The Agent Desktop for an Optimal Agent Experience
November 3, 2022 | Reading time: Approx. 7 minutes
Experts from the FIS Group
It is not sufficient to provide customers with excellent service and support only before and during the purchase, because the measures of the service agents also make a decisive contribution to the service experience. In this article, you will learn how you can optimize your service experience by means of the agent desktop of SAP Service Cloud.
Enterprises are challenged to provide their customers with positive experiences along all touch points. In the face of ever-changing markets and rising customer experiences, however, this represents a great challenge.
In order to provide customers with positive experiences along the entire customer journey, it is therefore indispensable to take your own employees on this journey. A positive experience of service employees leads to a positive customer experience at the same time.
This includes a sophisticated change management within the enterprise as well as digital technologies that support employees in carrying out their tasks easily and efficiently and, as a consequence, meet their customers’ expectations. Therefore, customer satisfaction is directly related to the satisfaction of employees or agents.
What is agent experience?
Agent experience is the sum of all positive and negative experiences that a service employee gains within an enterprise. This includes experiences from the area of cooperation as well as experiences concerning processes and workflows. It is also decisive how valued employees feel and which tools service agents are provided with for their daily work.
What are the challenges of service agents in the digital age?
Today, service agents face several challenges due to the progressing digital transformation and rising customer expectations. Due to the huge number of channels, such as website, e-mail, telephone, social media, WhatsApp and the like, that exists nowadays, service agents are forced to balance with a series of channels. At the same time, they have to react faster and faster and keep their focus on customer experience.
Employees working in the service departments, represent their enterprise and their brand to the outside world just like sales employees. As a consequence, they play a significant role in customer experience and in keeping advertising promises. To meet these requirements and appropriately represent their brands and companies to the outside world, these employees need the necessary expertise and corporate identification but also appropriate tools.
What is SAP Service Cloud?
SAP Service Cloud is a component of SAP CX Suite and connects all processes in the customer service with the entire value chain. The objective is to accelerate processes, increase efficiency and bind customers to the enterprise in the long term due to excellent service. This is achieved by means of functions such as multichannel ticketing, management of SLAs, intelligent routing, service intelligence, analytics and experience management as well as the agent desktop.
Focal point of SAP Service Cloud: What is the agent desktop?
The agent desktop is the central entry point for service agents and forms their work environment with an intuitive, flexible and adaptable user interface. This user interface can be applied to efficiently contact customers via diverse communication channels.
For this purpose, SAP Service Cloud provides an integrated and cloud-based communication stack, which enables multi-session communication in real time and helps resolve issues fast and efficiently.
Communication channels can be easily integrated into SAP Service Cloud by means of a UI widget. In this way, users can, for instance, respond to customer interactions by means of predefined e-mail templates and, in doing so, track these e-mails via a time axis.
By means of a widget-based and computer-supported telephony, the agent desktop supports voice calls and enables service agents to answer and process them directly via the desktop. In addition, a voice recording is enabled, which can be used for later quality control for instance. The automatic search enables fast finding of solutions for the specified problem.
The tasks of service agents also become more diverse, because it is no longer only incidents that have to be entered and processed. Nowadays, there are various services and customer concerns that exceed the mere processing of incidents.
Other tasks can be implemented by means of a flexible and regulatable case management on a case-related basis. This means that for different service processes, steps and consequences of action can be defined, which lead the agents successfully through the processes. In this way, the work of the service agents is supported in the best possible way, which increases security in dealing with customer concerns and also enables faster initial job training for new employees.
Furthermore, service agents benefit from an automated customer identification and search on their desktop. As a consequence, the most important customer information can quickly be made available in case of incoming service requests. Thereby, service agents can access existing customer operations or retrieve object information on products or equipments for instance.
Due to integrated knowledge bases, agents can quickly search for solutions for diverse issues. In addition, solutions of similar problems are displayed. By means of additional information, the knowledge article can also be updated without having to exit the agent desktop. The knowledge base is displayed here as a page area on the agent desktop to ensure that all other customer information is also available at any time.
By means of mashups, external systems such as back-office applications can also be integrated into the agent desktop. In this way, it is possible, for instance, to directly create the service order for a subsequent process without having to exit the agent desktop or the system.
Application scenario: How do you create the perfect service experience for customers and agents?
If a customer is confronted with a specific problem, they contact the enterprise’s service hotline by phone. The respective service agent answers the telephone call automatically via the agent desktop and all customer details are displayed immediately. As a consequence, the service agent can directly address the customer in a personalized way and ask for the customer’s request.
The customer states that a complaint regarding a specific product is concerned and that they consent to a recording of the telephone call. At the same time, the solution is displayed for the service agent by means of the knowledge base. The customer states that an irreparable defect is concerned and a new product needs to be sent.
The service agent can directly create a new order via their desktop and inform the customer as to when the replacement product will arrive at the customer’s site. The problem could be solved within a few minutes and the customer is satisfied. The information from the service issue can now be used for further marketing campaigns, e.g. to surprise the customer with a voucher after this incident.
Conclusion
To be able to provide customers with an excellent service experience, it is mandatory to also provide agents with the right mindset and the necessary tools. If all information and knowledge bases converge with the agents, they are able to solve customer issues fast and easily.
By means of personal communication, corresponding know-how and digital support, unpleasant conversations with customers belong to the past. This prevents dissatisfied and demotivated service agents and closes the circle between agent experience and the service experience resulting therefrom.
Here, the focus should be on the right technologies that are available at any time and from anywhere. Service processes should also be improved and accelerated by means of AI and automation but also be intuitive and easily operable at the same time.
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