This blog post was co-authored by Frankie Goodnight, Associate Engineer Pre-Sales Specialist.

Call centers are a critical part of many enterprises’ business operations. Whether they provide customer service, facilitate transactions, or offer technical support, call centers are often the area of a business where the most (and sometimes the only) human-to-human interaction happens. Even with the growth in online customer support, customers often turn to call centers for faster resolution of problems, and a great call center experience has an impact on customer satisfaction and a company’s bottom line.

During the past year, call centers have become more important than ever. As pre-sales engineers, we have regular conversations with customers about the intersection of technology and the challenges their organizations face. After recent back-to-back-to-back conversations about call centers, we wanted to share how Citrix can help you to enhance your call center operations.

In this blog post, the first of a two-part series, we’ll focus on the changes in the call center landscape, how Citrix fits into these trends, technology considerations, and your delivery options using virtualization. In Part 2, we’ll dive into technical frameworks, design decisions and configurations, and key optimizations you can apply in your call center today.

The Future of Call Centers

The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated the evolution of call centers, which were already introducing more advanced technologies. Additionally, we’ve seen more businesses moving from a traditional call center model that uses only voice communication to a contact center model, where email, chat, video, and other methods are also used to interact with customers.

As remote work becomes the norm, companies also have to accommodate geographically dispersed workforces. Two trends to consider around remote work are:

  • The increase in current employees working from home
  • Expansion of the talent pool with geographic freedom

When many organizations sent employees home in March 2020, we saw some call centers go from 100 percent in-person to 100 percent remote. While some predicted this shift would lead to a drop in productivity, early studies show the opposite. This Harvard study showed a 7.6 percent increase in call-center productivity after the shift to remote work. And employees are starting to expect hybrid-work models (or permanent remote work) for traditionally onsite roles. According to Forbes, 70 percent of employees want to work from home at least part of the week after the COVID-19 pandemic is over.

So, what does this mean? Flexible work policies are becoming increasingly important to attracting and retaining talent and staying competitive. And without a rigid employee location requirement, some businesses have found success with newfound access to talent across the world.

Finally, after 2020, it’s impossible to talk about the future of call centers without discussing business continuity. Businesses are strengthening their disaster recovery strategies, and call centers are a key component. The graphic below shows the value Citrix technology can bring to your business continuity strategy. Read our full case study on Citrix Tech Support and business continuity.

A consistent call center strategy can help facilitate onboarding, drive employee productivity, strengthen your disaster recovery strategy, and improve employee retention. Combined, this can deliver strong call center metrics for your business.

How Citrix Technology Can Support Your Call Center

Now that we’ve covered the call center landscape, you might be asking how Citrix fits into this picture. In many ways, delivering call center technology is our bread and butter. Citrix can help you to:

  • Save money on employee endpoints: Instead of purchasing expensive desktop computers and phone systems for your call center employees, Citrix enables you to give employees access to their resources with thin clients or employee-owned devices.
  • Facilitate call center staff onboarding: As soon as your employees have a company login, they can access a managed desktop or app set needed to get their work done.
  • Centralize IT management: Because your employees are working on centrally managed resources, your IT administrators don’t need to physically touch employee endpoints to troubleshoot devices or networking appliances.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service provides an efficient way to deliver apps and desktops to your end users, anywhere on any device, and enables you to manage apps in a centralized location and to apply policies that optimize the end-user experience. You also have multiple delivery options to ensure a great user experience for your call center staff:

  • Full virtual desktops, with call center software installed locally on the virtual desktop
  • Published applications for a more personalized experience.

On the back end, your organization can choose where to host these workloads. They can sit within a public/private cloud, in an on-premises datacenter, or a combination.

Additionally, Citrix Endpoint Management enhances security around the devices themselves, enabling your business to lock down company-issued or personal devices and apply policies such as geofencing or a device wipe when an employee leaves the company. Finally, layering on Citrix SD-WAN ensures that you deliver the best possible user experience and app quality.

How the Apps Are Delivered

Now that we’ve covered how Citrix can enhance your call center operations, let’s look at your delivery options. Remember, before you get started, you have key decisions to make such as endpoint strategy, workforce location, workload location, and peripheral technology. Check out the Citrix Ready Marketplace to see Citrix-verified solutions that are compatible with our technology.

When it comes to delivering resources over Citrix’s HDX technology, you have two options:

Generic Delivery

In this model, all traffic is delivered through HDX, and audio/video rendering takes place on the workloads themselves (whether that is in the datacenter, a public cloud, etc.). You might choose generic delivery because:

  • The endpoint doesn’t support the necessary rendering.
  • There is an endpoint limitation such as a driver installation. In this case, admins can install the necessary drivers on the VDA instead of the endpoint.
  • Some softphone technology requires applications to interact with data on the VDA. For example, some Microsoft Teams features must retrieve data from Microsoft Outlook. As a result, Citrix’s optimization for Microsoft Teams requires generic delivery for those features.

Optimized Delivery

Here, the endpoint renders audio and video directly, reducing the “hairpinning” effect that occurs in generic delivery. Unless you are dealing with one of the limitations above, we recommend using optimized delivery. Check out our proof-of-concept guide on optimized and generic (or “fallback”) delivery.

What’s Next?

We’ve seen customers have a lot of success leveraging Citrix technologies with their call centers. For example, Canara HSBC used Citrix technology to their workloads to increase capacity when call centers were operating at higher volumes than usual. And check out the case study on how Citrix Tech Support used our own technology to enable its business continuity strategy.

In our next blog post, we’ll go into detail about how you can optimize your existing call center experience; dive deeper into generic and optimized delivery; go over some recommended Citrix policies; and provide resources for specific integrations. In the meantime, share your thoughts and questions in the comments below.