Contact centers are a key investment in technological innovation that impacts both P&L and customer service satisfaction. Across several industries, from retail to healthcare to transportation, contact centers are often the most interpersonal interaction consumers have with a brand. So the experience that a customer has with an agent must be superb.
While many factors contribute to a positive customer experience, the quality of the underlying network and the performance of employee applications, like Amazon Connect or Genesys, play a significant role. Just think of how a dropped call or a choppy voice connection can mean the difference between a happy customer and a disgruntled one.
But assuring a high-performance contact center is no easy task with today’s Internet-dependent enterprise networks and distributed workers. Nevertheless, the flexibility of remote and hybrid work has endowed many employees with better work-life balance, improved productivity, and increased freedom and job satisfaction. Moreover, the Cisco Global Hybrid Work Study 2022 found that “more than three-quarters of respondents (78%) believe hybrid and remote working has improved all aspects of well-being, empowering employees to take care of their full selves in both their roles at work and beyond their jobs.”
At our recent Branch of One Summit, we heard from several customers that operate contact centers within their enterprises about just how critical the visibility from ThousandEyes was during their shift to remote and hybrid work. These business and IT leaders gave us helpful insight into how their contact center workers—and the IT teams that support them—adapted and thrived in their newly remote workplaces.
Data That Inspires Hybrid Work Confidence
Ted Sanfilippo, Associate Vice President, Global Network Services at Sutherland, knows these challenges first hand, having led the global enterprise services organization through its migration to remote work. Before its workplace transformation and deployment of ThousandEyes, Sutherland’s 33,000 employees worked in a controlled environment with on-site IT resources to help with problems.
Using ThousandEyes, Sutherland can now find the source of problems faster and get critical applications back online, significantly improving the digital experience of its global remote workforce.
“ThousandEyes afforded us the ability to look at actual data on all the users for a particular application or client environment to assess the situation and come up with a quick solution,” Ted said during his session at Branch of One Summit. “And even if we didn’t have a solution, we at least knew what the problem was.”
This improvement in mean-time-to-know for the organization’s remote workforce was a breakthrough because it allowed them to proactively communicate issues with their clients, instilling greater confidence in the business process and digital transformation services Sutherland provides. And with real-world testing data from ThousandEyes, Sutherland can now understand how each employee’s home Internet impacts their digital experience–allowing them to make informed policies and decisions that support hybrid workers.
The results: improved application and network performance, more productive remote/hybrid contact center workers, and increased client confidence.
Comprehensive, End-to-End Visibility
At the Branch of One Summit, we also heard from the automation and monitoring global lead of an influential computer software and hardware company who spoke on the value of contact center reliability. They called their contact centers “the lifeline of the company.”
Despite being a critical service, network troubleshooting for remote contact center employees often involved quite a bit of guesswork. Lacking a way to see from end-to-end, from user to app, made resolving issues arduous and time-consuming for those in frontline IT.
By using ThousandEyes, this organization eliminated the guesswork. For its contact center workers, it gained much-needed visibility into the end-to-end service delivery chain—across its network, the Internet, and services. Deploying roughly 70,000 end-user vantage points on their devices, this giant in the tech industry can now use visualizations and waterfalls powered by ThousandEyes to resolve issues fast.
Contact Center Success Starts With Visibility
Ensuring visibility into the network performance is at the forefront of ThousandEyes’ mission to improve the quality of the Internet, to improve the quality of life. Our Branch of One Summit demonstrated our dedication to delivering our product capabilities that help enterprise customers effectively support a more efficient, more resilient hybrid workforce. And by helping IT teams at modern enterprises save valuable time and avoid headaches while identifying and resolving issues, we know we’re inching closer to our goal for the Internet and those who depend on it.