Company Improves Customer Quality of Experience With Contact Center Agents

Customer Profile

This business processing company has delivered personal financing, payment processing, account servicing, career management services, and consulting for a half a century. In addition to their online financing, services, and support, the company’s contact center and service representatives are often how their customers and prospects interact with the business. As the service agents are effectively the face of the company, the IT organization prioritizes quality collaboration services in the contact center to ensure a positive experience for their customers. 

The Challenge

Following a period of challenging business conditions, this company was infused with new leadership and strategic plans to reshape their business and market direction. As a long-time user of the NETSCOUT service assurance solutions, a part of their strategy included updating and improving visibility throughout their IT environment. An internal audit had revealed a monitoring gap, with less than half of their infrastructure operations visible to the IT team. 

From both a corporate direction and a regulatory compliance perspective, they were looking to deliver a superior quality of experience for customers interacting with the representatives in the contact center. This would require enhanced visibility in their data centers and contact centers to ensure network, voice, application, and end-user experience performance assurance, as well as to reduce the time to troubleshoot issues when they did occur. With customer service agents due to return to their offices following home-based work during the pandemic, the IT staff was motivated to implement their new visibility. 

Solution in Action

The company uses Cisco unified communications and collaboration (UCC) equipment in their contact center and select unified communications as a service technology (UCaaS), as well. They are using their existing nGeniusONE Service Assurance solution for persistent, real-time analysis of voice, video, and business data applications, simultaneously, for triage, alarming, troubleshooting, trending, and analysis of network and application performance to assure quality for their customer-impacting services. They added: 

nGenius Packet Flow Operating System (PFOS) for Certified 7000 series packet brokers to distribute packets from the wide area network (WAN) and Internet links at the data center and contact center to downstream devices, including InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) appliances and other tools. This network edge perspective is critical for security, performance, and availability analysis. 

InfiniStreamNG 9000 series certified appliances to fill the visibility gap at the network edges and provide real-time, packet-based analysis to track and trend traffic utilization, applications in use, bandwidth and VPN capacity, and performance information for troubleshooting, reporting, and performance analysis. 

NETSCOUT Premium Support Engineer (PSE) to provide dedicated support of the company’s NETSCOUT deployment, including configuring dashboards, workflows, alarms, scheduled reports, and to aid in meaningful use of the solution for effective triage and troubleshooting. 

The ISNG appliances use NETSCOUT’s Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) technology to convert the packet-based traffic into smart data, which is consumed by nGeniusONE for smarter performance analytics, providing real-time visibility and 

insight into the company’s networks and applications. The NETSCOUT PSE is working in collaboration with the company’s IT staff to bring the full strength of the nGeniusONE solution for analysis of their Cisco Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) infrastructure. 

The PSE and IT team are using nGeniusONE, with data from the ISNG appliances, to gain in-depth analysis of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) used in setting up and transferring calls. In the contact center, this helps the company avoid lengthy connect times, delays in transferring calls to agents (based in either the contact center or working remotely) and dropped calls that create frustration for customers and require swift investigation for rapid identification and resolution to minimize disruption. 

They have also used nGeniusONE to quickly pinpoint misconfigurations in quality of service (QoS) assignments, identify areas of latency, and for resolution of slowdowns across WAN links. The evidence from nGeniusONE can be shared with WAN service providers and other third-party providers to rectify QoS assignments. Visibility into the voice media itself is enabling nGeniusONE to provide Mean Opinion Score (MOS) analysis, as well as per-hop behavior analysis, that is helping in identifying source of jitter, latency, and packet loss, as well as other voice quality issues like echo and noise. 

The Results

Taking the next step to implement nGeniusONE with more visibility is providing this company a comprehensive network and application performance management solution for real-time analysis of voice, video, and business data applications in a cost-effective manner for this IT team. One solution to monitor all their application services across their private data center and contact centers minimizes tool clutter and reduces the complexity and cost to assure quality services.

Of paramount importance, the IT and voice teams are meeting the new standards the company has set for providing “white glove” service and call quality for customers with contact center service reps. Maintaining and growing their customer base are key elements of the company’s strategic revenue growth plan. Maintaining a high-quality user-experience with voice services while simultaneously ensuring regulatory compliance is a win-win for the IT team. 

With the help of the NETSCOUT PSE, the IT team is gaining quick time to value in the overall nGeniusONE solution. Their coordinated efforts have already led to pinpointing potential slowdowns and capacity issues with the WAN and internet service provider (ISP) links. Ultimately, the collaboration between the PSE and IT team is providing valuable hands-on training to ensure that with multiple skilled nGeniusONE users, the value of the solution will continue to be realized in the months and years to come.