So, What is the Customer Perspective of your Contact Centre

Enterprise contact centers are becoming extremely complex, using technology from multiple vendors to meet specific customer requirements. Today, clients are using new media types such as smart phones and tablets to reach out so you need to explore new technologies such as cloud services to consolidate and improve your delivery.

Why Test the Customer Quality of Experience?

When you change or deploy new technology you need to understand the caller’s perspective, from the greeting through to the agents desktop. Testing will do three things for you:

  1. Maximize ROI by reducing your system down time and accelerate payback when deploying new technology
  2. Reduce your Risk, with multiple vendors within our systems. Interoperability issues can occur and can be addressed before deployment
  3. Improve Customer Satisfaction by validating the actual customer experience.

What do You Test For?

  1. Infrastructure – This encompasses everything from the carrier network through to the desktop.  By placing real calls from the outside in, you effectively test your voice gateway, the PBX, SIP trunks, load balancing rules, and the effect Data traffic could have on Voice Quality.   You should be able to understand how many calls per minute the system can connect, how the carrier handles overflow, the number of failed calls, busy signals, and ring no answer, etc.
  2. Self Service Applications – technologies such as speech recognition and IVR are crucial to ensure that calls are handled efficiently.   By testing you can understand if the correct prompts are being heard, if your time to connect is acceptable, if the database lookup performing correctly under load conditions, or simply if the responses correlate correctly to the user input.
  3. CTI Routing –  is the integration between the IVR and external systems working correctly, and is the CTI application receiving the correct data
  4. CRM Integration:  Are the screen POP’s coming on time and are the agents getting the right information, with the right call, at the right time.

With a comprehensive plan you can test connectivity by changing the volume of calls or the mix of calls to simulate your defined and expected real world customer conditions and record accurate results.  Detailed behaviour reports are important to allow you to create actionable tasks that address details of what level of load any failures occur.

StressTest allows you to understand how your systems will react to callers rather than letting your customers react to your system.

How Testing Solutions Reduce Risk & Improve Customer Satisfaction

Imagine you’re trying to book a flight. You call the toll-free number and use the interactive voice response (IVR) to get through to bookings, but instead you are put through to the baggage area. You hang up and try again, but this time you wind up speaking to the airline lounge. Do you try a third time or call a competitor? I know what I would do.

The IVR is now a key component to delivering a great customer experience, so what steps should a business take to ensure these systems are working optimally? Do they take proactive measures, or just wait until a customer lets them know that something is broken? And, by the time it gets to this stage, how many customers may have been lost?

There are some businesses out there taking unnecessary risks when it comes to testing the reliability of their communications systems. Instead of performing extensive tests, they’re leaving it up to their customers to find any problems. Put bluntly, they’re rolling the dice by deciding to deploy systems that haven’t been properly tested. This is the primary line of communication with their customers and, in many cases, it’s also how they generate significant revenue, why would they put both customer satisfaction and revenue in jeopardy?

Businesses have quite a few useful options when it comes to proactive testing. We recently acquired IQ Services, a company that tests these environments on a scheduled basis to make sure they’re working properly. It’s an automated process that tests how long it takes to answer, makes sure that the correct responses are given, and even performs a massive stress test with up to 80,000 concurrent calls. (It’s very useful for scenarios such as a large healthcare provider going through open enrollment.) These testing solutions are the way that businesses can ensure that their systems are working reliably under heavy load without leaving anything to chance.

In a world where we think of people as risk-averse, it’s interesting to observe anyone who chooses not to perform these tests. It’s not necessarily a conscious decision if the situation were actually framed in a way where someone knew exactly what they were putting at risk, they’d probably make a better choice. You wouldn’t buy car insurance after you already had an accident. It simply wouldn’t do you much good at that point. The same thing applies to your communications systems. It only makes sense to take a proactive approach to make sure things are working as expected.

