Desktop Analytics Improves Agent and Employee Experience

In a recent survey of over 1,000 contact center agents, 31% said they would likely leave the position in the next 3 to 6 months. When asked what their biggest challenge or frustration was with their current role, the number one response was unrealistic performance expectations (47%).¹

• What if you could give your agents real-time insight into their performance against goals?
• What if you could use actual activity data to understand their full workload?
• What if you could use actual employee activity data to calculate accurate handle times for different tasks and interaction types they handle?

Surprisingly, Verint Desktop and Process Analytics, a solution designed to help managers improve employee productivity and capacity, is also helping agents and employees find a better work/life balance and achieve their performance goals.

Let me show you how through a few real-life examples.

Desktop Analytics Helps Eliminate Mandatory Overtime

The commercial lending group of a top 10 U.S. retail bank suffered from a serious case of burnout.

• Work was complex, with hundreds of types of work, each with different processes and handle times, and five different platforms used to process the work.
• The group was consistently missing its service goals/SLAs. This resulted in mandatory overtime every day and on Saturdays too!
• Coaching and one-on-one meetings between employees and managers were essentially non-existent. They didn’t have time for them.
• The lack of supervisor interaction and feedback created uncertainty and only added to employees’ stress.

The group implemented Verint Desktop and Process Analytics (DPA) which captures employee activity directly from the desktop. It transforms this data into performance metrics that appear in role-specific performance scorecards that both employees and managers can view.

Employees can immediately see if they are hitting their productivity goals, and self-correct their behavior to ensure they do. Employees and agents now have a better employee experience with a greater sense of control over their day and destiny.

Desktop Analytics Increases Fair and Equitable Evaluations

One of the biggest challenges in contact centers and customer support operations is quantifying the true handle time for the many different channels and types of work and interactions. Verint Desktop and Process Analytics can tag work items by type, and capture start and stop times for each.

It can even track the touch points on a work type across different people and departments for end-to-end process times. Instead of guesstimates, organizations now have actual handle times based on their employees.

Why is this important? To truly assess if someone is achieving their productivity goals, you need to understand what they are working on, how long it should take to complete the task or interaction, and how long it is actually taking the individual.

In a previous blog Do You Have an Employee 35? (one of my favorites), I explored one insurer’s journey to identify the true potential of their workforce. One insight they gained using DPA was that employee performance is not always a will or skill issue. Sometimes, the company is partly at fault.

They acknowledged that they were:

• Not setting realistic productivity goals because they lacked accurate handle times.
• Grouping transactions and counting multiple tasks as one. As a result, employees were not getting the credit for all the tasks/items they processed.
• Penalizing employees for system issues that prolonged their handle times.

The insurer added handle time by work type into employee productivity rate calculations to ensure employees get fair and accurate credit for interactions handled and work processed.

Desktop Analytics Improves Coaching

A North American provider of customs brokerage services has over 2,000 employees across several customer support and processing groups. Each group was managed separately, with different processes, expectations and KPIs. This created tensions between groups and masked opportunities to improve employee productivity and performance.

The company deployed Verint Desktop and Process Analytics (DPA) to gain a better understanding of how employees were spending their time. According to the Sr. Workforce Director, “It (DPA) gives us unbelievable visibility. We can track activities and use that data to better coach and course correct our employees.”

While at first suspicious of the solution, employees now view DPA as an advocate at their side to which they can point and say, “See, I was working on this task for X long.”

The data has made one-on-one meetings and coaching sessions much more valuable, because it dispels any perceptions or biases and uses actual data to target coaching and drive performance discussions. The solution gives both managers and employees valuable insights.

Desktop Analytics Supports Remote Workers

In another blog, Measuring and Managing Remote Employee Productivity, we learned from Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury, a Harvard Business School professor, the benefits and challenges of a remote workforce. Challenges with an all or mostly remote workforce include:

• Need for higher collaboration and communication
• Higher learning costs, as employees can’t just observe a colleague to learn what to do
• A lack of socialization and potential feelings of isolation and of not belonging/fitting in.

Continuum Global Solutions, a contact center services provider, has a team of more than 15,000 highly trained and talented professionals, many of whom work remotely. They struggled to measure productivity of remote agents, and ensure remote agents not only have ongoing communications with supervisors, but also the necessary reminders and alerts to help guide customer interactions to positive outcomes.

Continuum deployed Verint Desktop and Process Analytics to help leadership identify and address the root cause of employee productivity problems, enabling the company to boost agent capacity and further empower its remote agent workforce.

Verint Application Triggers, part of DPA, create automated pop-up reminders for agents based on a desktop activity, like opening a specific form, and completing a specific field.  The pop-ups can offer process step guidance, verification reminders based on work type, and more.

Continuum also implemented real-time notifications for supervisors, alerting them when agents might be idle while waiting for contacts. This process has heightened coaching and management of remote teams.

“If the supervisor notification shows that an agent is idle, the manager can use that for ad hoc coaching, or to send a note or call of encouragement to let the agent know their work with the company is valued,” Carbonnell explains.

“Such supervisor-agent communication is very important for remote workers who can feel isolated due to the nature of the remote work environment. We know exactly how our agents are spending their time and are empowering supervisors with critical insights to help them coach agents to be more productive.”

So as you can see, Verint Desktop and Process Analytics is helping improve agent and employee experience. But its true purpose is to give managers the real-time insights they need to drive decision making and improve employee productivity.

If you want to learn more about how, check out this blog: 5 Ways to Dramatically Improve Employee Performance in a Few Short Weeks with Desktop Automation.

¹ Verint Agent Experience Survey, December 2025