This weekends Formula 1 race in Barcelona showed that it’s not always the fastest car that wins the race, it’s the most consistent.
Agent Handling time.
AHT. It’s the words heard most often when talking to prospects about introducing new technology into their contact centre.
The average agent handling time calculation is based on the amount of time it actually takes an agent to answer, resolve, and complete a call. Simply, all of the agents call time is recorded then divided by the amount of calls the agent has taken.
This number usually forms part of the the contact centre overall statistic, and agent performance is quite often graded against it.
No self-respecting contact centre manager is going to want to introduce software or hardware into their environment that could impact their agents average call handling time. The ramifications are endless: worsened customer experience, increased hold times, increased wait time, decreased customer satisfaction – the list goes on.
So what is the problem?
The introduction of new software and hardware will always have some level of impact, and as part of the buying process, a product with minimal impact will always appear more favourable in the eyes of a potential new client.
A vendor with a product with a very tiny impact footprint is a difficult find, as most solutions involve hardware on site, (solution/environment change, rollout, implementation, test period, QA period) or software installation and configuration, with long rollout periods.
These long rollout periods often include agents using both the legacy equipment, and the new equipment in tandem while they wait to roll over. Which is not an ideal scenario, and confusing for both the agents, the statistics, and makes it very difficult to manage.
What decides whether a vendor has a small impact footprint then?
It is all about the level of intrusion into the environment.
I mentioned this in a previous post, but i find that proxying solutions have the smallest impact.
The proxying solutions also have the added benefit of keeping the AHT at the same level (or less!) because from the agent perspective (the most important one) the solution doesn’t appear to have changed – the screen they are looking at remains the same, the functionality remains the same.
When a business is happy with it’s platforms, but want to add functionality to their current solutions such as a payment security solution, then using a proxy to achieve this has minimal impact, with maximum functionality.
Minimal Impact
Proxying has minimal impact on the environment, from a business perspective, it is a simple URL change, the page/pages were previously using a https secure connection via the cloud, once the URL is repointed to a proxying vendor, the CSS (page layout/view) remains largely the same, except now the page and all of it’s data flows through a third party on toward it’s original destination.
Maximum Functionality
Herein lies the key. Now that the page/CSS/data is flowing through a third party, powerful tools can be used to manipulate the backend of the page, including the data flowing through to it’s destination, this is especially important when it comes to payment security, and tokenisation technology.
The functionality that can be provided now has no restriction, data can be added or extracted, the page manipulated and changed, and the return flow of information from the original page source can also be manipulated and changed.
Pages can start off simple, for example, could contain only a customer’s name, then the third party API could populate the rest of the form, EXTERNAL to the merchant environment with sensitive data, before sending this on to a payment services provider.
THEN, the data being returned, via the third party proxy service, can again be manipulated to update an API, to populate the information back into a CRM or ERP.
Really. The possibilities are actually endless. With nearly zero impact.
Why can’t all solutions be like this?