Now that you’re aware of what’s at risk if you don’t perform these important tests, don’t make the conscious decision to wait until something has already gone wrong. We’re talking about the potential loss of millions of dollars per hour (or even per minute in certain cases). Some strategic planning can give you the peace of mind you’ll avoid catastrophic loss of revenue in the future. Whenever you do go live with a new feature, you can do so with confidence.

We’ve brought these new Testing Solutions into the Prognosis family. Above and beyond, we want to make sure people understand these capabilities are available. You don’t have to be reactionary, there are proactive solutions to stop you from rolling the dice when it comes to your business and customers. Don’t leave the livelihood of your organization to chance. Of course, if you’re in the mood to gamble your money, there’s always Vegas.

Thanks to IR Prognosis for the article.

Elevating IVR: Stop the Hatred for Automation

IVR.

In many customers’ minds, this three-letter acronym is a four-letter word. It’s not uncommon for callers to mutter a diverse range of other forbidden words whenever interacting – or trying to interact – with a contact center’s IVR system.

But IVR is not deserving of such hatred. IVR systems are not inherently flawed or evil, nor are the companies that use an IVR to front-end their contact centers. The reason why the general public’s perception of IVR is so negative is that so few of the systems that the public has encountered have been designed properly by the humans behind the scene. The technology itself has tons of potential; it’s what’s dumped into it by organizations overly eager to enjoy the cost-saving benefits of phone-based self-service that makes the machines such monsters.

Not all IVR systems in existence today are so beastly. Some, in fact, not only play nice with customers, they delight them and keep them coming back for more. So how have the owners of these much-maligned systems succeeded in getting callers to drop their pitchforks and torches and embrace IVR?

By adopting the following key practices, all of which I stole from a host of IVR experts and now pass off as my own:

Adhere to the fundamentals of IVR menu design. Most of what irritates and confounds customers with regard to IVR can be easily avoided. Callers often opt out of the system or hang up due to too many menu choices, confusing phrasing/commands, and fear of dying alone in IVR hell.

Here are a handful of essential menu features and functions common to the best-designed IVR applications:

  • No more than four or five menu options
  • The ability to easily skip ahead to desired menu choices (e.g., having the system recognize that the customer pressed “3” or said what they wanted before the system presented such options)
  • Use of the same clear, professional recorded voice throughout the IVR
  • (For touchtone systems specifically) Giving a description of an action/option prior to telling the caller what key to press for that action/option (e.g., “To check your balance without bothering one of our expensive agents, press ‘1’”; NOT “Press ‘1’ to check your balance without bothering one of our expensive agents.”)
  • The ability to opt out to and curse directly at a live agent at any time

Invest in advanced speech recognition. In leading contact centers, traditional touchtone IVR systems are being replaced by sleeker and sexier speech-enabled solutions. While you may not want to listen to a writer who thinks that IVR can be sleek or sexy, you should, as today’s advanced speech recognition (ASR) solutions have helped many customer care organizations vastly improve self-service, and, consequently, reduce the number of death threats their IVR system receives each day.

Powered by natural language processing, ASR systems provide a much more personalized and human experience than traditional touchtone ever could. Traditional touchtone is like interacting with Dan Rathers, while ASR is like talking to Oprah.

Even more importantly, ASR-driven IVR systems enable contact centers to vastly reduce the number of steps callers must take to get what they need. Customers can cut through unnecessary menu options by saying exactly what they want (e.g., “I would like the address of your call center so that I can punch the last agent I spoke to in the face”).

Use CTI to ensure smooth, smart transfers. Even if your IVR system is perfectly designed and features the universally appealing voice of James Earl Jones, many callers will still want to – or need to – speak to a live agent featuring the universally less-appealing voice of a live agent. And when this happens, what’s universally aggravating to callers is – after providing the IVR with their name, account number, social security number, height, weight and blood type – having to repeat the very same information to the agent to whom their call is transferred.

To avoid such enraging redundancy – and to shorten call lengths/reduce costs – leading contact centers incorporate CTI (computer telephony integration) technology into their IVR system. These applications integrate the voice and data portions of the call, then, with the help of magic fairies, deliver that information directly to the desktop of the agent handling the call. With today’s technologies, it’s really quite simple (though, granted, not always cheap), and the impact on the customer experience is immense. Rather than the caller starting off their live-agent interaction with a loud sigh or groan, they start off with the feeling that the company might actually have a soul.

