Happy 40th Birthday, Copy and Paste (give or take a year).

Actually, it's older than that if we include scissors and tape but I'm talking the revolutionary "technological" version still in use today!

On most desktops, copy and paste still thrives en-masse, costing our businesses BILLIONS of dollars in the manual labor cost (it takes a computer user approximate 5-10 seconds for every click, copy, toggle, paste, toggle back). Training a human on what to copy, when to copy along with mistaken copies, adds billions more. It's because in reality, our desktops (and smartphones) are still cluttered with many applications our employees need to simply do their jobs.

Call Center agents witness this every day. They sit on a desktop with 4 or 5 open applications and toggle all day long, collecting and moving data between them (costing the Call Center lots of time, money and frustration). I call this "manual work" because it's just that. Humans, bashing away at the keyboard trying to figure out where data resides, apply their brain-trained rules and move it around. Manual work and wasted time.

And it's not just legacy applications. As a big Salesforce user myself, you'd think this super-duper, SAAS based cloud thingy wouldn't be tarnished with the same brush, right? Well, you are dead wrong. Most applications built yesteryear and today have little to no ability to be connected cost effectively to much else. Sure, there are plug-ins for salesforce and office to cut back on the number of manual integrations but that just makes the cloud application, bigger, clunkier and slower. Either that or have a development team constantly customize your salesforce and plug-ins until they too make just one new legacy mess.

After 40 years it's got a little better to be fair. Click on a phone number in an email on your smartphone and there's a good chance (unless it's an international number with a zero in the wrong place) that number will be magically dialed for you. Yippee, progress. However, if you have a 100 employees, or a 1000 or 10,000, sitting at a desktop, manually navigating applications, they have been trained (and hopefully remember) on, the Average Wasted Time (AWT)  adds up. Especially in a call center where AWT is unacceptable (Cost and Customer SAT score impacts).

I say, if you can't beat them, join them but do it automatically instead. Desktop Automation enables business and IT to figure out the appropriate joins quickly (automate application and human interactions) and eliminate AWT. Desktop Automation allows you to train the computer to do the things the computer is perfectly capable of being trained to do. This way, humans (Call Center Agents, Back Office works etc.,) can focus on the stuff the computer doesn't do well (human interaction, discretion etc.,). AWT costs money, lots of it. Desktop Automation can eliminate most of it, and customers of Desktop Automation are rewarded with the clear financial ROI as well as the virtual elimination of errors.

Screen Scraping, Macro's and Scripting are old tech. The new Desktop Automation technologies allow Agile, Drag and Drop automations to be built and rolled out quickly. Take a look. Your "human" workers will thank you for it, and your desktop computers likely won't care that they have to work a little harder for you :)

Of course, Desktop Automation can do much much more than just help eliminate AWT but since it's a birthday for our copy/paste nemesis, I thought I'd give it it's own special post ;)

I'll post some use detailed cases shortly but here's a quick one for you. A recent Desktop Automation project that took 12 weeks to implement allows 50 people to do the work of 300 people (about $1.5m a month savings). Yes - the numbers are big!

The Agile Desktop for Call Center Agents and Back Office workers

So, what is the Agile Agent Desktop?

Imagine you could design a car in a few hours? Sure you need the off-the-shelf "Body" and the "Engine" but after that, imagine if the rest was up to you. Want a digital fuel gauge or a old indicator style? You choose. Want really comfy seats, deck chair or tight sports leather? You choose. Want a wooden dash, brushed metallic, gold? You choose. Want a GPS system, Google Maps on a Tablet in the dash, iPad? You choose. Want a CD Player, USB drive, Bluetooth, LP's <lol>? You choose or have them all.

You get the idea, choose the car, the engine and the main body and the rest you can configure, and change as easily as using a smart phone with a few touch selections. OK, not possible yet is it? But for the desktop - your every day work dashboard - it IS now a reality!

Your workers and agents arrive at their desks every morning and are stuck pretty much with the same old apps, the same old complex work flows and the same old slow painful navigation across all those apps to get their job done. Not only is it pretty uninspiring, it is often incredibly inefficient (with so many apps). Agents have hundreds of options (and have to be trained on each of them) and dig around the screens to get their job done.

Enter the new AGILE desktop. Where you can take your existing desktop (your PC and the applications on it) and improve it quickly with dashboards, automation and helpful guidance and navigational tools that make your workers more productive - WAY more productive. As in the car, it doesn't change how the car works and doesn't risk you steering off into a lake in the middle of nowhere. The Agile desktop takes what you have, and just makes it better. It doesn't even have to do it all at once, you can change what you need to improve, as you need it. The same engine (applications) run underneath and there's no risk to transactions or business logic being missed or bypassed. The ROI of the OpenSpan Agile desktop customer base is typically 20% straight in the first year and closer to 30% for the back office workers. And it doesn't stop there. Our customers continue over years and years to use OpenSpan to improve the workforce as needs change. It's flexible, it's fast and it works.

