The Company

A worldwide technology company operating in more than 170 countries is focused on helping people apply technology in meaningful ways to their businesses, personal lives and communities. With R&D investments of almost a billion US dollars, the company is able to offer a complete technology product portfolio to the market. The ultimate goal of this market leader is to offer products, services and solutions that are high tech, low cost and deliver the best customer experience.

The company needed a robust solution to handle automated telephone transactions to a product support line. The solution had to deliver enhanced service at lower costs. So the company turned to industry leaders in enterprise communication systems for the answer. The answer turned out to be a hosted IVR environment blending best of breed technologies from throughout the industry.

The Problem

Within less than a month after cutover, the company experienced outages that went undetected by traditional rigorous internal monitoring processes. Careful investigation indicated one of the servers was locking up and callers were periodically encountering delayed answer and sometimes receiving dead air after dialing into the product support line. The symptoms were easy to correct, but only after problems were discovered and reported.

The root cause was more elusive. Needless to say, the company was extremely concerned about the impact of its customers not having immediate access to its support line. Not only was the issue causing problems for the folks in the live contact center, but it was creating less than acceptable end-user customer experiences. Because internal monitoring was not detecting the problem, no one had information to go on to resolve the fundamental issues.

That is when the company looked to IQ Services and HeartBeat™ outside-in remote availability and performance monitoring services to identify customer affecting issues.

The Solution

IQ Services’ HeartBeat™ remote outside-in monitoring services offer a remote method for monitoring and measuring the performance of contact center and communications technologies 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. By generating automated transactions (telephone calls, browser sessions, etc.) that access and exercise communications solutions just like customers – from the outside-in, customer perspective – IQ Services gathers insightful data about the customer experience and identifies issues that can easily be missed or under-reported by traditional, internal monitoring methods, no matter how rigorous or extensive. In addition, the HeartBeat™ traffic serves as a control sample so boiled down metrics, internal monitoring and anecdotal reports from end-users can be put into context.

When IQ Services detects an issue, the right people are immediately notified so appropriate action can be taken. Complete audio recordings of suspicious or erroneous calls speed up issue identification and resolution. Online results give everyone who needs to know access to timely, actionable information as well as performance trend data to help optimize performance of the solution over time. Remote availability and performance monitoring conducted around the clock is the simplest, most cost-effective way to make sure problems are identified quickly and everyone knows what customers are really experiencing.

Successful Outcome

Within less than 24-hours of contacting IQ Services, a proof of concept HeartBeat™ service was up and running to demonstrate that outside-in monitoring could help solve the problem. Within less than 2 days of receiving permission to activate the full service, HeartBeat™ remote availability and performance monitoring had detected and reported over 35 unexpected conditions.

Upon receiving immediate notification of these conditions, the company utilized online HeartBeat™ results – including complete audio recordings – to identify issues which had escaped internal monitoring and were negatively impacting customers. By identifying and resolving the issues quickly, end-user customers were able to successfully access and use the new interactive solution to obtain valuable information and support.

In Summary

When a world leading technology company implemented a new hosted product support line application based on best in class technologies, its primary goal was to deliver better customer service. When elements of the integrated solution locked up and internal monitoring did not provide any insight, the company turned to IQ Services for assistance. With HeartBeat™ monitoring, IQ Services was able to quickly ramp up outside-in, end-to-end transaction activity. The culprit issues were quickly caught, documented, reported and fixed. The technology company was again able to deliver the desired customer experience at a lower cost, which is why the investment in the new product line support solution was made in the first place.

Every company should be concerned about the gap between internal monitoring and actual end-to-end performance and customer experience. HeartBeat™ outside-in monitoring is the right bridge to fill that gap.

Thanks to IQ Services for the article.