Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Streamline the Agent Experience with Mobility

January 11, 2017

Companies are spending a lot of time today focused on their customer experience. They understand that a great customer experience is an excellent competitive differentiator, so they’re looking for ways to cut down on hold times, reduce transfers, increase first-call resolution and up their responsiveness times for non-voice customer contacts, such as email and social media.


While seeking to improve the customer experience, they may not be paying much attention to the agent experience. However, the two are inexorably linked. When agents are having a difficult time keeping up with calls, finding answers for customers and interacting with their desktops, it’s going to be much harder to deliver a good customer experience. So it can probably be said that a great customer experience starts with a great agent experience.

So what’s the best way to foster the agent relationship in a way that directly improves the customer experience? In a recent blog post, Aspect’s Rebecca Anderson recounts the experiences of Asurion, a mobile device insurance provider based in Nashville, Tennessee. The company was looking for a contact center solution to help it streamline some of the administrative tasks expected of agents and managers through automation.

It discovered that managers were spending significant amounts of time receiving and approving requests for schedule changes from agents. Asurion had no effective way to communicate with agents in real-time, using agents’ preferred contact channels. As a result, agents were missing opportunities for voluntary time-off (VTO) and overtime (OT) because they were receiving the notifications too late to take advantage of them.

“Asurion deployed Aspect EQ Inform to help meet their needs around pro-active notifications initiated by key workforce management events,” wrote Anderson. “Asurion can now send out proactive push and desktop notifications via SMS and email. Asurion contact center management and their agents alike benefit from having control over notification preferences. The agents respond to the notifications using Aspect EQ Workforce Mobile and Aspect EQ Virtual Schedule Attendant (VSA).”

Thanks to the Aspect contact center solution, agents can now proactively take better control of their working days with an easy-to-use smartphone app that empowers them to self-manage their schedules remotely from smartphones and tablet devices. Agents without smartphones can use the Virtual Schedule Attendant, an IVR application that allows them to easily manage their schedules remotely.

“Since implementing Aspect Inform, Asurion has experienced increased agent satisfaction, lower absenteeism, increased OT and VTO fill rates, reduced administration workload from dialing agents, decreased administration time from WFM teams entering exceptions, and gained the ability to quickly communicate to the agent population during emergencies,” wrote Anderson.

Specifically, the implementation has led to an average of 35,000 notifications per week, and is expected to lead to a reduction of 2,500 administration man-hours annually. Currently, 62 percent of the agent population is engaged in mobile, email and/or SMS interaction with the solution, and this number is increasing weekly (the goal is to have at least 80 percent of agents using the solution).

By making it easier for agents to work and engage with their schedules, contact centers are better able to manage their own schedules and ensure they are properly staffed to match call volume. This, of course, is the first step toward ensuring a great customer experience.  




Edited by Alicia Young



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