Featured Services

Remote Availability & Performance Monitoring for Self-Service Business Solutions
by IQ Services
April, 2009

We work in an industry where the personal and business stakes are high for self-service business solutions.  It is critical that these solutions perform as designed in order to achieve expected ROI and customer satisfaction improvements.

• Whether we are from the call center or IT department
• Whether we are part of management, customer service or technology
• Whether we are the solutions provider, system integrator, partner, or customer…

We all deal with very complex environments and business expectations.  It is not atypical for us to implement best of class solutions, leveraging evolving technologies, working with lots of experts and diverse customers within the same organization, and managing routing and load requirements that span the world.

At the end of the day, with all the complexities and internal customers and business requirements we juggle, the only thing that really matters is that customers are able to use the self-service solution with the intended ease and efficiency.

SO…

When you receive an internal subsystem alarm indicating that a server is pegged or a ping has failed, do you know how the issue is impacting customers?  Do you know if it impacted customers at all?  Do customers even know when something is working as designed?  If someone takes the time to tell you there’s an issue, do you get the kind of detail you can use to solve the issue or does it lead you on a wild goose chase?

All the internal monitoring in the world can’t tell you as succinctly and accurately about the customer experience as remote availability and performance monitoring of the end-to-end solution.  Remote Solution Availability & Performance Monitoring (RAPM) uses real single or multi- channel transactions (phone calls, browser hits, faxes and emails) to ensure that your end-to end self-service contact center or communication solution is available and performing as expected. 

KISS
Sometimes, the simplest option really is the best.   RAPM is one of the least expensive and most comprehensive ways a business can optimize self-service.   This single, cost-effective service delivers multiple benefits with little impact on your existing infrastructure or resources:

1. Proof of what your customers are really experiencing
2. Confidence the integrated solution  technologies are all working together
3. Peace of mind that someone is watching to make sure the solution is working around the clock
4. Immediate notification if something is not working as expected
5. Actionable data to accelerate root cause identification and problem resolution
6. Insight into performance trends that indicate opportunities to improve performance

With RAPM, you get the same outside-in view of your self-service solutions that your customers have.  You get real, automated single or multi-channel transactions that do the very things your customers do via existing channels to your solution.  You get a clear picture of how the integrated solution components are working together to assure everyone in the “best of class” implementation is getting along as planned.  You get lots of data to help you optimize performance over the long haul.  Most importantly, you are notified immediately if something unexpected happens and the customer experience has changed – a heads-up that something may be negatively impacting your customers. 

The Devil is in the Details:  Test Cases, Monitoring Strategies, Notifications, Results
As mentioned earlier, there are many benefits to RAPM.  But the crux of the service is the ability to determine whether or not the solution performed as expected at every step of the monitoring interaction. 

The steps of the monitoring interaction are defined by the test case – a series of input and expected response pairs.  In the case of a voice self-service solution, the test case might be configured to exercise the carrier, switching, interactive application, TTS, speech recognition, host connectivity, and CTI components just to name a few.  At any step in the test case, RAPM might determine that a monitoring call did not receive the expected response to an input or did not receive the input within an acceptable period of time. 

At this point, the notification process is triggered to let the appropriate people know that something unexpected has been encountered.  RAPM notifications typically take the form of an email, telephone call, page, or SNMP trap.  The notification contains information to help the recipient understand the general issue.  In the case of email notifications, an actual recording or error page is attached to the email notification so the recipient can actually see and hear the problem experienced during the monitoring transaction.   The notification process triggered can vary based on time of day, day of week, error condition encountered, escalation strategies, planned downtime schedule and more.  The notification process gives you the ability to control the who, what, when, where and why related to the notification.  If you don’t want to receive a notification until something unexpected happens three times in a row or you want Susie to get a phone call notification if it is after 2 a.m. Eastern Time, the notification process will help define and implement these requirements.

Throughout the monitoring cycle, information is collected about all transactions whether each progressed as expected or not.  This data is extremely valuable not only for immediate issue resolution but also for performance trend detection and optimization.  Beyond immediate event notifications, the results of RAPM services can be delivered in various ways.  In addition to periodic performance reports delivered via email, the results of RAPM services are made available online.   This information is used for issue identification, performance optimization and even as a control sample for other performance statistics reporting.

RAPM is a straight-forward way to monitor the integrated elements of your self-service process.  RAPM can be as simple or complex as you need it to be based on your unique monitoring requirements and business objectives.

Some Real Data
Oftentimes, the value of something is best expressed in numbers (not just dollars).   So it might be interesting to note that in the 2 months prior to writing this article, IQ Services’ HeartBeat customers (that’s our name for the RAPM service) have seen unexpected issues or errors on 4 to 6% of their test transactions (which are typically generated 24 x 7).  Of these errors, over 22% are host connectivity or unavailability issues while 16% occurred because voice transactions were unexpectedly disconnected.

Although benchmark testing isn’t always relevant for every company, it might be interesting to compare your self-service solution performance to these figures.  Would a 4 to 6% error rate be an acceptable level of service for your customers and your business?  Does your solution experience more or less errors?  Do you always know when an issue is happening and when it is impacting your customers?

If you are interesting in finding out more about your solution’s performance, please get in touch and ask about our 30-day HeartBeat™ trial offer.   If we think we can help, we’ll let you know.  But if it looks like a different type of monitoring would be useful, we’ll point you in the right direction.