Assuring a Quality Customer Experience for Contact Centers

Customer Profile

This U.S. Financial Services Company focuses on offering a broad set of leasing and financing options for vehicles, payment protection, and insurance products. More than 3,000 employees across multiple regional offices, customer service centers, and sales and service branch offices are dedicated to supporting tens of thousands of customers every day. With managed assets in excess of $100 billion, their enterprise network is critical in supporting customer sales and services throughout the U.S.

The Challenge

This Financial Services Company had recently implemented new contact centers to support their ever-growing number of sales agents and offices, as well as address customer inquiries as they arose. Early in the planning process, the IT staff included targeted deployment of service assurance capabilities due to the importance of high-quality conversations between customers and sales agents and service reps in the contact centers. The IT staff also identified the need for monitoring traffic utilization of their WAN links to remote offices, as well as performance over links to their cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 services.

Upgrading and improving their visibility to the network traffic for performance, security, and Web traffic stats was also scheduled. However, this too was moved up on the schedule when the IT team encountered several issues with the network traffic being forwarded by their existing third-party vendor’s packet broker switches to the monitoring appliances.

Solution in Action

Delivering Unified Communications Service Assurance

After a rigorous evaluation period, the Financial Services Company selected the nGeniusONE service assurance platform and InfiniStreamNG™ appliances to address quality and performance issues impacting their unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) services at their distributed, customer-facing contact centers. The IT staff is using the nGeniusONE solution to quickly respond and resolve customer experience issues, such as dropped calls, echo during conversations, and lengthy connection issues.

With the goal to ensure service quality remains high regardless of where in the hybrid cloud it is delivered, the IT team also deployed an InfiniStream appliance to monitor the links to their Microsoft Office 365 service. With the addition of real-time analysis of activity, errors, and response times, IT is able to rectify the issue locally or provide evidence for it to be corrected by their cloud vendor.

Enterprise Traffic Analysis with nGenius for Flows

To fulfill management’s requirement for visibility into enterprise-wide traffic activity, IT selected and implemented NETSCOUT’s nGenius for Flows and nGenius 3300 series Collectors. This solution has provided a running record of daily, weekly, and monthly activity to the sales offices and branches. This information is being used to understand what traffic is where in the network and when for better traffic management and bandwidth planning.

Visibility with Packet Flow Switch

With the goal to upgrade and enhance their network traffic visibility for their service assurance needs in the contact centers, the Financial Services Company chose the software-based nGenius 5010 Series Packet Flow Switches (PFS) in combination with nGenius Packet Flow eXtender (PFX) software. For several reasons, this was a superior choice to the packet broker switch previously in use. The nGenius PFS system is able to perform the de-duplication necessary as it delivers the right traffic to the appropriate monitoring tools. It also offered them a unique Service Port feature that allows the IT staff, based on a configuration design, to direct just the right traffic to the right tool at the right time. Changes to a Service Port only apply to that monitoring tool; thus, IT stakeholders from voice, network, and security were able to easily optimize the data stream necessary for their needs.

The IT staff is also taking advantage of NetFlow generation capability using the nGenius PFX software to augment the information in the nGenius for Flows solution. Leveraging this capability in the nGenius PFX software reduced the workload on their Cisco routers, which was considered a win for the IT staff.

The Results

There have been several benefits recognized by the Financial Services Company and their IT staff. They are ensuring a high-quality customer experience with the contact center service reps, which has the added benefit of avoiding customer attrition and revenue loss. Both their WAN resource and overall budget planning processes have been improved with the ability to monitor and trend the traffic throughout the enterprise.

Reduced management complexity an improved IT productivity and collaboration are major benefits accompanying the introduction of NETSCOUT’s solutions. This Financial Services Company is meeting their objectives for operating its service assurance and security initiatives with ease, now that they have a properly functioning nGenius PFS system in place to feed the right traffic to the right InfiniStream appliance or other monitoring tools at the right time. They are realizing improved IT productivity from the ease of configuration and operation for all members of the team. And collaboration between voice, network, and security has been enhanced with ability to optimize the traffic for each of their tool’s specific demands.

From a financial perspective, the Company is extending the value of their investments in both Cisco routers and nGenius packet flow switches by reducing the workload of their routers with the NetFlow capabilities of the nGenius PFX software. Further, managing fewer vendors saves the company – first in IT productivity by reducing vendor finger pointing when troubleshooting interoperability issues; and second in procurement productivity by having fewer vendors to maintain and support. Time and cost savings in product training, annual maintenance, and periodic product upgrades are all added advantages.

Ultimately, the customer has expressed one of the biggest benefits is that they have found a true vendor partner in NETSCOUT®, with prompt, efficient, and knowledgeable customer service and support. In a crisis, this support is invaluable!