In the customer service landscape, best practices abound in terms of how to leverage technologies to improve the customer experience. However, one key component of the customer experience that has been subordinated (or ignored altogether) in these discussions is the notion of using technology to optimize the customer service agent experience.

1. How to Enhance the
Agent Experience for
Better CSAT and KPIs
Published by
Arm Your Agents with Their
Own Personal Assistant
A Special Report for Customer Service
and Contact Center Leaders

2. SPECIAL REPORT FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE AND CONTACT CENTER LEADERS
Introduction
In the customer service landscape, best practices abound in terms of how to leverage
technologies to improve the customer experience. However, one key component of
the customer experience that has been subordinated (or ignored altogether) in these
discussions is the notion of using technology to optimize the customer service agent
experience.
This is beginning to change as customer service leaders recognize the breadth
of benefits that improving the agent experience can deliver to contact center
performance.
In fact, Forrester Research identified ‘focusing on the agent experience’ as a key
trend that contact managers must no longer ignore in their quest to optimize
customer service. Noticing an upswing of buzz and momentum on this topic, Forrester
made this prediction in their 2012 report, Navigate the Future of Customer Service:
“Customer service organizations will continue to work on simplifying the agent workspace
and making it more usable. This includes removing extraneous data elements from agent
screens, automating tasks to increase agent productivity, and ensuring that relevant
information is easily accessible to agents...”
For most organizations, optimizing the agent experience will be an initiative that
is long overdue. It begins with providing these vital employees with quick and easy
access to the answers they need to achieve better performance. The fastest path
to an a optimized agent experience is achieved by equipping agents with their own
“virtual assistant.”
What’s Your Question?
Enter your question here
Ask!
When your CSRs have access to their own on-screen personal assistant, they no longer
have to remember where information is stored in your knowledgebase, nor do they need
to memorize a click path to the content they need. Instead, they simply ask a question and
get a single correct answer with one single click. Compare this to rudimentary “search”
procedures which turn up multiple results for the CSR to click through while the customer is
waiting. Improving the agent experience in this way truly enhances the customer experience
because high-value, frequently referenced content is literally presented
“at your fingertips” for the CSR.
© 2012 IntelliResponse Systems Inc.
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3. SPECIAL REPORT FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE AND CONTACT CENTER LEADERS
A Personal Assistant for Your Contact Center Agent
Putting next generation knowledge management tools (also known as “virtual agents” or “virtual assistants”)
on contact center desktops can have a substantial impact on the efficacy of agent performance. These are the
very same virtual agent technologies that are so popular in online self-service deployments for customer-centric
organizations today.
Bringing virtual agent technology to the agent desktop allows companies to arm each agent with his or her own
“assistant”—namely, a virtual agent tool that automates the entire knowledge retrieval process by allowing the
Customer Service Representative (CSR) to key in a question while they have someone on the phone, in natural
language and then get the single right answer. Gone are the days when CSRs have to sift their way through
documents or search results to get the answers to the most common questions they receive.
This live example from employee health benefits provider Bloom Health shows what CSR agents see on their desktop:
The question and answer engine acts as a virtual agent for the CSR, essentially doing all the work of
search and retrieval, but with a much higher degree of accuracy and level of confidence because the
single answer leaves no room for guesswork. The latest Virtual Agent technology leverages natural
language processing to ensure a high accuracy of delivered answers.
Confidential knowledge base information has been obscured.
A desktop virtual agent tool like the Bloom example provides many benefits that impact contact center and agent
performance, including:
•Increases speed to response and therefore FCR scores
•Helps make agents work more efficiently while on the phone
•Reduces the need for formal call escalation to managers
•Eliminates those informal “queues” that exist within each contact center, when CSRs seek assistance from
their more seasoned peers
•Allows for more rapid, streamlined training of new CSRs
© 2012 IntelliResponse Systems Inc.
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4. SPECIAL REPORT FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE AND CONTACT CENTER LEADERS
Enhancing The Agent Experience:
Where To Begin?
Organizations that recognize how improving the agent experience impacts CSAT scores and other KPIs need to know
where to begin. The Forrester observation above does a great job of articulating three areas where contact center
leaders can direct their focus. Let’s take a closer look at these three areas here…
1: Removing extraneous data elements from agent screens
While three-inch thick binders stuffed full of product knowledge are no longer a staple of every
agent workspace, many of the problems associated with deep content repositories still confront the
modern agent. In many contact centers, agents still have to bring forward dense documentation,
(albeit electronic) and scroll, search and click backwards and forwards through multiple screens in
order to access information relevant to the discussion.
Many content repositories are little more than digital versions of the reference binders of old. Sure,
these databases are ‘searchable’ but the time savings over paper-based repositories are nowhere
near optimal.
