The contact center has emerged as a crucial component of business success. Today’s companies compete almost exclusively on the basis of exceptional customer service, and delighting customers relies heavily on developing the right contact center strategy.
Customer expectations are constantly evolving, presenting new challenges for organizations. Today’s consumers expect seamless, fast, and personalized interactions, delivered across a range of channels. This means business leaders need to invest in a range of technologies, to deliver amazing experiences. All of these technologies, from tools used for callback requests, to interactive voice response (IVR) and VoIP, can suffer from technical issues.
Creating an environment that facilitates zero downtime, with a holistic, proactive approach to identifying and mitigating issues is crucial to staying one step ahead of the competition. So, how can contact centers make “zero downtime” a possibility?
The Impact of Contact Center Downtime
According to IR, the cost of unnecessary downtime can be much greater than companies think.
“Contact centers are the heartbeat of customer experience and organizational success. They’re not just support hubs; a well-managed contact center plays a pivotal role in growth,” says Ali Athar, VP os Sales Engineering at IR.
“But achieving that success relies on delivering exceptional service and, crucially, seamless operations. At IR, we understand that every interaction counts.”
Problems with unified communication and contact center tools don’t just impact individual experiences, they harm business reputations, increase the risk of customer turnover, and they can also cost companies thousands.
For instance, operating at 99.9% uptime in a contact center running 10 hours a day means companies could miss out on 219 minutes of productive conversations per year. This could lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue, not to mention the loss of repeat business.
Business leaders face a multitude of challenges when it comes to maintaining consistent uptime, such as:
- Issues handling omnichannel experiences: Customers today move between communication channels regularly, and companies need to ensure they can deliver the same seamless experience across all channels. This requires careful coordination and implementation of stress testing, load testing and similar measures across all channels.
- Voice quality issues: Voice calls still account for around 30% of interactions in modern contact centers. Modern voice architecture and connectivity is crucial to ensuring 100% uptime, as well as crystal-clear audio quality, and enhanced compliance. To thrive in today’s world, companies need to constantly monitor and track voice issues on a huge scale.
- Managing hybrid workforces: Contact centers are not exempt from the hybrid working phenomenon, with team members often working from a range of different locations. Dispersed, remote workforces add to the complexity of a company’s continuity plan, making it crucial for companies to leverage tools that allow them to remotely monitor and optimize communication tools from a single location.
Even the rise of conversational AI tools can lead to significant problems with mitigating downtime, creating a new demand for companies to constantly test AI solutions, and ensure AI to agent handoffs are seamless, consistent, and convenient.
How to Make Zero Downtime a Reality: Top Tips
Mitigating downtime in the contact center can be a complex process, with so many different challenges to overcome. However, it is possible, with the right technology and processes. A solution that enables seamless end-to-end monitoring, visibility into communication solutions, and testing paves the way for comprehensive operational resiliency.
Here are our top tips for success:
Automate and Optimize Voice Monitoring
As mentioned above, voice is still a critical component in many customer journeys. Problems with voice quality not only impact customer satisfaction, but harm employee productivity and efficiency, as well as causing issues with compliance.
A proactive and automated voice monitoring solution that can instantly notify business leaders when voice issues emerge, helps to prevent unnecessary disruption. It can ensure companies can extensively track service quality, and take a proactive approach to identifying potential issues, and mitigating future call quality problems.
Take a Holistic Approach to Monitoring
While monitoring voice quality is crucial in the modern contact center, it’s important to remember that customers expect a seamless and consistent experience across a range of channels. This means companies need to take a comprehensive approach to monitoring every element that may influence customer experience, or lead to unnecessary downtime.
A comprehensive monitoring solution, that provides insights into legacy technologies, cloud-based platforms, and even agent experience, allows for a more in-depth insight into the architecture of the contact center. This enhances customer and user experiences, while also protecting the reputation of companies, relationships with buyers, and compliance standards.
Perform Regular Testing
Testing is an essential part of making zero downtime a reality in the contact center. Comprehensive testing helps contact centers with everything from capacity planning, to ensuring they can handle changes to work processes and call volume during seasonal peaks and major events.
Regular load and stress testing helps to ensure companies can be proactive in addressing potential problems that may arise and implement strategies in advance to mitigate downtime. A comprehensive testing solution, like the tools offered by IR, allows companies to combine stress and load testing with real-time, automated monitoring, for a comprehensive view into system performance.
Make Troubleshooting Proactive
One of the biggest factors that prevent companies from making zero downtime a reality in the contact center, is a “reactive” approach to addressing problems with connectivity and communication tools. In today’s world, businesses don’t have to wait until a problem has occurred before they can begin troubleshooting and fixing the issue.
Real-time data analytics and customizable dashboards allow contact center leaders to proactively troubleshoot potential issues. They can use these solutions to identify anomalies during outages and peak periods and take a proactive approach to eliminating common concerns.
Ensure Remote Insights are Available
As the contact center continues to evolve with the implementation of hybrid and remote working strategies, ensuring visibility into remote ecosystems is becoming more essential. Businesses need to be able to proactively monitor, troubleshoot, and test ecosystems wherever they are.
This makes leveraging a remote solution for monitoring and contact visibility crucial in today’s world. Solutions like RemoteInsight from IR allows companies to run remote agent readiness testing and troubleshoot remote agent issues before they begin to impact customer experience. With insights into 22 critical performance metrics, RemoteInsight gives businesses the information they need to remotely diagnose problems, and minimize downtime caused by external systems.
Make Zero Downtime a Reality for Your Contact Center
Contact centers in today’s world, whether they’re on-premises, in the cloud, or deployed in a hybrid format, need to deliver 100% uptime, and exceptional experiences for both customers and employees. A holistic approach to monitoring, testing, and analysis ensures companies can adhere to evolving customer expectations, reduce costs, and maintain an edge over the competition.
“Our solutions ensure contact centers operate seamlessly and efficiently, with end-to-end proactive monitoring and ongoing outside-in and capacity testing for all customer-facing interactions, from phone to online interactions,” says Athar.
“Many contact centers now operate on a hybrid working model, with agents working from anywhere. By ensuring agent readiness, enabling proactive troubleshooting and reducing downtime, we help ensure organizations can deliver exceptional service, drive customer retention, and ultimately, achieve business success.”
With solutions from IR, companies can seamlessly automate monitoring, proactively troubleshoot issues, and even address problems faced by employees in remote environments.
