The contact center may be a central focus of the customer experience, but there are many other business applications involved in enabling agents to deliver the kind of experience customers expect. When applications aren’t integrated, the agent typically has to switch back and forth between application windows to perform certain tasks. Unintegrated applications can’t communicate and share data, creating more manual tasks and a cluttered desktop environment for the agent. This can sap productivity, increase errors and affect the customer experience.
Benefits of Application Integration
There are two ways to go about integrating business applications to create a better user experience for agents. You can either integrate the applications that agents use most frequently, such as the customer relationship management (CRM) app, into the agent desktop application, or you can integrate the agent’s tools and call center functionality into the business application.
By integrating the contact center agent desktop with business applications, you optimize the agent desktop, provide a consistent user experience, and simplify contact center processes and workflows. Agents have easier access to the information they need to resolve customer issues, resulting in reduced average call handling time, increased first-contact resolution, fewer repeat calls and escalations, and improved data accuracy, all of which translate to more satisfied customers. You can also reduce training time and the risk of security and regulatory compliance issues.
A number of vendors offer agent desktop integration, providing access to data from multiple applications through a browser-based interface. This interface is configured for the contact center and provides visibility into customer history and interaction data from all communication channels. While this approach can clean up a cluttered desktop and reduce manual tasks, the ideal solution is one in which the contact center platform provides integration tools.
Cisco Webex Contact Center
Cisco Webex Contact Center features seamless, plug-and-play integration with your CRM and other business applications such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and Zendesk. This capability improves agent productivity by streamlining workflows and eliminating the need to bounce between windows and apps. Because contact center functionality is embedded in business applications, Cisco Webex Contact Center can also help you improve first-contact resolution rates.
Cisco Webex Contact Center also uses predictive analytics to predict the customer’s issue and automatically route the call to agent who, based on previous performance metrics, is most likely to deliver the desired outcome. Pulling data from your CRM and other contact center systems, 360-degree customer journey analytics are then used to better understand and improve each stage of the experience.
Your contact center is the central point of customer interaction with your organization. Cerium can provide a comprehensive assessment to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of your contact center and help you integrate key applications with your contact center platform to improve performance. Let us show you how Cisco Webex Contact Center empowers your agents to become more productive and deliver the best possible customer experience.
