NetSocket and ethosIQ Partner to Provide Enhanced Solution for Customer Contact Centers

The ethosIQ Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) provides a single comprehensive and accurate data resource for contact center reporting, analysis and system integration purposes. These data are based on realtime events taken from contact center routing infrastructures that are comprised of ACDs, contact routing frameworks (including telephony servers and peripheral gateways) and IVRs. Organizations with multiple different office work and contact center handling technologies and sites benefit from the accessibility of a single dashboard from which all applications are managed as provided by CEP. The system can also collect data from most non-voice / multimedia applications within office workflows such as email applications, CRM systems and Document Management Systems (DMS).

Experience garnered from prior engagements brought home the fact that customers have had a tendency to revamp their contact center operations without consideration of QoS and the overall customer experience. In support of this need ethosIQ and NetSocket announced a partnership to deliver a combined platform that provides an overall satisfactory customer experience. Under the partnership, ethosIQ will offer NetSocket's Cloud Experience Manager (CEM) as a component of its Customer Engagement Platform contact center solution. CEM enhances CEP by ensuring the quality of customers' call sessions.

"NetSocket's Cloud Experience Manager expands the range of business intelligence that the Customer Engagement Platform provides companies on customers' calls to their contact centers," said Scott Walker, CEO at ethosIQ. "We incorporate the best of complementary products to create a comprehensive customer service delivery platform that offers powerful functionality and an outstanding return on investment."

Cloud Experience Manager

CEM uses a distributed architecture deployed at major network segments (e.g., datacenters and contact centers) to provide a realtime correlated view of the different layers of the user experience: content quality - pertaining to the voice, video and data stream; session quality - basically the quality of the E2E transaction; and the network quality (a key differentiator) - involving the realtime hop-by-hop IP topology related to the physical devices and the endpoints in the network. An integrated view into end user experience from all three layers is delivered through a single console screen, typically deployed in the NOC, allowing enterprises and SPs to proactively detect, isolate and remediate network issues within UCC environments before they affect end user experience. The management system can be deployed in a VMware virtual machine environment.

The core of NetSocket's technology is its patented IP Correlation Engine (ICE). This multilayer information mashup service provides a dynamic and actionable analysis of service behavior. ICE technology correlates the three primary components of user experience: content, session and IP topology. Additionally, the technology allows organizations to quantify and enhance user experience via realtime monitoring and correlation across these components. These solutions can be deployed both by enterprises and SPs.

What This Means to Customers

The ethosIQ CEP is used to supply a single comprehensive and accurate data resource for contact center reporting, analysis and system integration purposes. Normally it is used by enterprises with contact centers of at least 250 seats and contact routing infrastructures that are comprised of ACDs, contact routing frameworks and IVRs from a mixture of suppliers including:

• IVR (Interactive Voice Response) and ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) - from vendors such as Aspect, Avaya, Cisco, Genesys, Intervoice, Nuance and Syntellect
  
  
• ACDs and contact routing frameworks - from vendors such as Aspect, Avaya, Cisco, Genesys and Siemens.

The types of realtime and historical reports and analytical applications that can be created with data from CEP are extensive but commonly include:

• Customer journey analysis - showing where, when and by who/what each leg of a customer's journey was handled.
  
  
• IT asset use analysis - typically contact volumes handled, IVR ports used / unused and directory number / extensions used / unused.
  
  
• Automated service analysis - how many customers made which selections and where transactions were abandoned.
  
  
• Transfer analysis - which dialed numbers, IVR routing options, IVR automated service applications and agents generate the most transfers.
  
  
• Handle time reports - call, after call work and office task handle time by agents, teams, skills, contact types business units and sites, etc.
  
  
• Phone and office agent work state reports - including log in/out ready/not ready and various after-call work types by agents, teams, business units and sites, etc.
  
  
• Service level reports - wait times and calls / work in queue by contact types, business units and sites, etc.
  
  
• Offered contacts and work reports - by contact / work types, business units and sites, etc.
  
  
• Contacts / work handled reports - by agents, teams, business units and sites, etc.
  
  
• Contacts abandoned reports - by contact types, business units and sites, etc.

Your business depends on customer loyalty, of which the customer communication experience is a critical component. Both testing your contact center infrastructure in a pre-production environment and maintaining ongoing monitoring are essential steps in maintaining customer satisfaction levels and your company's reputation. Customers should look at CEP and other competitive offerings from such vendors as Empirix, IQ Services and NACR. A "do nothing" strategy is incompatible with today's winner-take-all competitive and socially connected world.