Advisors Excel Moves 700 Customer Service Agents Online with Talkdesk
Kelly submits a chat to the county unemployment resource center and sits 19th in the queue. Sam reaches out to the nurse hotline at the pediatrician’s office because of a sick child at home. He waits on hold for 27 minutes. According to Talkdesk’s research, the number one thing customers want from contact centers is solutions as quickly as possible.
Built to help businesses and organizations move faster, and move forward, Talkdesk, built on the Salesforce Platform, is an AppExchange partner helping customers such as Advisors Excel during COVID-19. We sat down (over our laptops) with Kathie Johnson, Chief Marketing Officer at Talkdesk, to understand how the Talkdesk team is keeping customer service centers running today.
What challenges are your customers facing today?
Kathie Johnson: Contact centers are overloaded across all sectors, and customers need support now more than ever. The business continuity of customer service operations is critical, as is the health and well-being of contact center employees. The traditional contact center, by its very nature, is a concentrated gathering of people, which is a challenge as well.
We hear across the board from customers — especially those with heavy brick and mortar business operations — they’ve retained staff by successfully enabling their agents for remote work. They’ve experienced little to no loss in business continuity, which is future-proofing their customer service operations.
Due to COVID-19, there was an immediate need to move agents out of a physical contact center and work from home as fast and effectively as possible. The second challenge was the inability of VPNs to support the move to work-from-home agents adequately.
How are you supporting customers during this time?
Johnson: In April 2020, we partnered with Advisors Excel® to power their customer service operations. Advisors Excel used a legacy, on-premises system that couldn’t scale with the company’s growth. With seamless integration with Salesforce, they used Talkdesk Enterprise Cloud Contact Center™ to move 700 agents to work from home immediately.
Jared Arnold, Chief Information Officer at Advisors Excel, told us, “Talkdesk’s commitment to innovation and development philosophy stood out to us, making it clear that Talkdesk was the right partner to advance our customer service operations.”
Talkdesk’s strong integration with Salesforce reliably and automatically displays account information to agents, allowing them to focus on the caller, and provide fast and effective customer service. With Talkdesk for Salesforce, tickets are automatically logged with all relevant call data attached, reducing after-call-work and improving the overall efficiency of Advisors Excel customer service operations.
How does technology help address these challenges?
Johnson: To quickly, easily, and cost-effectively maintain customer service operations and enable remote contact center staff requires cloud contact center technology. We address business continuity and agent safety, helping customers move to the cloud now.
Jarod Arnold shares, “The flexibility of Talkdesk cloud solutions allowed us to make a significant shift during implementation and enable dozens of our agents to work from home, to support social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic.”
Talkdesk Now enables companies to deploy a cloud contact center solution in as little as 24 hours. Talkdesk Boost moves customers to the cloud and gets remote agents up-and-running in less than two weeks while retaining their current ACD routing. Talkdesk Mobile Agent helps service agents and sales representatives handle inbound and outbound calls virtually anytime, anywhere from their mobile devices.
Talkdesk includes dashboards to help with omni-channel reporting within Salesforce, which empowers agents with full contact center functionality inside Salesforce.
Omni-channel delivers personalized service via the channel most convenient for customers. It as access to advanced voice capabilities directly in Salesforce and integration with Salesforce Omni-Channel, to better manage work items across multiple channels.
Reporting is also inside of Salesforce. We have 25+ prebuilt historical reports and customizable live dashboards to perform detailed analysis on team performance all within Salesforce. The reports correlate Talkdesk and Salesforce data to measure the true impact of a contact center.
That’s incredible. How else are you working with your customers in light of COVID-19, and what’s next?
Johnson: Our focus remains constant: supporting business continuity planning and guiding our customers through digital transformation — whether it’s accelerating the enablement of remote work or simply helping them be more agile, efficient, and innovative to design better experiences for their customers.
Advisors Excel plans to grow by nearly 4x in 2020, and they can continue that momentum with Talkdesk and Salesforce. Jared Arnold says, “We are very excited for the future with Talkdesk as our customer service solutions provider.”
Learn more about Talkdesk’s solutions on AppExchange and see what other solutions are available to support digital transformation on the AppExchange COVID-19 Resources for Businesses.
