In the last blog, I explained what USD is and why you need USD in your call center environment. In this article, I plan to dig deeper on some of the fundamental technical components in USD.

This article is primarily targeted towards developers who understand what USD is and would like to broaden their technical skills on USD. If you haven’t read my previous blog, I recommend reading it first.

Some of the basic concepts of Unified Service Desk like Hosted control, UII Action and Action Control are loosely coupled to an extent that some of you may be confused by these moving parts. In this article, I aim to simplify it a little bit for you.

You can consider this article the “Hello World” example to get your feet wet with these basic concepts.

What is Unified Service Desk?

Let’s imagine a software platform that:

• Unifies all the data that the call center agent needs in order to help out the customers efficiently.
• Helps to minimize agents’ manual data entry, improve data quality and allows the agent to focus on answering the customers as quickly as possible.
• Improves productivity by helping out the agents while they are multi-tasking or handling multiple customers at the same time.
• Automates some of the business processes, hence reducing the training cost.
• Performs all the above while leveraging the CRM investment of the organization and is included for no additional cost with the Dynamics CRM professional license.

Unified Service Desk (USD) is essentially a platform that enables all the above functionalities.

In order to fully understand the capabilities of USD, we need to first understand the current challenges the call center environment faces:

• Disparate complex lines of business to handle.
• Multi-tasking environment, which is error prone.
• Inconsistent information delivery.
• Poor data quality due to mistyped data.

All the above challenges ultimately increase the average call handling time which brings down customer or citizen satisfaction and increases costs.