Using assurance for reactive repairs after the fact is old tech. The businesses moving to real-time observability are going to crush customer experience.
Assurance finds what broke; observability shows what’s about to break, so customers never feel it.
The current method is to conduct performance evaluation, consult monitoring reports, and perform routine system health checks after the fact. You get comprehensive insight into the running of your contact center and take action to make changes when needed.
It works. You see what’s broken and you fix it.
The only problem?
You’re being reactive rather than proactive.
The solution?
Traditional assurance needs real-time observability.
When you combine traditional assurance with real-time observability, there’s the potential for a serious business impact: real-time visibility into customer experience reduces mean time to repair (MTTR) and improves overall customer satisfaction.
Assurance isn’t broken. When something goes wrong in your technical setup, you identify the problem and fix it. This will never go away.
That said, this approach is somewhat limiting when it comes to the customer experience.
☒ Do they care if you’ve fixed a problem after the matter?
☑︎ Do they care they can get hold of you quickly and get their issue remedied?
When complementing traditional assurance with real-time observability, you have the unique opportunity to capture potential issues before they happen.
Think of it like your fuel gauge in your car. Knowing you’ve run out of gas is partially useful because you know why your car has stopped moving. The better scenario, however, is getting an alert when you have 50 miles left in the tank and a visual representation of your tank’s capacity at all times.
There’s a reason why you have fuel gauges on cars. It removes the guesswork, chance, and reactiveness. That’s precisely what observability does, too.
Contact center observability means continuously monitoring every part of your customer support system (e.g.call quality, agent actions, and technical performance) in real time.
It brings all this information together so you can quickly spot and fix problems before they affect customers.
When you have access to real-time observability, you connect with what customers are experiencing and gain a view of how they perceive your business.
After all, many of your customers' only touchpoints with you are phoning customer service or receiving a bill. It pays to be ahead of the curve and get a view from their side of the lens.
You must view observability as an enhancement rather than a replacement for assurance. After all, knowing something is happening in real time doesn’t mean you won’t review it later to avoid repeated failures.
In fact, when coupled with real-time observability, traditional assurance becomes more effective. Armed with the data and knowledge of what happened in the moment, the assurance phase is more efficient and lends itself to better, longer-term changes.
If you’re in agreement that assurance + observability is the way forward, our next quest must be to provide both without introducing complexity.
By introducing observability in the same interface as typical assurance reporting, quality managers get a single unified view for all technical and monitoring concerns.
Add to that agent experience metrics, customer sentiment tracking, and other experience measures and you’ve got a single pane of glass that peers deep into the performance and inner workings of your contact center platform.
Be it call center supervisors, quality manager, IT staff, or even your director of customer experience, everyone benefits from a comprehensive suite of data, monitoring, and key performance indicators:
As a provider of customer service, you can bolster the new business process by informing prospects exactly how much you put into ensuring their consistent experience.
Likewise, when converted to paying customers, you stand out among other service providers as the benchmark for competitors to beat. It’s not so much that customers will rave about your service; it’s more about how little friction there is when they contact you. The lack of numbers speak volumes in this case.
Want to try the single desktop approach for yourself?
Start your free 14-day trial with Operata today and experience the difference a true CX Observability platform makes in your ability to craft the best possible contact center experience for your agents and customers.
Moving from an assurance-only setup to assurance + observability is a piecemeal process.
The even better news? There’s no downtime as you turn one thing off and turn another on. Rather, you’re enhancing your existing setup.
There are three main components when it comes to migration:
Working through this interactive process introduces modern observability components without disregarding existing assurance processes and tools.
For integration with your existing systems, you can use API connectivity and data normalization for a unified view across different vendor environments.
Operata integrates with CCaaS such as Amazon Connect, NICE, Genesys and Voice Enabled CRM's such as Zendesk, Salesforce and Service Now.
When Reciprocity moved from assurance to observability, its primary goal was to expand its monitoring capabilities and gain deeper operational insights.
Specifically, Reciprocity was intrigued by the ability to monitor various aspects of calls:
“Operata really opened up a lot of the data metrics for us, to more easily understand what was going on when there were issues.”
~ Tyler Cross, CTO - Reciprocity Industries.
Seeing agent behavior metrics unified with technical data from the agent workstations unlocked new insights into the relationships between technical, operations, and experience data and their impact on the customer experience.
By adding the Operata Platform to its cloud contact center operations, Reciprocity was able to improve agent and customer experience, increase agent effectiveness and productivity, and accelerate their time-to-value with Amazon Connect.
So you know all the benefits of observability. You understand that assurance paired with real-time is a formidable combination. But you’ve got to build a business case.
Operata took industry collateral to establish the cost benefit derived from optimizing the customer experience, having end-to-end measurement and automating test cycles.
The results show that a significant year on year return on investment is gained with an investment in Operata, exceeding 360% annually. Moreover, the pay-as-you-go nature of the service delivers immediate return on investment with the cost savings exceeding the solution investment from week 1 of using the platform.
This is achieved specifically by introducing a 90% reduction in troubleshooting time. If you know problems are occurring (or about to occur), you spend less time working out what happened in the past. There’s a theme here.
Likewise, reporting time gets reduced by around 95%. Trustpower eliminated the 15-minute manual issue reporting process that agents previously used, along with the additional 20 minutes service desk time for data processing.
"In moving to Amazon Connect, and Agents working from home, Trustpower needed real-time visibility of quality and issues. In hindsight, we should have put Operata in sooner."
~ Rachel Southon - Project Manager, Technology & Delivery, Trustpower.
To track this ROI over time, document the following over your first three, six, and 12 months:
What industry analysts are deeming the rise of observability can be a reality for your contact center. And it takes less effort than you’d think.
To start planning your new look monitoring dashboard, take all your outputs (mute states, hold music, jitter, latency, packet loss, etc.) and run them through Operata’s artificial intelligence tools.
You get a view of what’s working, what’s not, and where you can experience improvements. The next step is proving the ROI for your specific business, which starts at day one.
If the future of contact center availability is assurance and observability, make sure you’re not the support function getting left behind.
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