The Agile Agent desktop for the Call Center Agents or the Agile Worker Desktop for the Backoffice workers just plain makes sense. Check it out, it's so easy, you'll wonder why you didn't think of it yourself :)

http://www.openspan.com/solutions/contact_centers/agent_desktop.php

2013 Top 10 New Year’s Resolutions for Call Center Executives

I was thinking to myself on New Years Eve (resting up after tearing a calf muscle doing Zumba earlier in the day!), what would be the best way to start my 2013 blog schedule. It had to be a traditional top 10 to go with the untraditional me (how many guys do YOU know who do Zumba?).

So, here we go, a traditional top 10 for the new year, with all the trimmings. Enjoy.

What are your goals for optimizing call center operations and impacting revenue for 2013? 

Consider these top 10 resolutions for world-class call center performance!

10.	Stop measuring what you cannot fix - it's meaningless. Look to key insights from Desktop Analytics to drive change and impact your agents, customers and bottom-line
9.	You are not just a cost center -- you are a revenue generation center; change your contact center this year through actionable data driven from Desktop Analytics
8.	Focus on improving your agent's desktop environment -- your agents and your CSAT scores will thank you!
7.	Be picky! Partner with only the best – see why over 300,000 agent desktops use OpenSpan over all other agent improvement options
6.	Instigate the best new measure for agent standards from fact based, real time Desktop Analytics
5.	Make introducing innovation a joint business and IT initiative
4.	Understand why an Agile Agent Desktop strategy succeeds and a Unified Desktop strategy fails
3.	See how Desktop Automation changes the way you think about agent desktops
2.	Remember AWT (Average Wasted Time) is the new thing to "cut"
1.	Investigate new technologies revolutionizing cost reduction in the Call Center

Screen Scraping is DEAD - Long live Desktop Automation

I often refer to screen scraping as "click and pray" since the results from it, are at best, Highly Brittle!

But the growing demand for obtaining better performance out of your workers through user optimization technologies is driving the need for better clarity on what works and what doesn't!

So, what makes Desktop Automation better than screen scrapers?

First, Desktop Automation (what OpenSpan pioneered as "Surface Integration") lives inside each running application it's going to automate - like a plug-in. It takes robust control over the UI objects so that you can automate against any object that the user would normally have to interact with. What I mean by living "inside" is that you then have the same control over the object as if we were the developers of the application. You can tell if someone clicks a specific button or changes a piece of text in a field or selects a menu. We don't "hope" we detect that click, we ALWAYS get that click. Likewise we can tell the application to change the text value of a field, or click a button or navigate to a page on behalf of the user. Again, we don't hope the application receives the click and we don't tell the user not to minimize the application or take the application out of focus - since we are living inside the application.

Second, screen scraping is often only used for small batch like operations or simple tasks. Desktop Automation from OpenSpan is running on close to 300,000 real active desktops, in mission critical and hectic environments. On call center agent desktops, on branch tellers pc's in banks, in insurance and healthcare claims environments, airlines, travel and much more. If you tried to extend screen scraping to these environments then the brittle click and pray approach just won't last long at all.

Third, screen scraping technology vendors try to mask the fact they are screen scraping. They hook onto the MSAA band-wagon. MSAA is Microsoft's way to explain how well written desktop applications (to MSAA spec), can talk to each other. Good luck with that considering probably only 20% of the applications even come close to supporting it properly and even then, it's very limited it what you can use it for.

Fourth, Desktop Automation doesn't have to rely on pauses and sleeps (the pray part) to detect when automation can occur. Since we see exactly when an object is ready to be automated against (by the fact it we see when it's created on the screen or page it's on), we know exactly when to automate against it. This event driven model means again, the resilient and robust automations are going to work, each and every time without the delays and "prays" associated with screen scraping.

It is wrong to put screen scraping and desktop automation in the same bucket but since they both claim to automate the UI, it's probably too late to create a new bucket. You MUST however look at the success stories for Desktop Automation. It's running in organizations with instances of over 25,000 desktops, all running powerful Desktop Automation solutions to drive out significant productivity gains from their call center agents and user bases. In some cases, customers are in their seventh year of running projects of Desktop Automation and they continue to expand it's use. With screen scraping, the approach is destined to small click and pray projects with short (weeks/months) at best. Now Desktop Automation is here and has firm presence at some of the largest enterprise customers in the world, and now on close to 300,000 seats, I think, it's fair to say, screen scraping is DEAD and Desktop Automation is very much ALIVE!

How to cut AHT overnight

Sound too good to be true? That's because most people think "boil the ocean". I'm going to blog 6 ways over the coming weeks on how you can take simple, easy to implement steps to eliminate "chunks" of AHT in short order.

The first one is reducing the time (by around 80%) it takes an agent to do call wrap-up. AND for those that say their agents don't spend time doing call wrap-up, I think you are denying reality. I've seen call wrap-up actually take place during the current call and even during the next call ("please hold whilst I look up that information for you"). Call wrap involves making notes during the call so your agents remember what they did - which is incredibly ironic since your agents are using a computer - and your computer is pretty good at remembering things for itself!

