Role of Unified Agent Desktop in Banking Contact Centers

Banking is one of the foremost industries that need a contact center for its operations on a daily basis. Poor experience in a contact center can scuttle any initiative for overall customer experience improvements. Nowadays, contact centers have become the preferred channel for customers for many services such as blocking a card, checkbook request, balance-related inquiries, etc. The millennials are placing more calls to a bank compared to someone in their 60s.

Additionally, countries have legal requirements and compliances for the client – contact center employees such as the Bank Secrecy Act and Data Protection. It becomes imperative that such contact center employees or ‘agents’ follow the bank policies and procedures diligently as these procedures protect both the customers and the bank.

Within such a highly regulated framework, the role of an agent in the client-agent interaction is of paramount importance. Adoption of ‘right’ technology can help solve many issues related to compliance and legislation, policies and procedures and avoid placing the onus on to an agent. One such tool that helps agents execute his/her processes without worrying about the procedures and policies to a large extent is a Unified Agent Desktop for Banking & Finance.

Agents are not given unhindered access to the backend applications, ensuring they can only see what they are allowed.

In the banking industry, unified agent desktops provide an additional benefit of regulatory compliance other than improving key metrics such as AHT and FCR. A unified agent desktop presents only context-specific data to an agent. The agents need not flip-flop between different banking or financial applications while executing their business processes. The agents are not given unhindered access to the backend applications, ensuring they can only see what they are allowed and/or required. Access to data and workflows can be authorized depending upon user roles, rights, and use cases. Tools such as guided scripting help agents execute the business processes with a high level of consistency and compliance of the business processes.

Unified Agent Desktops help contact centers integrate the multi-channel strategies onto a single unified desktop for agents. Unified Agent Desktops need to be aware of the context as well. This is important when self-service applications need agent assistance. Blended contact centers lay additional stress on to the agents with respect to skills and business processes. An intelligent agent desktop is probably an answer to this issue.

The user interface automatically changes depending upon the use cases. Context-specific data is passed to an agent desktop and the customer does not have to repeat the information to the agent when the former switches from one channel to the other.

In the banking industry, a Unified Agent Desktop Application is now mandatory. Customers have a choice to which bank they use. A Data breach can lead to significant losses in both customers and reputation for the bank.