Overview
This global software and services firm is ranked by Fortune among the 1,000 largest companies and 100 best places to work. To deliver on its customer-focused mission, the company employs over 10,000 contact center agents across multiple office locations as well as work-from-home arrangements.
The agents deliver a wide range of services, from product support to value-added consulting. They are supported by an IT team that is focused on ensuring agents have the high quality tools and services they need to be productive and satisfy the customer. Productivity is a cornerstone in the organization’s strategy for maximizing agent retention.
Challenges
In 2018, the company adopted WebRTC for agent communications as part of a shift from on-premise contact center infrastructure to a cloud-based service. While they realized many benefits from deploying WebRTC, they also encountered occasional communications problems that were difficult to solve because they had little visibility into the communications sessions.
For example, agents would sometimes receive calls with one-way audio and there were instances when calls were not delivered to an agent. In addition, agents might cause a range of problems, such as misconfiguring the browser to block access to the microphone.
The IT team had no reliable way of measuring the quality of the telephony services experienced by their agents and customers. Moreover, they had great difficulty knowing when communications problems were occurring. They relied on agents to report the problem to a help desk system, which didn’t always happen. The team also tried using speech analytics to identify sessions with problems by searching for keywords such as “I can’t hear you.”
Work-from-home agents presented unique challenges because the quality of the consumer Internet services they use is widely variable. When agents reported distortion, drop-outs and other media quality problems, the IT team needed a way to determine whether they were caused by local network connections.
Even though the overall reliability delivered by its contact center as a service provider was quite high, the company experienced infrequent telephony service outages which left their agents idle. It needed a way to detect outages and escalate them to the provider.
Solution
The callstats.io Monitoring and Analytics solution gave the company real-time visibility into its WebRTC sessions that helped solve its communications problems. The solution passively monitors the WebRTC sessions that connect agent browsers to the cloud service provider and tracks critical metrics, including media quality, network performance and errors.
To get a clear picture of the service quality delivered to agents, the company monitors two metrics on the callstats.io dashboard: The callstats.io Objective Quality metric, which scores each call based on an aggregation of network performance metrics; Agent feedback ratings, which are collected immediately after each call is closed. The metrics are not only used by IT staff, but also by contact center supervisors who can validate problems and take action to re-route calls for a particular agent, if warranted.
Powered by artificial intelligence, the solution detects important trends and issues alerts when trouble occurs. The company’s IT team quickly diagnoses the root cause using detailed session information captured by callstats.io. Personnel can identify signaling errors that cause one-way audio and configuration errors that block access to embedded microphones.
The solution tracks a range of network performance metrics that IT managers use to diagnose network problems, including consumer network performance issues. Rich reporting capability allows the IT team to collaborate across help desk and engineering functions. Reports can be shared with service providers to expedite resolution of trouble tickets.
Results
The company increased agent productivity and satisfaction, which are key objectives for retaining valuable talent. The callstats.io solution reduced the IT team’s response time by enabling them to independently detect WebRTC communications issues without assistance from agents. The team diagnoses and resolves problems more quickly and effectively, too.
Outages and other issues with the service provider are more quickly resolved with callstats.io because they are quickly detected, documented and communicated to the company’s partner. In the case of work-from-home agents, the solution helps the IT team identify and diagnose network performance problems, then work with the agent to remotely fix them.
“Callstats.io gives us a way to identify and resolve a bunch of tough problems that weren’t even visible to us before,” said the company’s contact center operations manager.