When we speak about the contact center experience, it is usually based on the customer experience (CX). However, a great customer experience starts with the agent experience – and the agent desktop. Whether cloud or on-premise solutions, contact centers can incorporate newer technologies to streamline the agent experience and enable exceptional CX across channels.
For larger, enterprise contact centers with hybrid deployments, the focus should be on providing a unified and consistent agent desktop experience. Imagine how challenging it would be if agents had different tools and capabilities depending on the communication channel.
Few contact centers are ready to be fully cloud-based, and many have found hybrid to be the easiest path to modernization. As such, it’s not unusual for a contact center to have a mix of premise-based infrastructure and cloud-based elements, usually with public providers like Google, AWS or Azure. For these types of deployments, the agent desktop solution should be able to augment CX regardless of the deployment model.
To better understand the importance of a consistent agent experience, here are three examples of how central the desktop environment is for enabling great CX.
Omnichannel Communication & Digital Channel Flexibility
The types of channels customers use to connect with contact centers will keep growing as demand and technology change. Voice continues to be a dominant channel along with email, chat and, more recently, video. Digital channels have also been gaining traction, like messaging and social channels, because they are easy to use and are already being used by customers.
There’s also the mobile-first nature of today’s customers to consider and the arrival of Agentic AI on the scene. Increasingly, customers will be interacting with both human and machine-based agents, so there are more moving parts to orchestrate for seamless CX.
This is a very different world from when customer service was telephony-centric, and it should be clear why omnichannel capabilities are essential. Not only do agents need to engage across any one of these channels, but over the course of a customer interaction, they will likely be switching to multiple channels to best support customers.
All this flows through the agent desktop. The key to a great agent experience is not having to worry about what channel the customer inquiry is coming in on. A true omnichannel desktop can handle all channels equally well, allowing the agent to focus squarely on the customer.
Real-Time Assistance & Human-AI Engagements
AI is quickly becoming table stakes for contact centers, and one of the strongest use cases is an AI-powered Assist capability for agents. Unlike self-service bots that are customer-facing, these bots provide real-time support to agents. Agent Assist can be scaled for every agent and every call.
On one level, these bots – or virtual assistants – automate tasks, such as post-call summaries or real-time transcription and translation. AI has matured enough now that these tasks can be done just as well as humans can, and in a fraction of the time. These are value-added forms of automation that most agents would happily defer to bots, freeing them up for a better agent experience and ultimately a better and more efficient CX.
Other forms of agent assist are more agentic in nature and can provide more nuanced forms of support during a call. Sentiment analysis is a prime example where these bots can detect changes in tone or intent faster – and sometimes better – than humans can. This can make all the difference when a call is about to go off the rails or require an escalation.
Assistive bots are becoming a standard offering, and each contact center should be able to choose their AI tools of choice and expect to provide a consistent desktop experience to all their agents.
Internal Collaboration for Agent Support
Contact center agents do not operate in a vacuum and will only do their best work when a variety of capabilities are orchestrated to provide the right information at the right time, and in the right way for customers.
However, aside from AI tools, the agent desktop experience should also be optimized for human-based support, like knowledge and collaboration with subject matter experts (SMEs) across departments. While AI tools can help in identifying the right SME, the agent needs their direct input, often in real time. All these interactions will take place on the desktop interface, so it’s vital to support all the modes needed for the agent to get critical input during a customer interaction.
This can include anything from a shared video call with an SME and customer, reviewing previous interactions from the customer, reviewing a bill, or reading an article from a knowledge base. The agent desktops should do all this seamlessly to streamline the agent experience and, in turn, provide a better CX.