigating the desktop.

These glaring statistics and plentiful pain points create a troubling outlook for call centers and the customers they serve. To flip the script, they must take a modern approach to improving their call operators’ experience, helping them take full advantage of the tools available to them. One path is to provide workflow management tools that support employee performance across the entire desktop.

With an employee-centric approach, call centers can foster an environment where both productivity and customer satisfaction are maximized. OpenFin’s Workspace offering – an extensive set of unified, interactive tools designed to deliver exceptional desktop experiences – is built for this. Where personnel would typically have trouble surfacing precise information from the reams of data ingested by their CRM, we enable streamlined access to this information so that employees can resolve customer issues in a timely manner.

In a world where agents spend up to half of their time on calls searching for information across disparate apps, Workspace enables them to accelerate their processes with a highly intuitive and convenient search experience. By effectively sensing user priorities, Workspace can automatically launch the next app in a given workflow or rapidly surface relevant information such as customer account numbers and call history logs, eliminating unnecessary dead time. Our system is compatible with a massive range of third-party apps, so there’s no need to waste resources on full replacements of pre existing systems to tap into our capabilities.

Workspace automates rote tasks and provides real-time decision-making support for agents, enabling them to deliver better experiences for clients. With a single click, agents can update the context of their entire desktop, optimizing access to all the information needed to take instantaneous action. With our Browser feature, the most essential tools and data flows are seamlessly incorporated into user workflows, and non-essential ones are set aside to create a more focused experience. Additional capabilities, such as actionable notifications, further expedite customer inquiry management.

We believe Workspace is the gateway to robust task prioritization and overall call center efficiency – agents can shorten their time to action and problem resolution, which is vital in a setting where mere minutes can make a huge difference in terms of customer satisfaction. By empowering agents to navigate the desktop with maximum productivity and speed, we ensure that call centers can extract maximum value from their existing investments in third-party apps.

By delivering better desktop experiences and more pleasant, less stressful interactions for their agents, call centers can powerfully improve employee retention rates. This kind of digital transformation requires time and resources, but with the right approach, they can reap limitless benefits.

Want to learn more? Reach out to us.