Managing CX – Hidden Downtime and Blind Spots

Surprises can be fantastic and energizing, but for IT professionals not so.

In the increasingly complex arena of information and communications technologies, change is managed very carefully and monitoring is comprehensive.

As businesses grow and evolve, so does their infrastructure, making it difficult to maintain complete visibility of key systems. Blind spots emerge and are sources of downtime which cost money and turn staff attention away from productive activity to firefighting.

Cost of downtime

According to the Uptime Institute Symposium, average costs of IT systems downtime is impacting business at a rate close to $5,600 per minute. Revenue streams are impacted while employee costs are directed at the burning fire, and the reputational risk increases with each passing minute.

The new customer experience

Businesses depend heavily on telecommunications to engage with their customers. In fact, research from Statista shows that the preference for shopping online versus in-store decreases with increased age:

• 67% of millennials prefer to shop online
• 56% of gen-Xers prefer to shop online
• 41% of baby boomers prefer online shopping
• only 28% of seniors prefer online shopping

The B2C trend is reflected also in B2B markets and many businesses are simply not investing in brick-and-mortar premises; rather, they are engaging with their customers online, and via telephone and contact centre technologies.

While email, webchat and others are important communication channels, the humble telephone conversation remains the number 1 choice, particularly where the business transaction value is high or the customer service request is complex. It is simply more satisfying and comfortable for the customer to engage in conversation with a person.

Blind spots in the global telecoms network

Blind spots can lead to surprises or, worse, to a complete lack of awareness. With centralized contact centres servicing global markets, a simple phone call is far from simple.

For a customer to talk to an agent, a connection is established which transits the customer’s own network, the business’s network, and more. The “more” comes into play as carriers and network providers leverage intermediary relationships (other networks) at peak times or for specific routes. The end result is a phone connection involving multiple international interconnects through multiple regulatory jurisdictions, and things can, and do, go wrong.

Critically, if a customer connection fails before reaching the business network, the business is totally unaware and blind to the issue.

Additionally, if a customer does successfully connect, the long-distance network routing often experiences issues of latency, post-dial delay, and poor audio quality, which does not allow for a productive business conversation.

Mike Palmer

Customer satisfaction ratings are hurt when customers cannot make a call. The potential to foresee an outage and prevent it from happening is attractive. Using the Spearline platform, telecoms teams and customer experience teams can monitor services and identify interruption signs before they affect the customer. Uniquely, the Spearline platform monitors from the customer perspective and uses its extensive global network and global telecoms interconnect to identify issues beyond a business’s own network, addressing the blind spot and reducing hidden downtime.

In 2019, the growth rate of e-commerce sales is projected to be 21.5%, and in 2020 and 2021 it is projected to continue around that 20% mark, continuing the drive away from traditional brick-and-mortar business models.

For more information visit, www.spearline.com

Author: Robyn Coppell