Observability for Cloud Contact Centers

With three-quarters of organizations already using Contact Center as-a-Service (CCaaS) solutions, cloud contact centers are now the backbone of customer experience management. And, with 89% of companies competing primarily on the basis of customer experience (CX) – up from just 36% in 2010, CX is today’s competitive battleground. To deliver exceptional customer service, contact centers need a deep, real-time understanding of their end-to-end contact center performance. This is where CX Observability comes into play.

What is Observability?

Observability is the ability to gain insight into the internal workings of any system by analyzing its outputs. A contact center is a complex “system”, providing an abundance of data outputs with technical, operations, and experience factors contributing to its overall performance. While generalized observability tools like Datadog are used in various domains, contact centers present unique challenges that require specialized observability solutions.

General-purpose observability tools often fall short when it comes to the specific requirements of CCaaS technology. The dynamic nature of contact center interactions and operations, coupled with the need for real-time monitoring and analysis for specialized hardware and software, demands purpose-built observability tooling. Operata provides a purpose-built CX Observability platform that serves as an essential complement to leading CCaaS solutions like Amazon Connect, Genesys CloudCX, and NICE CXone. In that way, Operata is like “Datadog for cloud contact centers”.

Why the Right Observability Tooling Matters More Now than Ever

Cloud migration promises greater efficiency and reduced complexity for contact center organizations. However, as contact centers increasingly migrate to CCaaS solutions, the complexity of managing these environments actually grows.

While many technical elements within the contact center may be well understood by the organization, some aspects like network configuration require specialized expertise and tooling when utilized for new payloads like WebRTC voice streaming. Additionally, with a new dependency on a CCaaS provider, new organizational and technical demarcation lines need to be defined, and processes put in place to handle issue resolution and escalations.

By leveraging purpose-built observability tools, organizations can gain comprehensive visibility into their cloud contact center performance. With CX Observability in place, contact centers can migrate to the cloud with confidence, proactively identify and quickly resolve technical issues, optimize performance, and uncover new insights and actions to improve customer satisfaction.

Essential Features for Cloud Contact Center Observability

When evaluating observability solutions for cloud contact centers, there are several key features to consider:

1. Assurance and testing tools: True end-to-end agent and customer experience measurement with real calls, at scale, across geographies and varying service locations.
2. Real-time monitoring: Instant visibility into contact center metrics and technical performance indicators enables proactive issue detection and resolution.
3. Customizable dashboards: Tailored dashboards allow contact centers to focus on KPIs and metrics that matter most to their unique environment.
4. Intelligent alerting: Automated notifications across the entire organization ensure that potential issues are addressed promptly, minimizing downtime and service disruptions.
5. Harmonized data: Correlated technical, operations, and experience data sparks insights and drives actions that improve contact center performance and enhance customer experience.

Data Available from Purpose-Built CX Observability Tools

Purpose-built observability tools for cloud contact centers provide a wealth of data, including:

• Technical performance: Agent workstation resource utilization, agent microphone type and driver, web browser and version, operating system and version, network performance metrics, and voice quality metrics.
• Operations metrics: Call volumes, IVR time, queue time, talk time, transfers, abandons, customer phone number, agent states, and more.
• Agent and customer experience: Agent and customer sentiment, changes in sentiment during calls, agent compliance and performance scorecards, and call tagging based on conversational analytics.

More importantly, by harmonizing the above data, contact centers unlock unprecedented and often unexpected insights into factors affecting contact center performance. For example, many industry professionals consider call transfers to be driven by agent behavior. However, Operata found that agents using their built-in mic are almost twice as likely to transfer calls – a correlated technical and operations data insight that can’t be obtained from any other observability tool.

Benefits of Observability Tools Purpose-Built for Cloud Contact Centers

Modern CX Observability tools offer several benefits, including:

• Enhanced customer experience: Deep visibility into factors affecting agent and customer experience enables contact centers to uncover new insights and take action to improve outcomes.
• Improved operational efficiency: Continuous monitoring and proactive agent guidance enable faster issue resolution for agents and the IT teams that support them, often without the time-consuming process of manually logging tickets.
• Increased agent productivity: Real-time CX Observability alerts and reduced downtime empower agents to spend their time more productively, and enjoy an improved employee experience.

To learn more about CX Observability return on investment (ROI), read this Operata whitepaper.

CX Observability – the Right Tool for the Job

With cloud contact centers, observability is no longer a luxury designed solely for IT teams, but rather a necessity for the entire organization. Regardless of where you’re at in your cloud journey, purpose-built CX Observability tools designed for CCaaS solutions provide the real-time insights and actions required to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

To take control of your contact center performance and unlock its full potential, sign up for a free trial of Operata's CX Observability software and get started in 30 minutes or less.

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