Friday, April 8, 2011

The Power of the Contextual Help

I spent this week onsite in Baltimore helping a customer architect some automation scenarios where the goal of this exercise was not only to reduce the average handling time of the contact center agents but also make them more productive and provide better customer service.

One of the issues we identified during the discovery phase of this project was the lack of ability of the users to recognize customers with flagged accounts or important alerts to need to be reviewed when get in touch with the contact center.

The current system provides a black triangle image close to the right corner of the screen while the account information is on the left corner. Ha! Don't get me wrong but who in the world designed a condition like that?
Something that has to be brought to the agent's attention in black on a gray background. Nah! It's not gonna work.

Frankly, now I understand why these agents were not able to check that alert and keep that in mind during the call or take action according to the information provided there. They couldn't see it. Agents working all day long taking calls and in front of their computers with the exact same applications all day start not recognizing small changes. It's a fact! You gotta do something better and give them a better experience if you want to have a better customer service.

So, we fixed that issue... and more than that... We didn't change a line of code on their systems.
OpenSpan has a very nice capability to recognize when a control (button, image, textbox, dropbox, etc) is created, changed, clicked or whatever happens with it.
OpenSpan also has a method called ShowToolTip which works for Windows and Web applications.
The quick solution to the issue described here was to combine these two OpenSpan capabilities.
To give you some details, when the agent was getting the account information for the call we setup an event "listening" for the alert image creation on the screen. As soon as we recognize that condition we then read the Outer HTML property of that image because that would be the text displayed on our tooltip and finally display the tooltip for 10 seconds. In a non-intrusive way we brought the agent's attention to where we needed so they could see the alert without clicking on anything and kept working on their call without any interruption.
What colors we decided to use??? Well, we decided to do it in OpenSpan Orange-like and since we were in Baltimore why not to say that was an Orioles sponsored tool tip.

It came out similar to this:

There are so many use cases for an implementation like that. From process guidance to bringing the agent's attention to certain aspects and everything in between.

If you're interested about the tooltip capability take a look on the OpenSpan Online Documentation available here.

Setting Up Local Environment for Developing Oracle Intelligent Bots Custom Components

Oh the joy of having a local development environment is priceless. For most cloud based solutions the story repeats itself being hard to tr...