GO
2: Automating tasks to increase agent productivity
What happens at your contact center after a CSR searches for information that he or she doesn’t
know off hand? Odds are, the search gets the CSR closer to the information, but not all the way to
the single correct answer.
It’s not uncommon for CSRs to have to ‘manually’ search through electronic documentation to find
the precise information. If it’s information related to an obscure customer question, or one they
have not encountered in a while, you can bet this search is going to extend the length of the call.
Forrester calls for true automation, such as a desktop that allows the CSR to ask a question in a
natural language and immediately be delivered the single correct answer – with no guesswork and
no manual searching through content.
3: Ensuring that relevant information is easily accessible to agents
To make the agent experience as user-friendly as possible, what’s needed is an efficiently organized
agent screen, with information categorized in a logical and intuitive manner. Key areas should be:
Virtual Agent Tool – The main ‘work’ area, to house the answer to the question input field and the
resulting answer field.
Popular questions or Top 10 Questions – A continually refreshed list of the most relevant questions
based on what’s actually being asked by consumers. This should be a dynamically generated and
refreshed list of the most popular questions actually posed by customers over a customizable
period of time.
Related Questions – Related questions provide a natural, logical path for the agent to follow as
they help the customer resolve their issue. This list of questions should be intelligently linked to the
response that the Virtual Agent tool currently shows on the agent screen.
A look at the following agent screen show how Bloom and netSpend have created agent
workspaces that accomplish all of the above recommendations from Forrester.
© 2012 IntelliResponse Systems Inc.
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5. SPECIAL REPORT FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE AND CONTACT CENTER LEADERS
In addition to the Virtual Agent workspace that allows the CSR to ask a question in natural language
and get the correct answer, the CSR is also armed with easily accessible answers to follow up
questions that the customer is likely to have, all of which are accessible instantly with a single click.
Confidential knowledge base information has been obscured.
These workspaces truly enhance the customer experience because high-value, frequently referenced
content is literally presented at your fingertips for the CSR. Guesswork, searching, scrolling, and
toggling through multiple screens is all eliminated.
Confidential knowledge base information has been obscured.
© 2012 IntelliResponse Systems Inc.
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6. SPECIAL REPORT FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE AND CONTACT CENTER LEADERS
Extending the Benefit: Scaling Virtual Agent
Technology to Other Channels
An additional benefit of deploying a virtual agent solution is that the same technology can be deployed in your other
channels as a customer-facing online self-service tool.
In simple terms, customers who choose to visit your website or social channel such as Facebook can use the same
question-answer technology in exactly the same manner. That is, your customer can simply enter their question using
natural language and get a single correct answer, as shown in this example:
RBC dedicates an entire web page to offering customer advice, with a virtual agent self-service tool displayed front
and center. The use of their brand mascot, “Arbie” alongside the tool beckons customers to ask questions.
© 2012 IntelliResponse Systems Inc.
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7. SPECIAL REPORT FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE AND CONTACT CENTER LEADERS
What’s more, customers can enjoy these highly satisfying and self-directed resolutions
regardless of form factor.
CIBC is a global bank that uses virtual agent technology to deliver a consistent online self-service experience to
customers on the iPad (pictured on the left), mobile phone (on the right) and on their customer facing website.
After deploying virtual agents such as these, it’s not uncommon for organizations to
reduce their overall chat, email and call volumes by 40% or more.
As a result of deflecting thousands, or hundreds of thousands of calls and emails to
the contact center (particularly during peak times of the year) a host of additional
benefits are realized, including:
•FCR is further improved, and escalations are reduced as a result.
•Low complexity informational requests are handled by the customer, instead
of the agent. Agents can focus on delivering higher value assistance that
requires more interaction such as screen-sharing or an activity that
generates revenue such as upselling and cross-selling.
•Agent engagement and morale increases, since the nature of the calls are
less repetitive. The agent can have a greater impact on the customer service
experience versus acting as a live “robot” that simply offers the same
basic customer-service information hundreds of times each week.
•Consistency of answers across all channels improves when customers and
agents are using exactly the same technology to retrieve the single correct
answer.
© 2012 IntelliResponse Systems Inc.
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8. SPECIAL REPORT FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE AND CONTACT CENTER LEADERS
Hedging Your Bets is Key for the Contact Center
of the Future
Despite the emergence of the online environment as the channel of first choice for resolution among consumers,
savvy leaders recognize that this does not spell the demise of human-assisted channels. In fact, customer behavior
data shows that a significant portion of modern customer are still engaging live support.
