Koorb + Unified Service Desk

Koorb’s Daniel Sykes recently posted an article on the Koorb website on USD or Unified Service Desk and, as Daniel  reported, it only takes one search to see there's a raft of information on the web relating to USD, its benefits, definitions, use cases, limitations, etc. Visha, who leads Koorb’s Wellington CRM Team, has summarised what she's learnt after her own research in order to provide people with some quick links to reference some of the content and her findings are reported below.  Unified Service Desk (USD) was first introduced in the Spring '14 Release of Dynamics CRM 2013. Although the adoption of this tool has been slow to build in New Zealand, it has gained a lot of popularity in the States and is widely used in the customer service and call centre industry.

“Unified Service Desk, commonly known as USD, is a client-hosted (Desktop) application that captures, groups and displays all customer related information via one 'unified' platform. It enables customer service representatives to do their job using one integrated user interface, saving them from having to hop from one application to another as they search for customer related information such as their call history, cases, invoices, etc. All relevant customer information is presented using one contextual interface, making the experience quicker and easier. It also enables agents to manage multi-channel engagements and work on more than one customer at a given time.

“Some benefits are listed below:

•It's easily integrated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM out of the box with some configuration. Using Unified Service Desk to configure agent applications doesn't require you to write code, reducing the lead time to implementing a solution. This makes it a perfect starting point as opposed to bespoke development.

•It can keep track of many sessions at the same time, so users can do work for many different clients at once and their data will stay separated on the screen.

•It integrates and hosts other applications easily with one sign on where applicable.

•It provides an easy way to automate processes in both CRM and other systems, as well as transfer information between those systems.

•The latest version of USD enables integration with Parature Knowledge Base to enable agents to search articles stored in Parature while assisting customers.

•Inbound and outbound call scripting and business process automation via configuration.

•It enables routing of calls to other representatives with traceability and reportability.

•The computer telephony integration (CTI) framework of User Interface Integration (UII) enables organisations to build adapters to connect Unified Service Desk with their existing CTI infrastructure to support customer communication in agent desktops over various channels such as chat, email, or telephone.”

For more information please go to www.koorb.co.nz .