The shift from human to digital is well underway, as businesses are looking to create new ways to interact with customers that will create a differentiated customer experience (CX). Companies of all sizes and in all verticals are feeling the pressure to digitize as CX is now the top brand differentiator — outweighing price, product quality, and all other factors. For most organizations, the contact center is where CX starts, which is why there has been so much investment in modernizing this area over the past few years.
One of the interesting aspects of contact center evolution has been that contact centers are not just for agents any longer. While agents remain the primary users, salespeople, account managers, customer success, marketing and even field service need to access the rich set of data in the contact center to do their jobs. One company I recently talked to had migrated their on-prem contact center to the cloud and moved all 50 agents to the new system. At the same time, they added another 100 seats that were non-agents. This is a trend I see continuing into the foreseeable future. However, these new users need access to different information than agents and that requires a different experience.
It’s unrealistic for any vendor to create a unique interface for every possible use case but it is realistic to provide tools for the business to do so. Talkdesk has been helping companies address these growing demands
with low-code/no-code development tools that can be used to customize contact centers for an enterprise's own bespoke needs. Talkdesk offers a full portfolio of contact center automation tools as part of its cloud-native Talkdesk Builder solution. Companies can use the solution to build specific interfaces, business process automation flows, omnichannel flows, custom reports, or third-party integrations with other systems.
“Delivering a great CX requires being able to resolve problems at first contact and provide consistency, no matter the channel. It also requires delivering personalized services at every step and ensuring reliable and clear communication,” said Alain Mowad, Talkdesk’s director of product marketing.
The low-code/no-code capabilities in Talkdesk Builder can be accessed directly from the dock within Talkdesk Workspace, which is a visual framework that unifies all the applications, processes, and data on a single screen. IT staff, administrators, and even users can make contact center customizations and test them in a workspace environment without any coding experience.
Talkdesk Builder launched in 2021 with low-code capabilities that included an integration builder (Talkdesk Connections), orchestration builder (Talkdesk Studio), and reporting builder (Talkdesk Explore Create). Talkdesk just extended the solution with two new tools: Workspace Designer for creating custom interfaces and Automation Designer for business process automation (BPA).
The first tool, Workspace Designer, has a simple drag and drop user interface (UI) that creates a customized experience for every role in the contact center. For example, it can be used to build a tailored workspace for agents, displaying all the information they need within that workspace.
The second tool, Automation Designer, allows non-technical frontline teams to make changes to BPA conversation flows without going through a typical development cycle. In the contact center, there are three types of BPA conversation flows: process automation (engaging a person in a guided sequence of actions like with a chatbot), API orchestration flows (coordinating the inputs and outputs across multiple systems via APIs), and workflows (a sequence of steps that are taken within a given product).
“We launched Talkdesk Builder with the intent of making low code and no code tools to accelerate customizations across the contact center. With the additions of Automation Designer and Workspace Designer we’ve augmented Talkdesk Builder to provide additional tools to contact centers to customize their workspaces and BPA rules. The result is a complete suite of low-code and no-code tools that allow non-technical staff to customize every aspect of the contact center,” said Mowad.
The tools aren’t meant to replace the role of IT or skilled developers, but rather help enhance their roles so that they can deliver capabilities quicker to their business stakeholders, Mowad added. CX doesn’t have to involve a slow and costly development process that takes away valuable IT resources. What makes Talkdesk unique is it allows users to easily use its tools in many ways for a variety of use cases.
For businesses, experiences create differentiation and the same can be said for the vendors that make experience platforms. A contact center dashboard is great for an agent, but the other users need something different and Talkdesk is providing the tools to let businesses quickly build exactly what they need for each of their users.
