Agent Voice

Elevate your chats to phone calls at the click of a button

📜 Introduction

LivePerson acquired my previous company, Tenfold, in late 2021 for many reasons, not the least of which was our experience in the world of telephony. We were asked to hit the ground running with a new product initiative centering around the most widely-used area of the LivePerson platform: the Agent Workspace.

🔑 Stats

  • Role: Product Designer

  • Team: 1 UX, 1 PM, 1 FEE, 2 BEE

  • Duration: 3 months (1 month for design, 2 months for implementation

🤔 The Problem

LivePerson customers had been reporting that consumer sentiment was dragging despite high rates of case resolutions. The asynchronicity of text-based chat was working well for smaller problems, but when something needed to be solved this second, consumers wanted to get on the phone and talk to an actual human being.

💡 The Solution

  • Embed a dialer within LP’s Agent Workspace, available on any and every page

  • Offer the same controls typically offered in an enterprise voice application (Call/End Call, Click-to-Dial, Dialpad , Skill selection, Hold, Mute, Record, Masking, Flag)

  • Dialer must be able to be tucked away when needed and not dominate the screen for the duration of the call, while still offering key call controls.

  • Chatting will remain as the primary means of communication between brands and their consumers, so agents will only ever be required to make outbound calls.

👀 The Results

Maximized + Minimized view

99% of any contact center call is about what’s happening on the agent’s screen, so it’s imperative that the dialer can stay out the way when required.

Just as important, however, is the ability to access call controls at a moment’s notice from any page.

Click-To-Dial

Any phone number visible on screen is eligible for Click-to-Dial, and the feature can be configured to either load the phone number in the dialer before calling, or immediately make the call after clicking.

Dial Pad + DTMF

Just like when you are calling a customer support line and are routed through a menu using your dial pad, contact center agents similarly find themselves navigating queues and other outbound numbers in the same way.

Not only must the agent be able to input numbers, those numbers must persist even after closing the dial pad.

Skill Selection

An agent can be qualified for one or more “skills”, a very broadly-applied industry term for either a particular skillset, queue, or team.

Each skill can be tracked individually, so it’s critical that the correct skill was selected ahead of initiating the call.

Skills can also have unique caller IDs (I wouldn’t want to see a call from “Acme Inc. Enterprise Sales” when I’m waiting for a call back about my shattered monitor).

Flagging Calls

An agent can flag a call for a variety of reasons, depending on the organization (immediate supervisor intervention, verbally abusive customer, sales lead, etc.).

Recording + Masking

Recording calls is an important tool when managing a contact center, allowing supervisors to review individual performance, listen into a particularly great (or awful) call, or train new agents with real-life examples.

Masking prevents PII (SSN, bank accounts, etc) and other private customer information from being recorded without needing to actually stop the recording.

Every organization uses some permutation of one, both, or neither of these, and the UI must be able to adapt.

🎯 The Impact

  • Agent Voice was released internally to members of LivePerson’s customer support team

  • The experience of converting from chat to call was described as “seamless”