Planning Ahead for Optimal Contact Center DeploymentPhil Odence, VP Contact Center Business, Empirix

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Agenda

• The IP Call Center Wave• Challenges with IP in the Call Center • Managing the Challenges• Real World Examples• Conclusion

3The IP CC Technology Wave is Cresting

Forrester 2008 IP CC Trends

•19% Have Deployed•14% Are Rolling Out •28% Are Evaluating •30% No Plans

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Concerns About IP Throttle Adoption

Forrester 2008 IP CC Trends

Concerns

• Voice Quality

• Complexity of Managing Applications

• Assuring Consistent Experience Across Channels

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The Good News / Bad News Story

Benefit ChallengeGeneral: Efficiency and improved customer experience

High bar set by TDM for voice quality and reliability

Virtualization enables efficient utilization of remote agents

Routing accuracy and performance. VQ over a WAN or Internet

Centralized data centers ease management Dramatically larger capacity and higher performance.

Ease of application creation Managing more complex applications

Best of breed solutions for competitive advantage

Complexity and finger pointing in multi-vendor environments

Integration with CRM Ensuring agent desktop performance

Distributed architecture for load balancing, capacity management and disaster recovery

Extremely difficult to pinpoint problems

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Mitigating Technology Challenges…

Requires a lifecycle management approach

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EmulateCustomer Experience

EmulateAgent Experience

Correlate withDiagnostic Data

IP Contact Center

Environment

End to End Approach to Testing and Monitoring

8Different Challenges Require Different Approaches and Depths of Transactions

Carrier PBX IVR CTI CRM

Voice Self Service Application Test

End to End CTI Test

End to End CRM Test

Simple PlatformTest and IVR VQ

ConnectionTest

9Challenge: Ensuring Quality of IP Speech Apps

PSTN

PBX/GatewayVoice Portal

Application and Media Servers

Customer: Large UK Retailer

Key Benefit: Speech apps sound good even at heavy load, because you have tuned the infrastructure before deployment

Voice Quality Report

Played Prompts

PESQ/MOS Analysis

Reference Prompt

Heard Prompt

10Challenge: Diagnosis in Distributed Voice App

PSTN

Voice Portals

Application Servers

Customer: Major Airline

Database Servers

Front End Transactions

Back End Transactions

Multi-Layer View(Front, Back End Transactions

and Infrastructure) Key Benefit: Callers are less impacted, because you can not only identify, but diagnose and address problems quickly

11Challenge: Ensuring Function of Speech Apps

PSTN

PBX/GatewayVoice Portal

Application and Media Servers

Customer: InternationalWireless Carrier

Multiple complex

applications, paths and languages

Automated Script

Generation for 1000s of test cases

Regression testing at each development

iteration

Key Benefit: Callers enjoy new apps more quicker and with fewer functional flaws because of exhaustive, repeatable testing.

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Challenge: Maintaining VQ over WAN

WAN

Centralized Data Center in US

… Multiple

International Remote Sites

Customer: Healthcare services provider with 20,000 agents worldwide

Periodic IP Calls to Remote Sites

Ongoing Connectivity

and Voice Quality

Reports and Alerts

Key Benefit: US callers experience fewer poor quality calls because you are able to route around WAN problems proactively

13Challenge: Ensuring End-to-End Performance with Integrated CTI / CRM Applications

Customer: Auto Finance Company

PSTN

PBX/ACDCTI

IVR

DB

CRM Web Server integrated with

CTI

LAN Agents

Emulated Agent

Desktop

Correlated Caller and Agent Experience

Routing

Data Integrity

PerformanceKey Benefit: Callers and agents are happier because even at peak calls go to the right agent with the right data in a timely manner.

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Empirix – Products and Services for Testing and Monitoring

• Corporate Headquarters in Bedford, MA USA; International headquarters in the UK and Japan

• 330+ employees worldwide• Empirix founded in 2001, started as

Hammer Technologies, founded in 1992

• Privately held; venture funded primarily by Matrix Partners and Lehman Brothers Venture Capital

• Most Fortune 100 companies, all of the world’s top ten Network Equipment Manufacturers (NEM), and nine of the top ten Service Providers benefit from Empirix solutions

Assuring Performance of Carrier-Class

Networks and Enterprise Contact Centers

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Summary• Contact Centers continue moving to IP and new

technologies to support business drivers of agent virtualization, multi-modal interactions, and UC applications.

• The benefits of this transformation come with challenges and risks around making it all work together and as seamlessly as possible.

• These challenges heighten the need for testing and monitoring CC applications, systems, and the network.

• Including an end-to-end testing and monitoring strategy in your new technology roll-out will help reduce the risks and ensure a good experience for customers and agents