And this is where the first trick comes in. Simply use OpenSpan's desktop automation to teach the computer to remember, during the call what the agent is doing - EXACTLY, down to the last click / field change / credit / debit etc., across all the apps they use and feed that info into the right notes field instantly. 100% accurate and it won't forget!

I told you. It really is that simple. Our customers swear by it.

How OpenSpan changes the game for a BPO!

It is well understood, that some of the best outsourcers in the world, not only just take on their call center customers work (plus front and back office) but they take it on so they can do a better job than the customer themselves. Sometimes this is simply through economies of scale (doing it cheaper / onshore or offshore). Sometimes it's because the BPO has the depth/breadth of experience of that customers sector, across their entire peers. Lets be honest, if you are the outsourcer of a telecoms company, it's likely you could add significant value (best practices) to another telecoms companies outsourced call center too.

In order to learn, scale up and deploy, the BPO has to make a huge commitment to their new customers (infrastructure, hiring, training). After all, they need to be great out of the gate. For an outsourcer, it doesn't make sense to take on new customers without at least a 2-3 year commitment and probably more in many cases. However, in return, the BPO is often guaranteed to be paid, say, a price per minute for taking call center calls or doing back office work.

This has worked for years and the BPO's have more often than not, delivered great value to their customers. However, once the BPO model has been established for a customer, when contracts become due, the competitive market for BPO's is hot. At that point. smart customers have been covering their bets and signing up more BPO's to outsource their call center seats to (spread risk). This is good in many ways for the customer since they can quickly add/remove seats from the best/worst performing BPO's (Customer service, SLA's etc.,). There are many other relevant angles for the BPO to gain more seats and the customers and BPO's are often trying outsmart each other to ensure they get the very best service at the very best price.

And that's the key - doesn't that last sentence "best service at best price" sound like a conflict to you? Of course it is.

What OpenSpan has seen over the last 4 years as a vendor to many of the worlds largest BPO's is that this game is changing.  The customers are coming to the BPO's and are now asking them to improve productivity which in turn would mean less business to the BPO. Again the conflict. Why would a BPO be incentivised to reduce the number of minutes it takes to deal with a call in a call center if the BPO is paid by the minute? Now the BPO's are fighting back with OpenSpan. OpenSpan is a global leader in Desktop Automation and Desktop Analytics which enables Call Center agents and Back Office workers to perform significantly faster and much more accurately.

The BPO's are now leading with OpenSpan to offer their customers choices. If the outsourcer works uses OpenSpan to improve the process, the outsourcer wants to share in the productivity gains. Customers love it. It's a win/win. Outsourcers using OpenSpan are able to compete with a productivity improvement story against those outsourcers not using OpenSpan. Since OpenSpan is already used by over 250,000 call center agents across some of the worlds largest banks and telecomms call centers, it is THE proven and accepted technology to drive up productivity. OpenSpan Desktop Automation is used by more BPO's in the world, than any other desktop productivity tool, and as more and more of the "pay-per-minute" contracts come up for grabs across the very competitive BPO market, OpenSpan's BPO's are not only keeping the customers they already have, but using OpenSpan to win more customers and more seats than their peers.

Check it out, www.openspan.com

Is cutting call center AHT a good thing?

A few years ago, I was telling a prospect about how OpenSpan's Desktop Automation technology can cut AHT in their call center. However, their response made me take a step back; They said, "we don't want to reduce AHT, we want to focus on customer experience and cutting AHT doesn't necessarily do that".

Hard to argue with that but this was a big part of my sales pitch. Sure we don't just cut AHT but what's the best angle to take going forward with my pitch. It got me thinking. Our customer service agents spend all day on the phone, at their desktop, they use the computer to help them during the call but the truth is, they spend the time typing into the computer what they need to get done. They spend hours doing this during the day, many minutes during each call is spent navigating the multiple screens, searching, duplicating the same things over and over using rules they learnt in training and hoping they don't make mistakes. Why are they doing this stuff? The desktop computer is a powerful beast and yet the agents do things it should be doing. They waste time doing lookups, searches, rekeying etc., and slow the call down and extend AHT. This often leads to poor customer service - especially if the caller is in a hurry!

Then it came to me. Just because we don't want to cut AHT, does not mean our agents should be wasting time on the call, doing things the computer should be doing. The average time they waste on each call is huge. If you could cut out the waste, your call center can choose to use the time saved towards cutting AHT or use the time to have a better customer experience. This is when I came up with a new acronym for the Call Center - AWT (Average Wasted Time). AWT should be reduced or eliminated on every call because it's pure waste. You are paying people to do things they simply should not be doing - and people are your biggest cost, right?

So now, when I talk to prospects about how Desktop Automation can save millions of dollars a year, I don't focus on AHT unless that's what they want - I focus on AWT - because EVERYONE wants that.

Check out our quick 3 min videos on What is OpenSpan - and Does this remind you of you