If your business isn’t looking at digital transformation right now, you are behind the curve. Moving your operations to a digital existence is the single biggest driver for IT departments. The way we do business is changing rapidly and companies that aren’t focused on adopting digital methods are going to find themselves left behind.
One of the biggest digital shifts in technology has already occurred. Unified communications (UC) has accomplished a successful transformation from the world of analog TDM circuits to a new world of IP-based endpoints and services. The idea of being tied to your desk with a hard-wired desk phone is antiquated. The modern world relies on software-based devices that can make calls and receive messages no matter where you might be in the world. All made possible by the digital transformation that UC has accomplished in the last ten years.
Unified Communications in the Modern World
Your customers are also adopting more digital methods of interaction with you. Rather than being tied to the phone for hours waiting on an operator to pick up to help with their order or their questions, they would rather use any number of other asynchronous methods to chat. This could include website chat windows, instant messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger, or Twitter and other social media accounts. Each of these new avenues for communications should be a part of your overall contact center strategy.
It’s important that your communications strategy is sound and reliable. Just because people don’t want to spend precious hours on the phone waiting for a customer service rep doesn’t mean they want to then spend those hours waiting for a reply to a message. The nature of asynchronous communications today means that the preferred alternate methods need to be available 24 hours a day for use by your customers. Responses to queries need to be prompt and efficient. And that’s not something that’s possible if your UC contact center is down or has degraded service. You have to be sure that your UC system is ready to go when your customers are ready to talk.
NETSCOUT Solutions for UC
One area where you can assist your UC contact center strategy is in monitoring and service assurance. There are a lot of moving parts in the modern contact center. If you’re focused on best-of-breed solutions, they won’t all come from the same hardware or software vendor. That means you need to find a way to ensure that all of the disparate services that are running in your contact center are operating correctly at all times. Given the relative complexities even with a single-vendor solution, you need someone that has the experience to make that happen.
Now, you may be saying, “I already have a contact center monitoring program!” That is true of most companies. Anyone that values their metrics has a way to keep track of them. But are you really looking at the right level? Rather than average call time are you focused on the call setup? Can your monitoring solution measure actual call quality? Is your solution focused on what your customers tell you is happening or what is actually going on? If the customer never connects to your agent, they can’t report bad quality. But you can believe that when they call your competitors, they will mention how difficult it was to get in touch with you!
NETSCOUT has spent years in the UC space with the kind of service assurance that you need to keep your contact center running smoothly. Platforms like nGeniusONE give you packet-level visibility into all kinds of UC software. You can ensure that your IP voice quality is high for users that want a friendly operator on the phone to walk them through a canceled flight. It can also verify that your calls aren’t suffering from drops during high volume traffic times to prevent potential customers from ringing through and starting the call irate at your UC solution before they ever get to buy your product.
nGeniusONE gives you the ability to monitor many third-party solutions like Avaya and Cisco as well as many other smaller software pieces that integrate with those UC platforms. Because you have visibility into the entire stack throughout the whole network you can be sure that every piece of your solution is working at optimum. That’s a big ask for a modern UC platform in a contact center which could have dozens of potential applications running in concert with each other but with very little integration beyond handing off data between calls or other forms of communication. Because NetScout is looking at the packet level of data exchange they can see how the programs are actually behaving rather than just relying on the reporting that the applications are doing themselves. This can often uncover issues you didn’t know you had!
Making Sense of it All
Modern UC solutions have to be ready to serve your customers and users in a variety of ways. You have to be able to anticipate how people want to communicate and keep your services running for them at all times. It also means your IT teams and operations folks always need to be ready to keep new applications or suites of software online to meet a new need when your customers demand them as an avenue of communication.
NETSCOUT has the talent, the tools, and the experience to help you ensure your services are online when they need to be running and available for your customers and users to access. Tools like nGeniusONE give your IT staff the assurance they need to help your customer service people do the job of growing your business while keeping your customer satisfaction high. By monitoring the data packets flowing between the applications in your contact center, you can be assured that everything needed to keep your customer satisfaction high is working at peak performance. To learn more about NETSCOUT’s Unified Communications and Collaboration, please visit their website.
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