Manufacturer Resolves VoIP Quality Issue in 15 Minutes

Customer Profile

This global manufacturing company employs thousands of people at 20 operational facilities in their U.S. operating unit. Concentrating on manufacturing, sales, and service, the U.S. unit sells through a channel of over 1000 dealers.

The company believes Customer Service is key to their relationships with their vehicle owners. To handle an increase in call volume from dealers and customers they added a new, modern Contact Center. Several of their Contact Centers were migrating to SIP trunking to improve Unified Communications (UC) services overall and deliver a high-quality customer experience with their agents.

The Challenge

To ensure quality during and after the start-up of the new Contact Center as well as the SIP migrations, the IT team needed visibility to the network and all the applications the Contact Centers depend on to deliver service. The most critical concerns were their top 5 apps including SIP, Microsoft Skype for Business, and Email services.

The challenge was compounded by the IT department inheriting responsibility for all IT monitoring in North and South America. This led to specific issues monitoring VoIP, as they were already experiencing call issues because QoS tagging was inconsistent across different regions, and IT lacked the visibility necessary to identify where the changes originated.

Although the company has historically been “packet-heavy”, they knew they were not “right-sized” to meet their unexpected IT growth and new VoIP requirements. They used multiple tools for Voice monitoring, which required resource-intensive, time-consuming research, that in turn, led to unacceptably long times to troubleshoot issues.

Solution in Action

The Network Operations and Voice team in IT were committed to addressing these challenges as part of their overall support of the company’s growth and dedication to customer service. Already using NETSCOUT® nGeniusONE with patented Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) for wire-data monitoring at some of their Contact Centers, they used this opportunity to upgrade and augment their environment with new NETSCOUT solutions including converting to nGeniusONE for UC, adding new InfiniStreamNG appliances, and Packet Flow switches. By taking advantage of this latest technology they gain a single point of visibility to their network, including VoIP monitoring.

With nGeniusONE for UC they now have UC specific monitoring, metrics and reports. Service-based dashboards, and pre-built SIP workflows help identify issues in a single solution for faster resolution. Critical for this IT team now responsible for multiple regions, they have visibility to SIP error codes and can monitor QoS changes across the network.

The Results

The Contact Centers are critical for the company to deliver exceptional customer service, especially as they experienced a large increase in call volume. The value of visibility to the VoIP system became apparent immediately, as within 15 minutes the Network OPs and Voice teams collaborated to pinpoint the cause of a QoS issue that had eluded detection for weeks! The IT team can now proactively enforce QoS assignments throughout all areas of the network, contact centers and remote locations, reducing the search for where any changes were made and delivering better service overall. The UC experience at all call centers has improved from the insights gained from monitoring VoIP traffic.

Having one solution that now includes UC monitoring, together with their existing network and application monitoring solution, has enabled them to identify the cause of voice problems and see the real-time traffic without bouncing between tools and spending time dealing with “finger-pointing” between the IT infrastructure teams, WAN providers, and vendors.

With the latest NETSCOUT solutions, including UC monitoring, the company has improved IT efficiency and their customer’s experience when working with agents at the Contact Centers.