Cyara today launched its Virtual Agent for Desktop, a solution for testing how efficiently contact center agents can interact with the myriad of systems and applications that reside on their desktops.
Cyara Virtual Agent automates and mimics real-life agent interactions and workflows, such as answering or ending calls, entering customer information, or looking up account details in CRM applications. Until now, this was only possible by taking live agents away from their phones and replacing them with human testers. With Cyara's Virtual Agent, the entire process can be fully automated at any time, on virtually any Windows-based desktop.
"When you get to the agent desktop in the contact center, you have a mash-up of technologies that can be among the most complex in any business environment," says Bill Aston, Cyara's general manager of the Americas.
"Often the agent is forced to move between screens and move from one app to another, and it can get very complicated," he adds. "So many different systems can translate into performance problems when the agent wants to get information from back-end systems out to the customer."
For businesses, that can have a disastrous effect, as Alok Kulkarni, cofounder and CEO of Cyara, illustrated in a statement:
"Like anyone else, I've had the frustrating experience of calling my bank or insurance company only to be told by the agent that the systems are running slowly or that something crashed. We've learned that when this happens to customers, they rarely complain. They simply walk away forever and take their business elsewhere. With CVA Desktop, companies of all sizes can implement comprehensive testing to make sure that they don't fall victim to these hidden pitfalls."
Because there are so many of those pitfalls, the CVA Desktop "measures the responsiveness of all of the systems in the agent environment," Aston says, including the timeliness of getting information and how it gets delivered to customers.
In a nutshell, CVA Desktop "simulates all the agent behaviors needed to respond to specific customer inquiries," he says. "And it can be used in all phases of the customer life cycle."
Some of the features and benefits of Cyara's CVA Desktop product include the following:
- the ability to automate and closely mimic real-life agent interactions and workflows, including button clicks, text input, and the opening of windows and other applications on the desktop;
- measurement and validation of agent desktop performance, including the ability to measure application timing and responsiveness and validate that it is within user-specified thresholds;
- the ability to validate application content and behavior, including screen-pop contents and application functionality;
- access for users to define and configure virtually any workflow through the Cyara Portal;
- advanced step-by-step screen-shot capture of generated agent desktop, with support for extended multi-display agent desktops; and
- drill-down, out-of-the-box reports that provide a view of agent desktop performance and results.
Aston says ideally companies should run the application prior to launching any system, but also for regular load and regression testing. A key element of the system is the ability to look for latencies when many agents could be tapping into the same systems for information, he explains.
"It's good to get a time-based snapshot under varying levels of load throughout the day," Aston says.
But more than that, timing is the key, he says, noting that the earlier companies can detect and fix defects and problems, the better. "The more confidence the agent has in the system translates into how she is able to respond to customers," he states.
This product launch comes on the heels of Cyara's recent announcement of a $25 million Series A funding round led by PeakSpan Capital and Greenspan Associates.