Independent Study: Call Center Design

Challenge

Designing user interfaces for call centers is a balancing act that involves the ability to weigh multiple considerations, issues and pressures. While call center operations are an opportunity to enhance the responsiveness and quality of customer service teams, this domain has an inherent complexity that should not be underestimated.

Key design considerations include the high volume transaction environment, potential for impact when even small changes are made, interdependence of the call center agent and the caller’s goals, demands of multiple systems, shifting business priorities, performance pressures, expert behavior, design control, and high costs of training.  Although core design principles remain the same, these issues warrant a more specialized and detailed approach.

Based on years of experience working in the call center domain, User Centric’s experts set out to share the proven tactics for creating optimized systems.

User Centric Approach

Usability efforts within call centers are more likely to succeed by diagnosing a client’s business challenges first, and then prescribing an approach addressing these issues. Based on tactics shared and lessons learned, User Centric identified five unique ways to explore research considerations for call centers.

1. Observe – The importance of on-site, side-by-side observation cannot be overemphasized. With all the tasks and expectations that service agents are faced with on a daily basis, it is impossible to predetermine constraints without observing them. Seeing papers tacked on walls, handbooks or guidelines, and the various calculators employed – on a first-hand basis – is essential to good design.
2. Determine value drivers – Call centers have both business and user-value drivers. The first step to good design is determining those priorities by asking whether the organization values increased sales over handling time, identifies the issues motivating agents and the activities considered important and their frequency. Answers to these questions can be determined through observation and interviews. Ask local managers for the metrics on which the agents are evaluated and coached.
3. Apply diverse approaches – Use technology to collect a corpus of interactions for later viewing and analysis. Techniques such as eye tracking can be combined with more traditional methods of analysis to achieve a greater depth of data.
4. Employ decision support initiatives – Business processes are often layered on top of a system’s basic functionality. It is critical to gather data on processes because the information you gain will allow you to employ decision-supporting methods. 
5. Understand the methods, procedures, policies and practices – Most call centers have extensive scripts for their agents. These documents are invaluable. It is also very revealing to discover how much – or how little – agents adhere to them.

Results

Enhancing the user experience within the call center environment could be considered a more challenging goal than it is elsewhere. However, efforts made within call centers are also more likely to demonstrate the value of usability to the average business client because the opportunity to create a tangible impact is so profound.

User Centric takes a holistic approach to call center operations and recognizes that change often triggers a domino-like effect beyond internal resources.

Read the complimentary User Experience in the Contact Center, which addresses the following factors essential to advancing the user experience in call centers:

1. Key differentiators in designing for contact centers
2. How to get started: Understanding the contact center user
3. Training roles and enhancing the user experience
4. Design considerations for contact centers
5. User-centered design resulting in positive culture change