Regularly test and monitor the system. Top contact centers keep a close eye on IVR function and callers’ interactions with the system to ensure optimum functionality and customer experiences.
One essential practice is load-testing any new IVR system prior to making it “open for business”. This involves duplicating actual call volumes and pinpointing any system snags, glitches or outright errors that could jam up the system and drive callers nuts.

Once the IVR system is up and running, leading contact centers frequently test it by “playing customer” – calling the center just as a customer would, then evaluating things like menu logic and speech recognition performance, as well as hold times and call-routing precision after opting out of the IVR.

Some contact centers have invested in solutions that automate the IVR-testing process. These potent diagnostic tools are able to dial in and navigate through an interactive voice transaction just as a real caller would – except with far less swearing – and can track and report on key quality and efficiency issues. Many other centers gain the same IVR-testing power by contracting with a third-party vendor that specializes in testing self-service systems.

Internal IVR testing alone is insufficient to ensure optimal customer experiences with the IVR. The best contact centers extend their call monitoring process to the self-service side. Quality specialists listen to live or recorded customer-IVR interactions and evaluate how easy it is for customers to navigate the system and complete transactions without agent assistance, as well as how effectively the IVR routes each call when a live agent is requested or required.

Today’s advanced quality monitoring systems can be programmed to alert QA staff whenever a caller gets entangled in the IVR or seems to get confused during the transaction. Such alerts enable the specialist – after having a laugh with his peers over the customer’s audible expletives – to fix any system glitches and perhaps contact the customer directly to repair the damaged relationship.

Thanks to Call Center IQ for the article. 

See How Ixia’s NTO 7300 Vastly Outperforms the Closest Competitor in 100GbE Visibility, Scalability, Capacity, and Cost-Efficiency

Visibility Is an Urgent Challenge

Lack of visibility is behind the worst of IT headaches, leaving the network open to malicious intrusions, as well as compliance, availability, and performance problems. Today’s soaring traffic volumes are bringing greater complexity, proliferating apps and devices, and rising virtual traffic—in fact, “east-west” traffic between virtual machines now makes up half of all traffic on the network. Virtual traffic is the culprit that spawns unmonitored “blind spots,” a breeding ground for errors and attacks.

All these challenges make visibility critical to network security and management. Customers need a highly scalable visibility architecture—one that can eliminate blind spots and reduce complexity, while providing resilience and control. Visibility relies on monitoring tools, and new tool investment can be a real budget-buster. That’s why companies need to protect their investments in 1GbE and 10GbE monitoring tools, and why load balancing has become such a smart approach. Now, as networks move into the 100GbE environment, Ixia offers the NTO 7300, enabling total visibility into multiple 100GbE links and dominating its competition.

Dramatic Design Difference

The NTO 7300 delivers the ability to optimize 1GbE and 10GbE monitoring tools for the intensive 100GbE environment and offers decisive advantages over competitors. No other solution packs as many ports into a compact footprint for industry-leading density and cost-efficiency. The NTO 7300’s one-two punch of design ingenuity plus advanced technology makes it the clear choice in every comparison. If you take a typical 100GbE deployment that requires 8 100GbE ports, advanced filtering, and 10GbE ports for tool access, it becomes clear that other solutions cannot keep up with the density and performance Ixia provides.

The Numbers Speak for Themselves

Compare the Ixia NTO 7300 to its closest competitor, and you see a striking difference in capacity, scalability and performance. The NTO 7300 commands every category for customer needs by providing more performance in 71% less space!

Ixia's Net Tool Optimizer 7300 b2ap3_thumbnail_competitor_0.png
7300: Port-Plentiful

The Ixia NTO7300 configuration fits neatly and entirely in a single 8U chassis, with many unused ports.

