Leading Insurance Business Assures Quality User Experience With nGeniusONE

Customer Profile

This national insurance company operates as an intrinsic business segment as one of the world’s largest insurers.

With the company’s organizational commitment to local agencies, their operational response to COVID-19 was designed to safeguard both customers and employees. With this approach, the company began emphasizing remote insurance service options that included Web portal, digital application, and Contact Center options. The company also offered financial relief to their customers during this time, including a reverse payment program and reduced coverage costs to both residents and local businesses.

The Challenge

Long-time Unified Communications (UC) performance challenges, such as dropped calls, had long frustrated both agents and information technology (IT) employees. Their legacy third-party tools could not visualize the UC traffic traversing the infrastructure. Even with a contracted forensic consultant on hand to assist IT, troubleshooting processes occupied too many resources for too long in order to “try” to get to root-cause of issues.

As a response to these frustrations, company leadership identified critical operations considerations for any future UC service assurance solution: the platform must accommodate easy integration into their existing business processes and technology environment. For the already-busy IT team, that meant that new technology must not involve:

• Significant architectural changes to legacy technology platforms, data centers, or call centers
• Extensive user training
• A major learning curve for generating UC monitor views, relevant reports, or troubleshooting workflow

With this high-level guidance, IT leadership re-commenced their search for a technology solution that would meet both their business management and technical operations criteria.

Solution in Action

The company quickly deployed and benefited from NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance performance analytics that met and surpassed their selection criteria. With nGeniusONE leveraging NETSCOUT Smart Data generated by software-based InfiniStreamNG and nGenius Packet Flow Switch (PFS) appliances, the IT team now has "any application, anywhere" visibility, providing once-elusive views into hybrid cloud and network environments, including their:

• UC business application performance, ensuring that instances of dropped calls were decreasing, while the quality of voice user experience increased
• Insurance applications, including Policy Administration, Claims Processing, Customer Relationship Management, and internally developed apps were operating efficiently in support of the business during a critical operations period
• Microsoft Office 365 deployment supporting agent use

With the NETSCOUT solution, executive leadership and IT managers were provided with the real-time UC monitoring solution they lacked, as well as visibility and vendor-agnostic analysis of their:

• Insurance applications performance for both customers and agents
• Business platform operations
• Virtual private network (VPN) performance during initial business operations shifts due to COVID-19
• Hybrid cloud deployment operations across their environment

In an equally important element of the solution, the IT team was able to realize rapid deployment and quick Return on Investment (ROI), with the nGenius Visibility as a Service (nVaaS) program. With nVaaS subject matter experts assisting the IT team in a manner that helped meet the company’s goals for new vendor technology deployment and operations, the company is realizing that NETSCOUT service assurance expertise is just an email, call, or text away. With nVaaS, the company quickly integrated nGeniusONE operations into their established IT operations and Service Desk workflows.

For example, if an issue occurs in their UC or VPN environment, the company’s IT operators are assured nVaaS subject matter experts are just a call or email away to either:

• Generate nGeniusONE analytics views and/or reports that show relevant data or troubleshooting to address the issue
• Validate the accuracy of their own analytics, troubleshooting workflows, and reporting

The Results

Company management met organizational goals for quickly deploying an easy-to-use service assurance solution that met their CapEx targets with the NETSCOUT solution and nVaaS program.

The software-based NETSCOUT ISNG and PFS appliances provide the end-to-end enterprise views that the IT teams had previously lacked for real-time monitoring and reporting, while offering the storage necessary for their troubleshooting needs today and into the future.

The NETSCOUT solution represents far more than a vendor tool used to meeting UC POC requirements, with the nGeniusONE platform:

• Allowing the organization to "consume" real-time analytics and reporting without needing to become experts on NETSCOUT technology use
• Accommodating the business process engineering environment, including how they troubleshoot
• Providing analytics and reporting used to generate nVaaS Executive Dashboards that already have the management team asking how NETSCOUT visibility can be extended across their environment to support real-time monitoring of additional applications

In terms of improving business continuity, the nGenius VaaS program’s abilities to quickly deploy nGeniusONE in the days preceding COVID-19 and provide rapid nGeniusONE subject matter expertise to assist IT efforts have enabled the company to more dynamically manage its technology environment and deliver a quality end-user experience in response to the unique customer demands associated with this pandemic.