Letter from the Publisher
by Jim Jenkins
Featured Services
Article on RAPM for Self Service Business Solutions
by Marla Geary
Articles
Link to IQ Services' article featured in Speech Technology Magazine
Asked & Answered
Question: What type of error notifications can I get with my new HeartBeat™ test drill, and is there a way to
schedule something different for day vs. night or weekday vs. weekend?
Fermentations
Navigating Around Wine Lists
by Chuck Blethe
Letter from the Publisher
April, 2009
Spring has finally arrived in Minnesota! We’ve even had a few beautiful days over 70 degrees and some of the golf courses have opened.
2009 is off to a very good start with the best first quarter in our history. Our view of the contact center and customer service industry continues to be encouraging in spite of the recession that is very real for all of us. The value of implementing speech, VoIP, and unified communications technology continues to be vital to meeting the short and long term customer service and financial objectives of our customers. There is a growing emphasis on life cycle management of business solutions that includes improved monitoring and increased emphasis on meeting service level requirements. Cost of ownership is a key consideration in making buying decisions related to new systems and services. The recession is definitely slowing down some deployments and delaying some decisions, but we are dealing with a slow down that we believe will quickly reverse itself as the economy recovers.
For this newsletter, we thought it appropriate to share information about a monitoring service that helps companies position themselves for success even – and especially when – the economy is tough. The concept behind our cost-effective remote availability and performance monitoring (RAPM) service –HeartBeat™ -- is so straight-forward and effective that we believe anyone can benefit from just reading about the RAPM methodology.
As always, we encourage you to get in touch and give us any feedback or insights you’d like to share.
Best wishes,
Jim Jenkins
Publisher
President & CEO
jjenkins@iq-services.com
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Featured Service: Remote Availability & Performance Monitoring
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:
- Proof of what your customers are really experiencing
- Confidence the integrated solution technologies are all working together
- Peace of mind that someone is watching to make sure the solution is working around the clock
- Immediate notification if something is not working as expected
- Actionable data to accelerate root cause identification and problem resolution
- 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.
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Asked & Answered
If you have a question that you'd like to see answered in our quarterly newsletter, contact us!
Question:
Question - What type of error notifications can I get with my new HeartBeat™ test drill, and is there a way to schedule something different for day vs. night or weekday vs. weekend?
Answer:
The HeartBeat™ notification process varies from customer to customer. In fact, we usually tell people “if you can write it down for us, we can probably do it.” With that said, customers typically opt for one of the following standard notification formats:
- Email messages with or without attached recording of the failed test call
- Condensed format e-mail messages for mobile devices
- Numeric messages for old style pagers
- Phone calls for live or automated answer that include a confirmation reply to stop or continue the escalation process
Sometimes customers choose a non-standard notification format that makes it easier for them to integrate HeartBeat™ data into their internal systems. The non-standard notification formats include:
- SNMP traps
- SFTP
- Other web services based methods
The error notification process also includes the ability to vary or suppress notification alerts based on time of day and day of week requirements. For example, a customer might opt to have e-mail notifications 24 x 7 and phone call notifications between 6 AM and 11 PM weekdays. The same customer might want those phone call notifications sent to Joe on Monday and Tuesday and to Sam from Wednesday through Friday. The notification process can also be configured to send different notifications based on error type, frequency of error and results at specific steps within the HeartBeat™ monitoring call.
The notification process is flexible and easily configured to meet your unique monitoring strategies.
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Fermintations
Before you head out to that famous restaurant with a fabulous wine cellar, you may want to consider the various ways wines are offered for sale in a restaurant and the markup you can expect to find. Most restaurants make their biggest profits on the wines they serve. The typical markup on a bottle of wine is two to four times their wholesale cost.
The least expensive wine offered by some restaurants is a house wine sold by the glass or carafe. These wines are normally purchased by the restaurant and represent a good value for their customers. The wine is basically sound and goes with many dishes offered by the chef on the menu. You can expect to pay $4-6 a glass for this wine offering.
Next - going up the scale in price - are premium wines that are sold by the glass or bottle. These wines are slightly better than the house wines and offer the restaurant patrons a chance to try them by the glass before purchasing a whole bottle to go with a meal. These wines may go for $7-15 a glass.
Next are the wines that are offered from the “regular” or “standard” wine list. These wines are normally higher in price and quality. A good wine list will contain names you recognize from vineyards with good reputations for producing good wines year after year. Wines from this list may range from $20 to $250 a bottle.
Finally, if your wallet can stand the prices, you can order older wines or rare wines from their “reserve wine list.” These wines are for serious oenophiles or patrons participating in very special occasions. Wines on this list can run upwards of $3500 a bottle.
Let's assume that you have asked about the house wine and have decided to go for a choice from one of their wine lists. The next thing to do is to assess their wine list. Some wine lists are bound in leather and some are printed on computer paper and slipped into the sleeve of a menu binder. The more permanent and immutable a wine list seems, the less accurate the listings are likely to be. A wine list that is printed from a computer and updated weekly is likely to yield better descriptions of their available wines. Some restaurants have a list of their wines available on-line via the Internet so you can preview them and be prepared to make your selection in advance. The best choice will always be the best value wine – not the cheapest wine on the list.
A wine list should tell you several things about each listed wine:
- Usually there is an item number or bin number for each wine.
- Of course, the list will give the name of each wine. If you have difficulty in remembering the name (or knowing how to pronounce it properly) you can just order by bin or item number.
- The list will have a vintage indication (the year the wine was made) for each wine. Sometimes there is no vintage so you will see the wine listing with NV, which means no vintage. If you see VV, that means the wine is vintage dated but you have to ask the wine steward what year it was made.
- Sometimes there is a brief description of the wine that expounds upon the virtues of its nose or taste characteristics.
- You may also see a suggestion for food pairings with each wine. You may or may not agree with their suggestion, depending upon your experience and individual taste preferences
- And you will always see the price of the wine.
Make it a habit of looking up the wine lists ahead of time for every restaurant you visit and read them carefully, keeping the above tips in mind. Before long you will feel comfortable with any wine list that you may encounter in a restaurant.
Chuck Blethen, Vigneron in Residence, Jewel of the Blue Ridge Vineyard, Marshall NC
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