Today’s contact centers are comprised of dozens of applications, including PBX, ACD, CRM, IVR, VRU, and chat, to name a few. And each has its own monitoring utility. Managing contact center performance and availability can be a daunting task. Achieving success in providing a consistent end-to-end customer experience requires constant review, situational readiness, and a swift response during spikes in call volume or other impactful events. Losing or mismanaging calls can easily lead to losing customers and revenue.

Merely monitoring the availability of the underlying technologies does not provide a comprehensive measure of the customer and agent experiences during a contact session.  What's more, the monitoring and management of the systems and tools that enable a contact center is traditionally viewed as being outside the bailiwick of the contact center operations teams.  Traditionally, technologists have no visibility into the business and the business has no visibility into the technology. With career longevity and compensation of the contact center operations managers linked to monitoring, managing, and satisfying queue and workforce performance metrics, their success or failure is too often determined by the performance of the underlying technology, even when everything appears to be functioning normally.

What if a slight degradation in network performance caused enough latency in transaction processing to produce a spike in wait time, abandonment rate, or call handle time? What if the technologists didn’t recognize this degradation was negatively impactful to the business? What if the business didn’t realize these issues were caused, not by ineffective operations or workforce management but rather, by the underlying infrastructure? When IT and business leadership form an alliance to address these challenges--through the implementation of well-defined IT maturity programs, including performance monitoring, management, and response programs--new levels of success can be attained.

Business-focused technologists  understand the need for the purposeful implementation and use of technology as a tool to solve business problems or satisfy strategic business objectives. Simply put, it’s about evolving from blinking lights to business technology management.

The true measure of performance is not whether the systems and tools are available, but rather if the critical business processes are available and performing within established service level agreements (SLAs).  Some providers work with contact center operators by delivering capabilities that allow for a comprehensive approach to end-to-end business process performance monitoring and response management.  They implement custom solutions designed to monitor the end-to-end performance of critical business processes with scoreboards for both business and technology stakeholders. These consolidated scoreboards display real-time performance data for queues and the underlying systems and tools that are integral to the enablement of these critical business processes. The scoreboard solutions may include alerts on technology events that have the potential to be or are currently negatively impacting business process performance, such as screen pops, right-call/right-agent, or payment processing. Some can even assign a relative cost to these events so that business and technology stakeholders have complete visibility into the event, including its financial impact. 

As an example, you may verify the availability, accuracy and performance of a screen pop by monitoring:

• Did the screen pop actually happen (availability)
• Did it contain the correct information (accuracy)
• Did the screen pop execute in a timely manner in accord with SLAs (performance)

Proactive monitoring of critical customer applications is achieved through rigorous simulations of “real” customer contacts, including IVR, VRU, email, and chat. Available solutions are designed for all levels of technical aptitude with operationally consistent, plain English descriptions of processes and alerts and graphical representations of network systems and applications. 

Equally important to business process technology monitoring are mature prcoesses and methodologies for response management to impactful events.  Problems are inevitable.  But most often, effective problem management can prevent an event from developing into an incident.  Many providers offer best-practice solutions for service desk, configuration management, change management, problem management and incident management that allow organizations to achieve operational excellence.  Business-aligned solutions help companies run their business, generate returns on their technology investments, and develop strategic capabilities for the overall enterprise.

With contact center volume at record levels, there is an opportunity like never before to transition from cost center to profit center and to delight customers and agents with an exceptional end-to-end interaction experience.

About Tom Lowry :
Tom Lowry is the Director of Client Solutions in the Business Technology Optimization Practice of the Burwood Group. With over 15 years of industry experience, he serves as the firm’s principal contact center strategy analyst. Mr. Lowry serves as a trusted advisor to his clients for business/technology alignment, process optimization, and performance monitoring and response program improvement.

About Burwood Group :
Burwood Group is a national consulting and technology services company with offices throughout the U.S., Burwood Group has been delivering business-aligned technology solutions since 1997. With IT operational experience in service management and delivery, and real world experience running IT organizations, the Burwood Group team partners with its clients as trusted advisors. We are passionate and committed to providing solutions that are appropriate to your needs and bring value to your organization through improved business performance.