Bringing Borderless Visibility to EMS Call Center Business

Customer Profile

This U.S. company is changing the way global government agencies can deliver Emergency Medical Service (EMS) support to their constituents.

The company’s success in providing Call Center solutions to hundreds of global customers has equipped them with the know-how required for establishing a scalable delivery network infrastructure designed to bring carrier-grade voice and data services for EMS.

The company has long relied on NETSCOUT’s smart visibility and real-time performance monitoring analytics to help assure deliver of their Call Center services to hundreds of global customers.

The Challenge

Government agencies in both U.S. and Canada are looking to transform legacy EMS delivery technology to better accommodate today’s mobile, text, imaging, video, and data platforms. As a result, some state, provincial, and local first-responder agencies are rethinking how to better deliver EMS support to residents, including outsourcing technology services to leading thirdparty providers. That is where this leading Call Center company used lessons learned in their other business lines to improve voice and data delivery network support capabilities for police, fire, and EMT teams.

With the high stakes involved in delivering EMS Call Center solutions, the company was committed to offering network carrier-grade voice and data support to help customers improve service delivery. The EMS Call Center would also offer agency customers and their first responders:

• A voice over IP (VoIP) switch solution to replace existing telephone exchanges
• Multimedia call processing and a unified call flow, with intelligent call routing based on employee skill sets
• A customizable user interface

As a result, the company’s Call Center design factored the following technology features:

• Virtualized environment, including virtual call switches used for call servers
• Physical, redundant network segments, where Call Signaling gets routed to set up telephone network connections

With Service Level Agreements (SLAs) governing the availability, performance, and quality of Call Center service delivery to future clients, it was important that the company’s production system offer superior voice and data coverage from Day 1. Company leadership knew EMS Call Center program success would depend on having the same high levels of end-to-end visibility and real-time Unified Communications & Collaboration monitoring already in place to support other Contact Center lines of business.

Solution in Action

The company is assuring uninterrupted service delivery for EMS customers by using NETSCOUT’s smart visibility and real-time monitoring solution for the UC&C, application, and network technologies running on physical, virtual, and cloud-based platforms in their new Contact Center. In this integrated solution:

• The nGeniusONE platform takes advantage of NETSCOUT smart data for real-time monitoring of the EMS Contact Center’s call signaling, SIP monitoring, and call set-up capabilities. Real-time Service Dashboard views are used for first-level troubleshooting, with Service Monitors providing highly valued call querying compliance with National Emergency Number Association (NENA) standards regarding ID numbers used to identify specific emergency calls.
• InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) appliances bring visibility into performance of physical network segments, with vSTREAM virtual appliances providing views into virtual switch platforms operating in the EMS Call Center, as well as call hops between physical and virtual platforms.
• NETSCOUT Certified Packet Flow Operating System (PFOS) software brings additional resiliency to NETSCOUT data sources by providing network traffic distribution and load balancing of monitored traffic across the EMS Call Center.
• nGeniusPULSE and nPoints are used for continuous testing that validates consistent, overall availability in the EMS Call Center, leveraging SNMP polling and TCP port testing.

The EMS Call Center operators find the user-intuitive nGeniusONE workflows provide a robust, real-time monitoring platform to investigate call signaling and set-up issues down to the individual call. The company is also better equipped to validate service performance in compliance with established SLAs, using nGeniusONE troubleshooting to address emerging issues in the EMS Call Center environment and identifying those occurring in customer environments.

The Results

The company’s ability to offer outsourced high-quality voice and data services to their EMS customer base brings many benefits:

• For citizens in need, they are equipped to better communicate with first responders using text, voice, email, and SMS.
• For local first responders, technology limitations no longer stand in the way of effective call support, with a carrier-grade voice and data network providing reliable communications support necessary for effective service delivery.
• For local agencies, the managed service model allows them to contain costs, while improving the Call Center technology that first responders and citizens each rely on in times of need.

For the company, their continued use of NETSCOUT for smart visibility in this new EMS Call Center environment allowed them to successfully offer production-level service on Day 1. As a result, they are already establishing multi-year service agreements with the government agencies they look to assist in the marketplace.