Call centres could make significant improvements to customer satisfaction and agent productivity by paying more attention to their systems' user interfaces, a usability specialist told a human factors conference in Melbourne this week.

According to Gabriel White, a consultant with The Hiser Group, good user interface design in this area is the exception rather than the rule, but some organisations "have seen the light."

The problem is that an inferior user interface slows down the agent, forcing customers to wait, and they may already be impatient from being held in a queue.

"Poor usability means poor agent productivity, hence poor customer service. Call centre systems with a user-friendly interface design are critical to engaging successfully with customers," he said.

Principal consultant Greg Ralph explained that forcing agents to deal with "context switching" between different interfaces (eg, a 'green screen' interface to one system, a Windows GUI to another, and a web interface to a third) also reduces the mental effort available to deliver good customer service.

Even small improvements can be of significant cumulative value at high-volume call centre, White suggested. Shaving just half a second of each directory assistance call would save Telstra millions of dollars a year, he said. Call centres employ 2.2 percent of the Australian workforce, making it the fifth largest sector, he added.

White cited various studies to support his position, offering statistics such as "user-centred design typically cuts errors in user-system interaction from five percent down to one percent" and "after the New York Stock Exchange upgraded its core trading systems using user-centred design techniques, productivity rose dramatically and users' error rates fell by a factor of 10 even though workloads more than doubled."

Ralph suggested there are three approaches that organisations can adopt. The first is to rebuild systems from scratch, paying due attention to the user interface. This is unlikely to be an attractive option due to the cost.

Second, various integration tools are available to integrate multiple systems and applications with a consistent 'skin.' They may also enable improved workflows.

Finally, some large corporations are creating a vision of what they want to achieve in this area in terms of interface design, workflow and consistent use of language. They then ensure that any new or upgraded system is a step towards that vision.

When changes are made, it is important to ensure that experienced users aren't left behind, Ralph warned, so steps should be taken to ensure they don't lose efficiency or status. Such measures include mapping existing function keys used in green screen applications onto the equivalent operations in the new interface.

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