Considerations for Mapping Your Business Processes to the Agent Desktop
Time spent defining a business process is a worthwhile investment. Decisions made before implementation can save much time and trouble later on. Careful consideration of all aspects of a business process can make it more effective and easier to maintain and can help to avoid process holes and bottlenecks.
The first step in mapping your organization’s processes to the agent desktop is to clearly define your business needs. Whether your goals are simple or complex, certain basic parameters should be identified and accounted for in your desktop design. Here, we’ll provide you with some basic questions to help you identify the requirements and resources you'll need to structure and refine your business processes.
Put simply, a process is a sequence of events—actions followed by other actions, governed by conditions and augmented by exceptions. Following is a sampling of essential questions that should be answered in preparation for defining a fully formed process.
- What activities are you supporting? What is your primary goal and responsibility for the process you are defining? Are you developing an entirely new process from scratch, or are there existing processes or systems that should be considered? If you're integrating with an external system, is there any functional overlap that's easier to manage within B2C Service?
- Who are your stakeholders? Identify everyone who has an interest in the success (or failure) of your process. Success is defined by accounting for and delivering on all needs of your consumers, staff, group managers, directors, and executives. To achieve that success, it's important to give these stakeholders a voice when designing and testing your business process.
- What outputs are required? For each stakeholder, list the specific process output that they
require to fulfill their needs. List any events and conditions that factor into those
outcomes and, when appropriate, define alternate outcomes for cases where exceptions to
those criteria occur. For example, each of these stakeholders requires a specific output
that their business process must account for:
- A customer may need an answer to a question or service for a product they've purchased.
- A manager may need custom reports to ensure that customer requests are met within a specified time period and that satisfaction scores are high.
- A director from another department may be responsible for incorporating customer feedback into initiatives for new products or services.
- A sales executive may be responsible for acting on business opportunities or account issues identified by your agents.
- What are your channels? How are you communicating with your customers—email, telephone, or chat? Are you monitoring the social cloud or providing a community to promote your services? Is your team logging incidents or opportunities manually, or are they being generated by some other means?
- Who are your resources? Identify the people who'll be responsible for completing any necessary tasks. For example, who'll be responsible for viewing and responding to customer inquiries? To whom will they escalate outstanding or complex issues? Who'll be charged with developing and monitoring team performance? And who'll be charged with maintaining these processes as needs change in the future? Do these people have staff accounts in B2C Service with appropriate profile permissions?
- What can be automated? As you list the resources needed to service your stakeholders, consider each task carefully and ask yourself, “Does this output require human interaction, or can it be wholly or partly automated?” Can you reduce the number of human resources you require, or the time you require of them, while delivering full value to your stakeholders? With desktop automation, you might be surprised how often the answer is “Yes.” The more tasks that are automated, the more focused your team will be on tasks that actually require their attention.
- What is your testing strategy? After your process definition is complete, how'll you test it? Is it large enough that it should be rolled out in phases, or to a subset of your users in advance? Do agents have a means for providing you with meaningful feedback? The more complex your processes, the more important it is to fully test all scenarios your agents may encounter and ensure all process outputs are sufficient for stakeholder needs.
After you've answered these questions, you're ready to begin defining your business process. At a very basic level, this involves listing the required actions, the conditions under which they occur, and any alternate outputs stemming from exceptions, and ordering them in an appropriate sequence. Then, you might sketch out a chart or detailed diagram to illustrate the flows implied by those business needs. Illustrating the order of action with a flow diagram can help you understand the finer nuances of your process and make it easier to verify your logic. For example, you may find instances where one part of a process overlaps another or creates a bottleneck, giving you the opportunity to streamline and increase the effectiveness of your flow.