What’s going on?
An innovator of contact center solutions was upgrading its Voice over IP (VoIP) infrastructure when big problems struck.
Voice quality had plummeted and staff were struggling to isolate the cause.
12 hours passed. Voice and network engineers and applications specialists, established a “war room”. They asked IR’s Principal Solutions Strategist Travis Polland to join them on a global call from the IR Prognosis office in Denver.
Travis told us “I got on a call to find out what the issue was. Using Prognosis we built a series of custom screens looking at the actual contact centers.
“In the process I learned staff were taking subjective measurements every fifteen minutes from the contact centers and counting how many calls were bad. The custom displays we built confirmed their experience. The bad calls were showing red in the displays.”
Over the next couple of hours the virtual team fine-tuned the displays to quarantine specific parts of the voice ecosystem.
Prognosis isolated the problems down to a few boards and then the cards within those boards.
In fact, human error was to blame.
You forgot what?
During the upgrade process some of the call processing boards that needed re-configuring had been missed.
Prognosis also identified two faulty boards.
Quickly updating the missed boards’ configurations restored calls to acceptable voice quality. All calls routed to the faulty boards were redirected to the good ones.
Fast time to value
Within 3 hours quality operations were restored.
Travis added “Not only had they been down for 12 hours and there was no way back, they had to find a way forward because it affected all their call centers.
“As staff from the various teams in the war room changed their configurations Prognosis showed us how things changed in-flight. In real time they could see the affect their changes had.”
The displays that were created to resolve this crisis have proved very useful going forward.
They’re being used to make sure this type of thing doesn’t happen again, by incorporating this check in change process management for the future.
The good stuff
The unexpected benefit of discovering faulty equipment as well as human error demonstrates some of the additional value Prognosis brings.
By providing insight to both causes and symptoms, immediate measures can be put in place to provide business continuity.
Support staff can work in a strategic rather than a tactical way to resolve the problem while the root cause is further investigated and resolved.
Because Prognosis automatically discovers and groups devices, they’re consolidated for when staff are ready to take action, making change management a lot quicker and more efficient.
“Everybody received good value out of it. By making changes ‘in-flight’ we could see how those changes impacted the agents. This was a pivotal point for the customer; it was also a pivotal point for IR because it was the first time we were in a ‘war room’ with a customer.“
Travis Polland,
Principal Solutions Strategist, Integrated Research
