All fields are required.
Making Digital Experiences Human
Brands today compete on experience. With so many options on the market for customers to choose from, it’s those companies that deliver top-notch touchpoints for care and commerce that secure prospects, retain customers, and meet their bottom-line goals.
As customer expectations continue to rise with the influx of technology, companies that deliver an innovative and first-rate experience win. But many companies are struggling to meet the high expectations of today’s consumer, which provides an opportunity for Sutherland Global Services.
Sutherland employs IT experts who sit down with clients to design and configure an overall architecture that meets their business needs with exceptionally engineered brand experiences. They do this by combining human-centered design with the scale and accuracy of real-time analytics, AI, cognitive technology, and automation.
The company has hundreds of blue-chip clients using its services to support digital transformation efforts and cover back-office needs, including customer call centers and technical support. With 44,000 employees located around the world, Sutherland uses its digital backbone spanning 144 countries to help brands interact on a human level.
Real-time Communication Across Complex Connectivity
Like most organizations in early 2020, the pandemic forced Sutherland to migrate its workforce to work from home. Prior to that, most of Sutherland’s employees worked in physical office sites where IT had complete control over their networks via MPLS circuits and SLAs tied to QoS metrics. With work-from-home, however, Sutherland lost visibility and control over its workers’ connectivity and had to contend with shoddy ISPs (Internet service providers) and the unpredictable Internet, as well as employee home environments.
Now consider that most of Sutherland’s work, both done internally and with external clients, requires real-time communication and collaboration. Leaving a customer waiting on a call because of an agent’s unstable router connection would simply be unacceptable. As would constant interruptions to virtual planning meetings caused by slow Internet speeds.
“We had a challenge initially where you'd have multiple agents or employees calling in saying they had a problem,” said Ted Sanfilippo, Vice President of Global Network Services at Sutherland. “They’d say ‘I'm losing connectivity to this solution’ or ‘I can't log into this solution,’ but you couldn't really get an understanding of where that problem was.”
Putting Performance at the Heart of the Experience
It bears repeating that connectivity is key to Sutherland's business model and its customer interactions. The company connects its backbone to client networks either directly through an MPLS connection, an IP SEC tunnel, or through the Internet. But while these varied modes of connectivity deliver service assurance and redundancy for the company’s broad service geographies, it also makes Sutherland’s architecture very complex.
So, when it came to supporting its newly massive remote workforce, the company needed a scalable way to better understand how well its employees could access applications and whether their home network performance was stable enough for client communication, especially those directed to call center agents. Specifically, Sutherland needed a way to measure the quality of each employee's home Internet connection, which is where ThousandEyes came in.
ThousandEyes Provides Visibility Into "Hard to See" Places
ThousandEyes visibility is important to Sutherland because it allows the company to resolve work-from-home connectivity situations quickly by identifying where the problem domain resides. Using Endpoint Agents, the company monitors application experience and network connectivity from user laptops and desktops in real-time and without disturbing worker flow. In the new hybrid world, this capability allows them to ensure that each agent is assigned the correct monitoring profile for their specific project.
“Within weeks, we were able to move our people to work at home and securely get them to connect to our environment and provide the same services they had before,” said Sanfilippo.
Making Work from Home, Work for Everyone
Sutherland expanded its market share following its transition to a predominantly hybrid workforce with support from ThousandEyes visibility into its Internet-enabled corporate network.
“ThousandEyes allowed us to determine if an employee had a good ISP carrier,” said Sanfilippo. “That went a long way to helping us ensure that person working at home is meeting our SLA standards.”
On top of meeting customer expectations with great service, Sutherland’s recent success can also be attributed to the quality talent it attracted since transitioning to a more distributed workforce setup. Admittedly, managing a call center team from a physical office was easier. But for the company, hybrid work seems to be the best way to get talent with different strengths and across various cities and regions, hence why it plans to continue operating under this model for the foreseeable future.
As Sanfilippo recognizes, “that visibility component has become the real trick in actually enabling that work-from-home capability.”
Figure 1: Path visualization from ThousandEyes provides valuable insight into connectivity issues and network outages.
Start Monitoring Your Network