AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Operata Service Monitoring and Assurance for Cloud Contact Centers and Amazon Connect
By Andy Scott, COO and Founder – Operata
By Nitin Kumar, Sr. Partner Solution Architect – AWS
 |
| Operata |
 |
The move to a cloud-based contact center as a service (CCaaS) enables innovations that power endless customer experience (CX) possibilities, making features like remote agents, sentiment analysis, and artificial intelligence (AI)-supported fulfilment that’s accessible for businesses of all sizes.
While enabling CCaaS seems simple, these environments rely on a multitude of technologies that connect customers to agents, with new dependencies, use of shared services, disparate technology teams, and service owners. The key to successful CCaaS management is to get in front of the operational challenges, a process that starts with organizational and technical readiness.
Operata is an AWS Specialization Partner and AWS Marketplace Seller that offers a CX observability platform built for Amazon Connect, providing service monitoring and assurance features. Operata holds the Amazon Connect service delivery designation.
In this post, we’ll explain how Operata supports defining the operational model and provides the observational data needed for dependent teams to manage the technology.
Why CCaaS Customers Should Invest in Observability
Cloud contact centers are like operas, with many moving parts orchestrated by many team players. CX observability helps in both understanding and managing these moving parts, whether it’s to define technical demarcations, baseline technical performance, measure against defined targets, analyze incidents, or optimize resources.
CX observability ensures that organizations can adapt swiftly to changing circumstances and help business and technical teams work in concert with each other.
Contact centers have changed. Earlier call center platforms filled a communications room with a spaghetti of patch cables lighting up a sea of agent handsets. Over time, handset connectivity moved to the data network. New skills were needed to manage quality of service policies, ensuring real-time media had the priority it needed. Years later, only the holes remain where these legacy contact centers once stood.
Today, call centers are a real-time application, fully dependent on the internet and a range of networks, workstations, operating systems, and more. Physical handsets have been replaced with WebRTC clients, customized and embedded into business applications. Agents are location-independent, using their home network services and even their own PCs to service customers.
Accountability for providing the contact center service may still be in one place, but the end-to-end responsibility is now shared across many technical owners. This shared responsibility has introduced a raft of new operational challenges.
Operata: CX Observability for Today’s CCaaS Solutions
Operata provides the continuous monitoring and assurance capability needed to bring CCaaS complexity into harmony, enabling agents to report issues, measuring baseline performance, and sharing real-time performance insights.
Operata helps organizations anticipate, identify, and resolve issues, perform end-to-end testing, justify investments to enhance customer experience, improve key performance indicators (KPIs), and accelerate the time-to-value.
Making the move to a cloud contact as a service solution is a strategic decision that inevitably involves risk and complexity. As the provider of the CX observability platform built exclusively for cloud contact centers, Operata is uniquely positioned to help contact center leaders identify the key considerations for successful CCaaS migration.
Migrating to new real-time voice applications over an existing environment needs care. The best outcomes happen when the organizational and technical impacts have been considered early. The complexity is in extending the CCaaS service to the agent and integrating the CCaaS softphone with business applications. Tools are needed to measure the performance of this new environment to understand and focus investment where it’s needed.
Operata’s CX observability platform is built exclusively for CCaaS, and provides end-to-end real-time monitoring and assurance capabilities. By simply adding its Agent Experience Collector to the agents’ browsers (Chrome or Edge) and using secure and easy-to-deploy CCaaS integration, CX assurance, and performance testing elements, you’ll have the insights to understand, develop, and measure performance of the end-to-end service.
Overall accountability for the technical service performance needs to be established. This service/product owner role requires end-to-end visibility of the technology elements supporting the contact center.
Operata provides a single pane of glass summary view of technology elements, errors, and reported issues. This level of data showcases “signposts” areas that need greater focus, with baseline and trending detail to establish impact and priority, as well as to focus areas for improvement.
Figure 1 – Agent and technology overview.
Technical Service Quality Targets and Measurement
A transition to cloud-based contact center as a service will change your technical service quality targets, and you’ll need to define acceptable levels of agent-reported issues and system errors.
Additionally, if third-party providers are used, how will this measuring capability be extended into technologies used by their agents? Operata captures performance metrics for every element in real-time, including agent-reported issues, errors, logs, and other indicators of poor or terminal customer experience. It provides everything needed to baseline service quality and set measurable targets.
Figure 2 – Technology insights.
Defining the expected service quality is a must and is constrained by both the performance of the environment and physics. For example, hosting agents in Australia from a CCaaS platform in the United States introduces unavoidable network latency, while callers ringing from Singapore adds another layer of carrier latency.
Baselining expected service quality and continually measuring against them is key to identifying issues.
Figure 3 – CX heartbeat.
Operata CX heartbeat assurance and performance testing provide non-subjective audio quality, audio latency, and network performance measures, correlated with more subjective CX data points like sentiment, surveys, and service level. These tools facilitate data-driven CCaaS hosting decisions using performance data to optimize service placement.
Understanding scope, responsibility, ownership, and the decision-making process is essential to maximize effectiveness in resolving issues. You’ll need to identify CCaaS environment knowledge, locate gaps, and plan how to bridge them.
Operata captures real-time metrics on the data network and PC performance, agent activity, agent-reported issues, audio devices, audio levels, errors, and logs. It also captures PC build details, browser type and version, and even the agent softphone being used. This detailed call data enhances service and tech teams’ understanding of CCaaS impact and dependencies in their supported environments.
Figure 4 – Equipment insights.
Building a Trusted Relationship with Your CCaaS Provider
Contact center as a service support is a shared responsibility between the CCaaS provider and customer, with both parties having knowledge of their respective environments, configuration, performance, and change.
Both CCaaS and customer support processes will require a base level of information in order to progress. For example, the customer’s data network support teams will need details on when the issue started, the networks impacted, and the critical impact of the issue (for their escalation purposes). Having this data available reduces the time taken to start the process and speeds up resolution.
Capturing end-to-end performance data gives insights into service norms and highlights anomalies when there are issues. This quickly reduces the blast radius to focus support teams on the most likely cause, while providing detail on the scale of the issue.
For example, simply knowing exactly when an issue started to occur is often enough to regress a change or resolve the issue. Since Operata continuously collects errors and log files, it’s straightforward to provide your CCaaS provider with the troubleshooting details they need.
Lastly, and just as importantly, real-time monitoring helps validate that the fix has been successful.
Today, many contact centers exclusively employ at-home agents, something that was unheard of just a decade ago. Home workers lack physical support, though, making it challenging for technical and business operations teams to monitor their home office environments.
Operata is uniquely positioned to correlate agents’ home technology environments, softphone events, softphone errors, and operational metrics. Operata can distinguish between a CX issue caused by a technical problem vs. one caused by agent behavior.
Figure 5 – Softphone errors and logs.
Conclusion
The operational challenges highlighted in this post show how businesses migrating to a cloud-based contact center as a service (CCaaS) can set themselves up for success by investing in observability and gaining a competitive edge in the ever-evolving customer experience (CX) landscape.
Operata’s performance monitoring and assurance platform is purpose-built to help Amazon Connect customers get the best CX. To see how Operata can help your organization, sign up for a free 14-day trial.
You can also learn more about Operata on AWS Marketplace.
.
.
Operata – AWS Partner Spotlight
Operata is an AWS Specialization Partner that offers a CX observability platform built for Amazon Connect, providing service monitoring and assurance features.