Data from Forrester paints a clear picture of the prevalence of the live phone support usage across all age
demographics. Interestingly, while usage is widespread, satisfaction scores are low in every demographic, as
illustrated here.1:
Gen Z
(18-22)
Gen Y
(23-31)
Gen X
(32-45)
Young
Boomers
(46-55)
Older
Boomers
(56-66)
Golden
Generations
(67+)
Us Online
Adults
Usage
63%
68%
66%
67%
75%
68%
68%
Satisfaction
57%
64%
59%
65%
66%
72%
64%
Another interesting piece of data is the explosion of technology-driven customer-initiated engagement with the contact
center:
Click-to-chat adoption has risen dramatically between 2009 and 2011. In 2009,
19% of online US consumers had used chat for customer service;
by 2011 that number nearly doubled to 37%.2
Click-to-call and screen sharing technologies are also being adopted with fervor. As recently as 2009, these metrics
weren’t even measured by Forrester, but by 2011, the adoption of these tools across the US online consumers had
exploded to 27% and 25% respectively.3
Clearly, the contact center will remain a vital installation in the customer service channel strategy. What organizations
need to focus on now is driving maximum value from the contact center by using technology to optimize the agent
experience.
© 2012 IntelliResponse Systems Inc.
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9. SPECIAL REPORT FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE AND CONTACT CENTER LEADERS
Getting Started: 3 Things to do Right Now
1: Explore what’s possible first-hand
The fastest way to understand what an optimized agent desktop experience should look like is
to experience the speed, accuracy and efficiency of next generation virtual agent technology
first hand.
Following are four live virtual agent deployments that you can explore for yourself online, right
now. Simply enter a question into the ask field and watch as the one right answer and related
content is instantly provided:
While the above examples are customer-facing virtual agents, the knowledge retrieval
technology and the efficacy of the experience is exactly the same as would be used by your
CSRs.
The only difference in agent deployment is the layout of the screen, which can be customized
according to best practices, as illustrated in the Bloom and netSpend examples above.
2: Subjectively compare Virtual Agent deployments with
your current agent desktop
After looking at the live examples mentioned in item number one above, the next step is a
quick subjective exercise that will allow you to perform a rough but highly valuable initial gap
analysis.
With the virtual agent technology experience fresh in your mind, and knowing what an
optimized screen should look like from the Bloom and netSpend examples above, look at the
agent desktop currently deployed in your contact center. Make note of differences in both
experiences. Sitting with an agent while he or she handles a handful of live calls will give you a
very real understanding of impediments to efficiencies.
Note what the rep has to do in order to move through the call. How many clicks and screen
toggles take place on an average call? How much searching and scrolling goes on?
It’s best to do this with not just one rep, but a selection of reps of varying caliber and tenure,
for a more accurate view of how the current agent experience is negatively impact your KPIs.
Opportunities for improvement will quickly begin to show themselves.
© 2012 IntelliResponse Systems Inc.
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10. SPECIAL REPORT FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE AND CONTACT CENTER LEADERS
3: Obtain objective diagnostics and an actionable map for improvement
Having deployed hundreds of virtual agent solutions for organizations in every industry,
IntelliResponse can quickly assess the health of your contact center agent experience as it
compares to industry best practices.
IntelliResponse has worked with Forrester to design a vendor-agnostic analysis tool that evaluates
the efficiency of your online customer service experience, and can bring the same methodology
framework to evaluate your contact center desktop. The outcome of this analysis is an objective
diagnosis of opportunities for improvement, and an actionable plan on next steps.
Contact IntelliResponse to schedule a no-obligation
30-minute assessment of your internal knowledge
management capabilities.
info@intelliresponse.com
1-866-454-0084
Questions About this Guide?
For questions on any part of this Guide, contact IntelliResponse at 1-866-454-0084 or info@intelliresponse.com
SOURCES:
Understanding Customer Service Satisfaction to Inform Your 2012 eBusiness Strategy
1, 2, 3
About IntelliResponse Systems
IntelliResponse is the leading provider of virtual agent technology solutions for the enterprise. We create profitable online
conversations for our private and public sector customers around the world.
With our patented Enterprise Virtual Agent (EVA) solutions, corporate websites, mobile applications, social media channels and
agent desktops can all be transformed by an engaging virtual concierge, empowering customers to ask questions using natural,
conversational language and delivering an effective and
engaging online experience.
Some of the worlds most recognized corporate brands and public institutions trust their customer experience management needs to
IntelliResponse “ including CIBC Bank, ING Direct, Charter Communications, Progress Energy, Copa Airlines, Kobo Books, Penn State
University, Yale University and Harvard University.
For more information about IntelliResponse, visit www.IntelliResponse.com.
Twitter.com/IntelliResponse
Facebook.com/IntelliResponseInc
YouTube.com/IntelliResponseInc
© 2012 IntelliResponse Systems Inc.
To learn more about taking online self
service to the next level for your customers,
visit www.IntelliResponse.com.
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