 Competition: Port-Poor

This competitor requires 28U and has insufficient 40GbE ports. It’s significantly lower in density, with no ports on advanced processing blades and fabric modules placed awkwardly in front.
Per Chassis:24 40GbE ports (or 96x10GbE)

64 10GbE AFM ports

8 100GbE ports

640Gbps Deduplication

 Per Chassis (2 chassis required):2x40GbE ports

40x10GbE ports

4x100GbE ports

240Gbps Deduplication

With its “pay as you grow” scalability; savings on rack space and power; a simple, rack-mountable chassis; superior advanced features such as header stripping and deduplication; and wire-speed performance in any configuration, the NTO 7300 is ideal for filling that critical visibility gap in the 100GbE environment.

Ixia NTO7300 Other
Fabric Module location Rear panel Occupy front slots
100GbE configuration 2x100GbE + 4x40GbE or 16x10GbE 2x100GbE + 8x10GbE
Advanced Processing capacity per slot Up to 640Gbps (320Gbps ingress + 320Gbps egress) Up to 80Gbps
Advanced Processing card configuration 2xAFM16s + 4xQSFP + 640Gbps AFM, per slot No tool or network ports, “the other’s” processor only
Slots per chassis 6 8
Chassis RU 8 (with AC shelf) 14
Total Configuration Ixia NTO7300 Other Advantage
10GbE ports 64 (up to 160) 80 (up to 96) Ixia (67% more max)
40GbE ports 96 8* Ixia (1100% more max
100GbE ports 8 8
Deduplication bandwidth 640Gbps 480Gbps* Ixia (33% more)
Total RU 8 28 Ixia (71% less)
*Doesn’t meet requirements

Additional Resources:

Ixia Visibility Architecture

Ixia NTO 7300

Thanks to Ixia for the article.

Candela LANforge 5.3.1 Released

Candela Lanforge Fire
Candela LANforge Fire Candela LANforge ICE

New Features & Improvements

Improved association times on the ath10k 802.11AC NIC * Improved stability of 802.11AC (ath10k) driver * Support for 802.11w on virtual APs. * Improved scripting for wifi captive portal testing. …and over 25 more improvements, too

Download Release Notes here

Thanks to Candela for the article. 

 

The Improving Image of IVR

Speech Recongnition

Since Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems were first introduced as a customer service tool, there have been many detractors. However, a recent Forrester Consulting survey indicates that the tide has turned and customers have accepted IVR and, in some cases, even prefer it to live operators. Speech-enabled self-service IVRs have become so commonplace that many consumers report that they prefer to use such systems for simple tasks such as checking account balances, flight statuses or shipment tracking. The survey results show that more than 50% of participants reported a preference for speech-enabled IVR for most simple transactions.

The survey also suggests a positive consumer response to proactive IVR systems. Such systems are being used to place courtesy calls to customers as reminders of appointments or other important upcoming activities. Of course there is nothing new about the practice of proactive calling, but customer acceptance of the technology is improving along with the general trends in IVR acceptability. Despite all the positive marks for IVR systems, there is still room for improvement.

Although customers appreciate the ability to handle simple tasks themselves, they still want the option to easily bypass the IVR to speak to a live operator. Respondents also said that improving speech recognition and accuracy would greatly improve their calling experiences. IVR systems are still the best method for cost savings in a call center environment and are unlikely to be replaced by any other technology in the immediate future. However it is important for developers to regard negative feedback from consumers as constructive criticism and a means to improve service and performance. Overall the results of this survey are very positive but continual improvement and meeting customer expectations will result in increased business for everyone involved in the IVR industry.

Thanks to Ezinearticles.com for the article. 

Network Strategies for 2015

As we say goodbye to 2014 and review our network equipment plans for the new year, looking at replacement options is not enough.

We have to consider the currents that network technology flows in and where they are taking us.

Ignoring buying decisions and looking at the bigger picture provides an opportunity to assess what emerging companies are doing to redefine and redirect our network thinking, from the higher levels of standardisation, convergence and virtualisation down to how startups are meeting these challenges.

Here is what you should be aware of in 2015.

