Assuring Voice Performance Amid UC Technology and Service Delivery Transformations

Customer Profile

This international financial company offers retail banking solutions to millions of customers, including personal, small business, and commercial banking products. For years, the IT team has used NETSCOUT solutions to assist those efforts.

The Challenge

Clients of this bank have for years enjoyed access to voice-based customer services, with the Call Center operations balanced across two of the company’s regional contact center locations.

The Call Centers rely on a multi-vendor environment that includes the following Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) providers:

• Genesys
• Cisco
• Nortel
• Avaya

While the IT team was supporting this contact center investment, the bank was managing their business response to COVID-19’s arrival. In safeguarding both clients and employees, the company closed some regional branches, which prompted increased use of remote banking services, including the Call Center. During this time, the Call Center’s staffing approach had also changed, with some of those Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) working at home and others newly relocated into shared office space with other employees.

Not only was IT now managing increased use of Call Center resources in this partially remote service delivery environment, they now needed to differentiate whether a service issue related to UC&C technology performance, configuration changes, or a combination of those factors. These visibility limitations into Call Center technology had surfaced at an inopportune time, with these issues making it difficult for the IT team to reconcile:

• Genesys technology performance issues, including media monitoring, call set-up visibility, and troubleshooting inefficiencies
• Quality of Service (QoS) mismatches occurring at one Call Center location
• Configuring newly located call center agents in their assigned service communities

Solution in Action

The IT team gained the insight needed for Call Center service reliability and improved remote agent experience by updating their NETSCOUT environment to include the:

• nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform, with advanced UC&C performance analytics required for real-time monitoring of their entire Call Center, remote CSR, and UC&C technology environment
• Software-based InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) appliances installed at two regional data centers, with these added smart data sources using patented Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) technology to generate real-time metadata from the company’s network traffic for nGeniusONE performance analytics.
• NETSCOUT Packet Flow Operating System™ software for Certified PFS 5010 appliances, with this packet broker solution installed at the two regional data centers to improve traffic load balancing and overall network performance by forwarding packet traffic to the ISNG appliances as well as other tools in the environment.

The IT team capitalized on the more granular views provided by smart data generated from network traffic at the newly instrumented bank locations feeding real-time nGeniusONE analytics views, including Service Dashboards customized to provide:

• A single-pane UC&C snapshot into multimedia (i.e., voice, video, collaboration), SIP signaling (for UC service delivery), and site-specific Call Center performance
• Real-time monitoring for ensuring capacity for the internet access links and VPN gateways
• Holistic UC&C monitoring, specifically including media monitoring of their Genesys call set-up processes and voice monitoring of Cisco VoIP
• Real-time views into their virtual application performance over VPN, as well as Office 365 business productivity applications
• Real-time monitoring of other services in use across this delivery environment, including SIP trunking, MPLS edge routers, DMZ services, and other service enablers

The Results

In the timeframe after COVID-19’s arrival, it’s no longer business as usual. More than ever, this bank needed to provide a high-quality Call Center experience to those clients contacting the bank about business transactions, loans, and account access. Extending their NETSCOUT investment in a cost-effective manner allowed IT to solve some long-standing UC monitoring challenges, while benefitting from on-the-fly visibility improvements across their increasingly remote service delivery environment.

For internal stakeholders, successfully rolling out this extended NETSCOUT visibility solution has increased the organizational profile of this local IT team, with this UC deployment serving as a model for future implementations across wider sections of the bank’s geographic business.

Providing critical, timely service assurance for Call Center operations and remote performance is also helping the bank address business challenges in the post-pandemic service delivery environment.