Happy Customer Service

Published in

hexatown//blog

3 min readMar 14, 2018

For years my company have been very curious about how our agents spend their time. Some decades ago, a tool called PowerBuilder was able to do awesome stuff. After having spent a few weeks with PowerApps and Microsoft Flow after my summer vacation in 2017, I tried to give it a go and invested a few hours in getting the replacement in place.

My ambition with this series of blog posts, is to share the solution with you, and why I find that the Power* series of products from Microsoft is such a good choice. The application is running, the customer is happy, and I will now start to share how it was made. Most importantly, I’ll identify where the pitfalls were and how I bypassed them.

Use Case

My employer is a large Fintech company, having a 24/7 customer service function spread over multiple countries with a second line support of +100 persons. It is crucial to know how the workload is spread and how each agent is performing, so agents are measured on a number of parameters.

At any given time an agent can only do one thing, but the agent could shift between different tasks. Some types of tasks are measurable in the quantity produced. Others are not.

One of the problems that the client has with the original app was that is lost it connection to the database when the users undocked their desktop computer.

Original PowerBuilder generated entry form

High-Level Requirements

User can start an activity by choosing a category from a catalogue of categories
System logs start time, user, and category
System stops existing activity
User can stop/pause current activity
System stops existing activity
Always easily accessible

The overall process

Administrators

A few designated administrators is support by a SharePoint site, in which they maintain the master data, which defines which entries are allowed in the time registrations.

Users (call center agents)

Users will be interfacing the system through a PowerApp application. The application will require access to the master data in SharePoint as well as the SQL database used for storing the transactions.

Managers

Managers will get access to reports in PowerBI in where they can use the transaction data to measure performance.

Solution

The idea is to utilize the mobile app player in PowerApps, as most of the interactions with the app then can be done on the move or even while commuting, thus decoupling the solution from the on-premises infrastructure.

The Development process

It actually took some months, but with an investment of 2–3 hours per week. I was developed by me, but using a peer-to-peer approach , where each components was developed during discussion of requirements. Many of the screens is actually maintain by the customer.