Standardisation

2015 will see the shifts in IT investments move towards standardised hardware and software products. The software and hardware standardisation efforts inherent in software-defined networks (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV) initiatives in the wide area network (WAN) will affect corporate network

Virtualisation

Existing datacentre hardware is being optimised in virtualised environments, and applications are being farmed out to public cloud providers, significantly changing the hardware equation.

Convergence

Hyperconverged infrastructure products combine compute, networking and storage resources to create all-in-one solutions. Hyperconverged appliances offer the scale-out architecture that fits the needs of most shared virtualised environments. To facilitate this, unified software packages have been adopted to converge networking functions previously allocated to dedicated hardware boxes such as WAN optimisers, packet shapers, application development controllers, application and network performance managers, load balancers and next-generation firewalls. This means storage and security are becoming intrinsic to networking topologies and, as such, will become embedded in networking hardware and software.

New challenges in 2015

The specific board-level demands to most enterprise network managers in 2015 will include:

  • Handling 100% traffic growth with the same budget as in 2014.
  • Recognising that much of that traffic growth, namely video, will be latency sensitive.
  • Ensuring the growing bring your own device (BYOD) demand for connectivity is secure and delivers quality of service (QoS) to the customers.
  • Minimising capital expenditure and go with industry-standard, bare-metal hardware to support SDN/NFV.
  • Maximising operating expenses in software and hardware deals.

This translates into key concepts around aligning networks to support business processes, shifting more traffic to Ethernet, flexible cloud deployments and better integration of security and storage capabilities. Startups present interesting next-step products to dominant suppliers in all these categories.

Aligning Network Hardware To Business Processes

When the buyer focus shifts to commoditisation, this presents a serious challenge to profit margins for premium network hardware brands such as Cisco, HP and IBM. Conversely, it presents an opportunity for nimble startups in the network hardware business, as brand loyalty is eroded and the focus shifts to supporting horizontal business processes.

Startup hardware suppliers are adopting the same hyperconvergence logic as software suppliers by integrating complementary software functionality into their boxes to facilitate core business processes. The result is hardware with better integration levels, cheaper and simpler deployments and easier scale-out capacity than their software and brand-name competitors. Instead of outsourcing functions, these network hardware startups advocate on-premise enterprise networking strategies. The message certainly whets the appetite of investors.

They are not looking for startups selling Lego blocks for DIY constructions, but rather emerging suppliers with the integrated hardware and software to handle specific business needs with faster time to value than existing value propositions on the market. Market leader VMware, with its Evo: Rail concept, has aligned all parts of its vSphere and Virtual SAN (storage area network) ecosystem with seven hardware partners (Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Inspur – China’s dominant cloud computing and service provider, NetOne – Japanese infrastructure optimiser, HP, and SuperMicro – the US application-optimised server, workstation, blade, storage and GPU systems provider).

Startup company Scale Computing, with its HC3 platforms, presents an interesting challenge to the Evo: Rail design, aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and values simplicity and fast deployment. The three HC3 platforms scale from 40 to 400 virtual machines (VMs). Scale Computing uses a customised version of Red Hat’s KVM hypervisor and leverages a block-level storage architecture as opposed to Virtual SAN’s (VSAN) object-based approach. While KVM may not have as many features as vSphere, Scale Computing is banking on the simplicity of operation along with aggressive pricing compared to the competition, and uses a scale-out architecture that can handle four nodes as the infrastructure grows.

Large enterprises should look at the startup Simplivity and its OmniCube, a hyperconverged infrastructure that delivers the economies of scale of a cloud computing model while ensuring enterprise IT performance and resiliency for virtual workloads. OmniCube has a data architecture that addresses data efficiency and global management requirements in virtualised and cloud computing environments. Its single unified stack runs on standard and hyperconverged x86 building blocks, simplifying and lowering the cost of infrastructure. Deploying a network of two or more OmniCubes creates a global federation that facilitates efficient data movement, resource sharing and scalability.

