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REAL Tip – Using Bulk Updates to Overcome Onboarding Challenges

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Will Walsh
Will Walsh Technical Solutions Marketing Manager

Technical Solutions Marketing Manager 

This past weekend, my wife and I hosted a dinner with some of our neighbors. It is no secret among family and friends that I am not an experienced cook, but as of late, I have come into a newfound love for the experience of cooking. That evening, we were hosting a larger group than I had cooked for in the past and my recipes were quickly turning into math equations.  

Luckily, my neighbor Sam came over a few hours early to assist. Sam arrived to find me buried under a mountain of potatoes, reserved for my Grandmother’s Irish Potato Cakes recipe. Sam smiled, chuckled, and then dragged my attention away from the recipe and my napkin calculations and said, “Stop, let's work smart here; I'll be right back." A few moments later, Sam returned with a commercial grade food processor and a bottle of wine and began to explain how my manual and tedious process of chopping dozens of potatoes could be done in a few short minutes with his shiny tool. He then pointed out how I now had time to address the pot that was boiling over behind me (really dude, really?). 

In a way, I knew he was flexing his kitchen muscles, but I was eating it up. What else could I automate or do more efficiently? Rudely leaving Sam to hold my wine glass, I ran to my office and jotted down: “Automate with APIs." You see, in the IT side of the contact center space, we have been plagued with inefficiencies in our onboarding and offboarding processes. This has forced us to throw people at the problem and is costing a great deal. Call Centers have one of the highest attrition rates of any industry. Turnover, averages between 30% and 45%, according to Quality Assurance and Training Connection. This trend appears most prominent at the agent level, according to a survey of Five9’s largest clients.  

This onboarding process is often strained by the sheer volume of new user creation and the deleting of old users. In most systems, adding or removing a user can often take many minutes per task – but that is only after you know exactly how you want the user configured. Add in the time it takes to log in, navigate to the correct section of the application, create the user, or delete an existing one, the many clicks and save points and confirming completion, it's no wonder frustrations and turnover are so high!  So how can we leverage the wisdom of Sam’s food processor lesson with the “eureka moment” regarding APIs to help streamline these process issues? (Application programming interfaces are a way for two software solutions to “speak” to one another.)  

I turned to my friends on the Five9 Technical Account Management (TAM) team and discovered someone had built a tool that, with a few clicks, would trigger the API calls needed to create or delete hundreds of users with no further human interaction! This tool turned hours of work into a couple of clicks and a process you could complete before finishing a serving of Grandma’s Irish Potatoes. 😊 

Some of our largest enterprise clients have reported time savings of upwards of 20-30 hours a month, with this method. No more lengthy user creation or mundane deleting of user after user.  

Here’s my REAL Tip: Save yourself time, money, and headache by leveraging Five9’s robust API architecture to automate the onboarding and offboarding process. You'll be glad you did. 

To find out more about how Five9s APIs, or processes (like bulk uploads) can help your business overcome onboarding challenges, contact your CSM or Sales representative today.

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Will Walsh
Will Walsh Technical Solutions Marketing Manager

Technical Solutions Marketing Manager 

Call 1-800-553-8159 to learn more about Five9