Monday, January 28, 2013

Enterprise customers Vs Startup customers

Cloudagent has been flexible enough to cater to the contact center needs of both Startups as well as Enterprises. Because of this, we have had the good fortune of working with both kinds of customers. So, we are just putting in our thoughts of what is good and what is problematic about each kind of customer. Some disclaimers before we put up our thoughts.

1. There are no good or bad customers. Any company which puts their trust in you is good enough in our books. The list below, more or less captures the times we felt happy or sad when dealing with each type of customer.

2. The list below is very specific to our product which is a contact center product. It may not be applicable to any other product or any other company.

Enterprises


Startups




So, to put it in a nutshell, Startups decide fast and are willing to take the risk with you, whereas Enterprises are more slow in decision making, but once they decide, they stick with you and pay well.



Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Improving Agent Efficiency

In a call center, the costliest resource is always an agent. So any good call center software should try to make the job of an agent as easy as possible. The software should be non intrusive with an easy learning curve and provide as much details as possible for an agent to answer the customer queries easily.

  The main components which make the agent communication efficient are

1. Agent toolbar: The toolbar should be intuitive and display the right buttons depending on the context. For example, when an inbound call comes in, outbound call controls should be disabled.
2. Call control buttons: When an agent is in the middle of a call, all call control buttons should be easily accessible.
3. Call script panel: Give hints to agents on how to handle the call
4. Screenpop: Provide caller details populated from your CRM.
5. Disposition screen: Store call details for later processing and reporting.









That is why, in Cloudagent we have spent a lot of time in designing the agent screen.
At the top of the screen is the agent toolbar. The agent toolbar is the first thing an agent notices when he logs in and it is also the thing with which he interacts most often. The tool bar has been kept minimalistic on purpose so as to not intrude upon the workings of the agent. But, it still contains all the necessary information for an agent to perform his call center tasks. An agent can control his status from the toolbar. Also, whenever an incoming call comes in he gets to know the details about the call including the skill of the call, the caller details etc on the toolbar. He also gets call control buttons like hold, transfer, conference, mute etc on the toolbar. So with a single row of buttons, an agent can perform his call center duties from the Cloudagent toolbar.

The rest of the screen is free for the agent to perform his normal routine. Only when an incoming call is there, the screen is replaced with caller details from the CRM. This will give the agent enough context about the caller so that he can answer the queries better.

The agent screen also has space for showing a script to the agent. If there is a script that your agents should follow when answering calls, that can be uploaded to the Cloudagent system and when a call comes in, the script is shown to the agent so that he can follow that in answering the call.

So as you can see, Cloudagent has been designed with the agent in mind.

Once he logs in, he can control his status from the toolbar. Also, there are keyboard shortcuts for all major actions.
Once an agent becomes ready, Cloudagent starts routing calls to the agent and when an agent receives the call, details about the call are shown on the toolbar and the customer details are displayed through a screen pop. Using this information, the agent can answer the customer queries very easily.

After the call is finished, the disposition screen opens up and the agent can finish updating the call details.

Using this workflow, agents can utilize their time efficiently in the call center.