The Journey to Trust

Analyst firm Gartner released new research last month exploring the development of Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) offerings in Europe. Within the report, NewVoiceMedia was referenced for being the only vendor to publish live service availability and performance data to customers and prospects.

As a new starter at NewVoiceMedia, I was really interested in finding out why the Trust Site was set up and how it’s maintained, so spoke with Chief Operating Officer Paul Turner, who was responsible for its creation.

The site was launched in April 2011 – prior to which there was traditional network monitoring in place. Paul explains, “Largely this was more inwardly focused, looking at the software, hardware and network equipment and how well those platforms were performing. While this was great from an engineering perspective, I questioned what our customers actually experienced.

“Essentially, the Trust Site started as, and remains to be, a customer experience monitoring capability. We wanted to build a means of having automated agents out in the public network, exercising our solution in real-time and able to report performance in real-time”.

So how was the site built, and over what time period? “Work on the concept started in April 2010”, Paul comments. “We looked at how it was going to take shape, how we would build the tests, eliminate false negatives and gather enough results that would be meaningful. It was a considerable engineering feat to bring that to realisation. What we have today are numerous automated agents out in the network who run tests at staggered intervals on a very frequent basis. We’re actually able to run around half a million tests a month, which roughly equates to one every five seconds”!

“We carry out 11 complex tests to exercise our entire software. These include checking that the correct text appears on web pages, ensuring all call recordings and reports are available, all links are working correctly and that the telephony is communicating with the web and database servers. The results are then available as a set of performance graphs.

“This also allows us to benchmark our service, as we have all the measurements for how long a repeatable set of actions take. We can compare the time taken today, with a week ago, and a year ago, meaning we can take the right corrective action if we need to address any performance changes that might occur”.

A key concern when moving a premises-based contact centre to the cloud is the reliance on an external party providing an equivalent or better service level. And quite right too; your contact centre is at the heart of your business, and if you’re entrusting it to an outsider, it’s crucial that you determine how stable the platform is. The Trust Site is designed to offer the same level of confidence that customers would get from the green light on the front of an on-premise box.

Paul adds, “Giving our customers and partners real-time access to information, means they can forget about managing a telephony infrastructure and focus on their business”.

You can download a complimentary copy of the Gartner report here.