
The 2021 holiday shopping season and ensuing post-holiday calls to customer service were among the most challenging that contact centers have ever endured. A recent Gallup poll showed that 60% of shoppers were unable to get a product because of the supply chain shortage—an issue that usually ended up with a customer speaking with a contact center agent.
Since the start of the pandemic, contact centers have scrambled to provide COVID-19 remote work solutions for agents that are easy to deploy with proper security built in. Organizations that demonstrated the most resiliency when they transitioned from on-premises to remote contact centers leveraged secure, virtual apps and desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) solutions that are designed for any device, over any network—perfect for remote agents.
Contact Center IT Solution Providers Have New Challenges
Contact center agents are often the first point of contact for customers, and if agents can’t access their workstations and apps to communicate effectively, it affects customer retention and satisfaction scores.
While the agents themselves face great challenges in this ongoing "new normal" landscape, contact centers and their IT providers also face the heavy burden of enabling these agents. New solutions today are helping IT providers with the necessary deployments and important functions for agents that:
- Help existing agents access the critical apps they need to get their work done.
- Provide access to customer data and corporate systems, secure that data passing over the internet, and ensure customer data is protected.
- Make it easy for them to sign on to preconfigured devices sent to their homes and get started helping customers.
DaaS Is a Competitive Differentiator
One of the key benefits of DaaS solutions is that they can be provisioned to tens or thousands of users seamlessly and easily, removing the heavy burden from IT solution providers. No matter how they’re deployed, apps and desktops act just like they would if they were running on employees’ actual PCs and look the same whether they’re being accessed from Windows, Mac, or mobile devices.
Leading DaaS solutions ensure that agents get the best virtual app and desktop experience possible, with flawless voice and video as well as pixel-perfect graphics and imagery, even in the presence of packet loss and high latency. This is imperative for agents today who need to deliver clear responses to customers in often high-pressure, time-sensitive situations.