Sometimes you see businesses overspend for one part of their infrastructure, leaving the rest to suffer. Sometimes the importance of a particular component isn’t recognized until it’s too late. We’ve seen it happen over and over again. I’m here today to tell you that your agent desktops are important. Scrimping too much there can leave your agents waiting around and inefficient.
Agents are usually only expected to use their desktop for accessing the agent screens (via their browser) and possibly a softphone. How much computing power could that need? Well, you may be thinking of clicking around on a single web page or two. Your agent client interaction script may be big and complex, with lots of conditions. Maybe some web services. That’s done in Javascript, and Javascript is handled by your browser. Your call center software even has to include checks to avoid double clicks and misclicks because your agents can already click faster than your browser can process things. That starts to add up, both on CPU power and memory.
The soft phone is an additional burden on the system. Handling the audio from your agent, mixing it properly and sending it where it needs to go, and other processing takes resources from the system. If the agent’s computer is too sluggish, your clients may notice distortion in the audio. That is not the sort of face you want to present to your clients.
OK, so you can handle the agent screens and the phones. Is that it?
No.
What about any CRM systems you have to interact with? Will your agents have dozens of orphaned browser tabs hanging around in the background, leeching resources? Got those handled? Good. YouTube videos? Spotify? Other services that your agents will probably access?
One last contender for resource hog is the antivirus software you’re going to deploy on each of the desktops. That is not only resource intensive when it runs, but it’s snoopy. Your antivirus checker is probably checking most of your acivity as it’s happening, which can slow things down. You can’t go without those safeguards as you can’t tell what an obnoxious user is going to try to put on your network, but a lot of people don’t count them when they’re estimating the specifications needed.
So remember, do your best to try out an agent system or two with a day’s worth of load on it: open tabs, agent script, CRM, a video or two playing, and your antivirus software running in the background. That will let you know what your agent experience is like, and allow you to make sure you’re buying what they need, not what you hope they’ll need.