Use Desktop Analytics to Improve Your Servicing Environment
can be eliminated or controlled using DA's real-time guidance features, which show employees the steps they need to take and what they need to say to handle inquiries properly. Workflow automation can be used to reduce the number of manual hand-offs and processing time, measure policy adherence, and ensure regulatory or process compliance. This includes sending triggers to turn call recording on or off, important for adhering to Payment Card Industry (PCI) regulations. Additionally, DA solutions can be set up to maintain an audit trail of all activities, including monetary and nonmonetary transactions.
Desktop Analytics Helps Improve the Customer Journey
Companies need systems and applications that allow them to enhance all aspects of the customer experience while improving productivity and reducing operating expenses. Desktop analytics, at its most basic level, gathers information about the customer journey. Desktop analytics can be used to trigger and tag recording of calls, chat, short message service, email, and social media interactions to obtain the information needed to reconstruct the entire customer experience across all channels. It can pull data from the CRM system and, based on the customer's profile, identify preferences and prior actions to provide agents with personalized sales opportunities to optimize each interaction. Desktop analytics can also do something that few consider: By providing visibility into the fulfillment process, it can "watch" to see if agents are delivering on their promises to customers--providing a true closed loop analysis of the entire customer experience.
Getting Past the Obstacles
Desktop analytics vendors face several challenges that continue to constrain adoption of this exciting technology. The first is that few managers are aware of the uses and benefits of desktop analytics. DA vendors must do more to educate the market and communicate the value that their solutions provide. The lack of a standard definition for desktop analytics confuses buyers, who are not sure what they are getting and why one solution is different from another, particularly when the vendor messaging is the same. This confusion has slowed adoption, as has the uncertain economy, which has made companies less than receptive to new applications.
Another major challenge is that these solutions require a considerable amount of professional services to implement. Although a great deal of progress has been made, productizing DA capabilities remains an area of significant research and development investment for all of the vendors.
The Future of Desktop Analytics
Desktop analytics is considered a big data tool because of its ability to capture and analyze all employee desktop activity. In the next five years, DMG expects to see DA functionality offered as part of larger enterprise application suites, such as CRM, enterprise resource planning, and workforce optimization, as well as continue to be sold on a stand-alone basis.
We recommend that companies invest in desktop analytics solutions to improve the performance and quality of their front- and back-office service environments. DA provides transparency into what employees do at their desktops. It can identify opportunities to streamline processes that drive efficiency gains and cost savings while reducing error rates and improving quality. It can be configured to provide adherence to process compliance and monitor for fraudulent activity, reducing corporate risk. And it can be used to enhance servicing systems and extend their life while improving staff productivity. With planned innovations that include the integration of additional data from third-party systems, agents will be able to make better decisions and offers to customers. And back-office employees will have better visibility into what they need to do to get work done properly the first time.
Donna Fluss (donnafluss@dmgconsult.com) is founder and president of DMG Consulting, a provider of contact center and analytics research, marketing analysis, and consulting.
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