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.
DaaS Migration Drivers
Leading contact centers are benefitting from secure DaaS solutions for three primary reasons:
- Simplify IT Management: Administrative actions can be pushed to thousands of devices within minutes and include delivering enterprise apps, updating security policies, and remotely wiping devices. Plus, zero-touch enrollment enables contact centers to rapidly scale operations by simply shipping devices directly to agents and configuring credentials from integrated cloud management consoles.
- Protect Customer Data: DaaS provides contact center IT solution providers with the confidence of knowing their customers’ data and devices are safe from threats. DaaS providers ensure that applications and data are stored in the cloud and are then securely accessed over devices. It’s important to work with a DaaS provider that offers an additional layer of security against internet-based threats to help protect agents and customer data.
- Integrate and Validate with Lower Risk: Trusted contact center partners are working to ensure IT solution providers can rapidly deploy a validated end-to-end software and hardware solution that delivers the best experience for agents. These partners are constantly validating new apps, endpoints, and peripherals to ensure contact centers continue to have the maximum choice of validated solutions.
By leveraging secure DaaS technologies with integrated and cloud-managed devices, contact centers can work productively from anywhere, improving their customer satisfaction and call resolution metrics. Leading DaaS solutions today are designed to help agents offer successful customer support by providing strong product integrations that enhance audio and video passthrough, advanced security with built-in protection at the endpoint and in the cloud, and the ability to support any workload, from SaaS to legacy enterprise apps.
MICHELLE SENECAL DE FONSECA is vice president of global cloud innovation strategic partnerships at Citrix, and SCOTT PORTER is managing director, Chrome Enterprise at Google. Citrix DaaS solutions on Chrome OS provide organizations with a secure by design remote work solution that provides employees with one-click, secure access to any type of app or virtual desktop, maximizing productivity without compromising security.
