• Fixing the desktop has continued to move towards the top the call center priority list as it is becoming recognised as a critical factor in many productivity and customer experience delivery issues
• Enterprise mashups have jumped from “is that a serious business tool for important operational applications?” to being a recognized approach that is seen as a very effective way to integrate applications for people

Today BPM is really into preplanned and rigid process models. While the underlying technologies are agile and explicit rules and processes are being leveraged, process models need to move from fixed to variable behavior. This will probably start with collaboration points in a mostly fixed process, work to loosely bound process snippets to dynamically created and executed flows that are bound by governance constraints. These kind of processes allow for BPM to extend its benefits to a larger group of work activity that is not so predictable. This will likely include collaboration across organizations and into value chains that touch different legal entities.

Human Sigma contends that as an organization tries to standardize processes and scripts for management teams to follow, scripting employee behavior does not really enhance the quality of the employee-customer interaction. In fact, it may worsen it by emphasizing the steps to do the job instead of the outcome the process is supposed to produce. [Six] Sigma followers look at the manufacturing world and conclude companies can improve processes and systems because the inputs they use to make things can be kept at predictable and repeatable levels. But human systems in business – such as the employee-customer encounter – do not conform to such predictable rules. Sales and service organizations in particular, with a high degree of direct employee-customer interaction, cannot expect to follow such conforming practices as those in the manufacturing world.

• We need to balance providing “enough” guidance to simplify and safeguard what a user such as an agent is doing, while leaving sufficient freedom for the user to be able to focus on the end goal- solving the customer’s issue - not the steps mandated.
• The engagement level of the agent with the business has been shown to be key to quality and has a significant effect on the profitability of interactions. The desktop environment provides a very tangible example of how much the organization “cares” about its employees (or doesn’t).
• Measurement and monitoring are key to understanding and improving the quality of interactions. The more we can do to understand the hard and soft aspects of customer service, the better chance we have of improving service and performance.

The conclusion … is that coaching in systems with a broad mix of tenure and even a modest level of turnover will have little effect on the performance of the entire system. To improve the outputs of a system, managers must find an approach to process improvement which lifts the performance of all the agents at the same time, not one at a time.

1. Too many applications, each with their own login, UI and screen layout
2. Applications that time out when they are used, forcing another login
3. Applications with too many screens, each in a tab, sub-tab or sub-sub-tab
4. Applications that require way too many clicks to get the job done
5. Applications that show you the customer name on the first screen, only to not show it on all subsequent screens, forcing the user to write it down on paper
6. Applications that perform so badly the agent has to become an expert in ad-libbing
7. Screens where the information is way down below the bottom of the screen, or all the way across to the right
8. Screens that are so crowded with information, it’s hard to pick out what you need
9. Screens that are so visually unappealing it makes them hard to use
10. “Customer Records” that are split across many applications and so require a large amount of copy/alt-tab/paste to see the whole picture

1. Companies merge, acquire and get acquired. Technology stacks don’t get integrated quickly, or at all.
2. Core CRM applications have huge programmes associated with them to implement front- and back-end CRM processes. It takes years to get round to doing “the other apps” so we end up with original apps as well as a new CRM front end.
3. To stay ahead of the competition, enterprises launch new products and services before the core applications can really support them, so new applications are built.
4. Agents build their own applications to help navigate through the complex desktop. These are known as “Shadow IT” or “Guerrilla” applications.
5. Technology is “improving” all the time. There are new widgets and frameworks and standards and approaches that IT tries to keep up with.

1. Databases organize information in a way that works for databases. Customers have orders, addresses, contact details. Orders have statuses, products, dates. Products have prices, catalogue entries. All too often, applications use the structure of the database to drive the structure of the screens. Mostly, users don’t look at information in the same way as computers, and nor do customers when they are asking for it.
2. The tools used to create applications make it easy to use the data layout to drive the screen layout.
3. Tabs, tabs, tabs. It seems like the right way to organize information, but demands change, so it rapidly becomes the wrong way to organize information.
4. It’s sometimes easier to add something to a screen than it is to create a new screen. You then get a crowded screen with loads of unnecessary fields on it.
5. The people designing the applications understand about data. The people who use the applications understand about the servicing of customers and their products. There is a mis-match here!
6. The people building applications don’t sit down with call centre advisors enough. If they did, they would not build apps in the way that they do!

1. User processes change faster than apps do. Customer service organizations manage sales processes, retention processes, diagnostic and fix processes. They need to learn based on what works and what does not work. They need respond to market conditions, competition, regulations. Importantly, they need to do this without changing systems. Unfortunately, as user processes are all too often wired in to applications (or on paper), this is too hard to do.
2. Sometimes it’s easier to create a new application than modify an existing one.
3. “One size fits all” does not work in a customer service organization where you have a variation in process across each user group. Maybe you have retention, inbound, outbound, first line and second line. Maybe you have organized teams based on product specialty. Either way, using traditional development techniques, it’s almost impossible – or very costly – to create applications that are tailored to the needs of each user group.