Is Your Contact Center Helping or Hurting the Customer Experience?

It’s hard enough to build a world-class customer service organization, but when you add in the demand to ensure top performance of unified-communications-and-collaboration-as-a-service (UCaaS) platforms on which today’s contact centers often rely, the job of IT becomes gargantuan.

In NETSCOUT’s latest UCaaS survey, 99 percent of respondents indicated that their company operates contact centers. Contact center employees are on the front lines daily and play a critical role in assuring the customer experience as end users call with new and demanding questions and requests. The survey found that 73 percent provide technical support and troubleshooting; 65 percent handle reports of service outages; another 65 percent offer general customer service; 61 percent initiate, change, or cancel services; and 61 percent answer billing and payment inquiries, among many other functions.

UCaaS Contact Centers Have Evolved

The very nature of contact centers has been evolving over the past several years. For obvious reasons, during the COVID-19 pandemic centers shifted to predominately remote operations. However, the pendulum has swung back in the opposite direction lately. The NETSCOUT survey found that only 14 percent of contact centers operated entirely in-person in 2022. In the latest survey, that number has more than doubled to 36 percent in-person. Today, only 6 percent of employees are working remotely, while 58 percent are functioning in a hybrid model that combines in-person and remote operations.

Trouble in Paradise

For contact center personnel to be effective at their jobs, they need UCaaS tools to work flawlessly, regardless of where they perform their jobs. This is especially important because many times the contact center and the personnel answering the phone may be the only direct experience customers have with a company.

For IT teams, challenges arise when contact center employees or their customers are having problems connecting, being transferred between agents or locations, or staying connected during a call. IT is then under pressure to deal with the issues that plague today’s contact centers, including general troubleshooting, delayed connections, dropped calls, and poor call quality. These technical issues can severely impede the ability of employees to quickly and efficiently dispatch customer concerns as they are received, which in turn is bad for business.

Types of performance issues experienced by contact center personnel

Observability Is Key to Ensuring Smooth UCaaS Operations

Keeping contact centers operating smoothly is in every company’s best interest. In a world where a premium has been placed on delivering a superior customer experience, making sure UCaaS tools are working flawlessly is critically important. To ensure UCaaS is supporting contact center employees, IT needs observability across contact centers, agents, and customers. Without sufficient visibility into network and application performance—including across UCaaS platforms—it is difficult, if not impossible, for IT to pinpoint problems and rapidly coordinate repairs.

The observability challenges are compounded when agents are working remotely. IT has its hands full dealing with a variety of technologies and vendors who are involved in supporting connectivity, call distribution, signaling protocols, call transfers, and customer resource management apps. Delivering a quality customer experience boils down to identifying the source of degradation among all the different locations and vendors.

With continuous packet monitoring at scale, companies can gain deeper visibility into platform performance, which in turn allows them to proactively identify issues and expedite resolution times. Gaining visibility across the entire ecosystem is key to pinpointing root causes faster, achieving operational resilience, and making good on the promise of an excellent contact center experience for end users.

NETSCOUT solutions provide independent, third-party monitoring of network, application, and UCaaS platforms, allowing IT teams to effectively manage the complexity and quality issues faced by contact center employees. NETSCOUT’s nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solution leverages what we call Smart Data for smarter analysis, providing real-time application and network performance analysis as well as user experience details for single-pane-of-glass views and reports.

End-through-end observability is essential when it comes to ensuring voice, video, and business data applications are delivering a flawless end-user experience. With contact centers often serving as the most frequent, if not the only, interface with clients, partners, and customers, making sure those individuals have a high-quality engagement with your company, aka contact center, is as important to the business as anything else.

Look for our next blog, which will examine the challenges to the performance of UCaaS, SaaS, and other services in remote offices and what IT can do to minimize such problems. Meanwhile, learn more about contact center trends in our comprehensive report “UCaaS and Today’s Enterprise: The True Cost of Outages and Help Desk Support.”

Learn more about contact center trends in our comprehensive report “UCaaS and Today’s Enterprise: The True Cost of Outages and Help Desk Support.”