Ethernet deployments

Ethernet adoption continues to expand and startups such as Arista provide important contributions with the 10-1000Gbps Ethernet switches that target cloud service providers with purpose-built hardware. Its EOS network operating system provides single-binary system images across all platforms, maximum system uptime, stateful fault repair, zero-touch provisioning, latency analysis and a fully accessible Linux shell. With native support for VMware virtualisation and hundreds of Linux applications integrated into hardware platforms, it is designed to meet the stringent power and cooling requirements of today’s most demanding datacentres.

Cloud in a box

In the SME market, SixSq’s Nuvlabox offers a turnkey private cloud in a box. The Mac Mini-sized box includes a complete infrastructure as a service (IaaS) framework, powered by StratusLab, and a platform as a service (PaaS) powered by Slipstream. The built-in Wi-Fi provides network connectivity. With the ability to run up to eight VMs, capacity constraints are solved by adding more boxes and managing them as a single unit. Nuvlabox comes with a library of standard apps and operating system images, including different flavours of Linux and Windows and allows secure remote monitoring and application deployment from a single dashboard. To bypass the capital expenditure objection, SixSq has shifted its business model towards business-to-business licensing, where service provider customers pay rental fees for the equipment and SixSq provides ongoing maintenance and call centre support.

Network Security

Increased use of IT adds value to corporate network transactions and attracts a lot of unwelcome attention. In 2015, we expect more hackers, script kiddies, professional thieves and state-sponsored advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks to target corporate networks. But there is still a lot of low-hanging fruit to gather, such as increased employee awareness of weak passwords and phishing exploits, faster remediation of security holes and better denial of service protection measures. There is also a need for better tools and procedures to protect the enterprise network and ensure these measures meet corporate governance, risk and compliance (GRC) requirements.

One supplier aiming to address these needs is Bromium, which combines a software client on any device with a central security server. Instead of using signatures, behaviours or heuristics to identify potential threats, its vSentry client creates hardware-isolated micro‑VMs for every network-related task, such as visiting a web page, downloading a document or opening an email attachment. All micro-VMs are separated from each other and from the trusted enterprise network. Thus, malware is contained in the hardware-isolated micro-VM. Bromium’s Live Attack Visualization and Analysis (Lava) server converts each micro-VM in the enterprise into a honeypot and automates the often prolonged post-attack malware analysis process. An entire attack is automatically and instantly forwarded to the Lava console, which provides an automatic in-depth analysis of the advanced malware.

Network Storage

Video and social network communications from mobile devices with always-on technology has mushroomed data flows. In the enterprise, big data analytics relies on huge volumes of unstructured data, itself often comprised of large file formats that require secure storage and fast retrieval capacity. Network data volumes are moving from exabyte to zettabyte levels of data and higher. Most pundits and some analyst firms predict traffic and storage volumes will continue to double every two years. Next-generation storage systems include hyperscale data storage, virtualisation to improve utilisation, cloud storage for disaster recovery and lower power consumption to save costs. To enhance storage security, storage systems may incorporate data dispersal and keyless encryption to keep data secure against breaches.

The startup company Solidfire has developed a storage system built on the native ability to achieve significant scale, guarantee storage performance, and enable complete system automation. Combined with enterprise applications and deeply integrated with key management frameworks, Solidfire delivers validated products that make a next-generation datacentre deployment more cohesive, automated, and dynamically scalable.

At the high end, Insieme Networks is the driving force behind Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) at the core of Cisco’s long-awaited SDN strategy. The ACI architecture leverages a mix of merchant and custom Asics, along with Cisco’s new line of Nexus 9000 switches and its Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC).

Establishing business models

Startup companies in the network hardware business are not only introducing new technology perspectives, they are also exploring new business models and establishing customer relationships. Building on standardised platforms allows users to do more process management and security tasks themselves. With higher levels of personalisation and control, users can more easily explore alternative business processes and combine functions across different platforms, which translates into faster time to value. 2015 promises to be an exciting year for enterprise IT departments looking to revamp their corporate network infrastructures – they may actually meet their boards’ network targets.

Thanks to Computerweekly for the article.