Quick troubleshooting and improved visibility for WFH contact centre agents

With work from home becoming increasingly prominent, contact centres are facing a growing need to monitor Agent Experience remotely. Remote monitoring and network testing capabilities are essential to quickly detect and easily resolve any communications technology issues that might result in poor customer experience.

Nectar’s Endpoint Client solution, a COVID-inspired add-on to the company’s Digital Experience platform, Nectar 10, allows contacts centres to do just that.

Comprehensive Cross-Network Visibility

“Nectar has always looked at the CC communications environment as having a few different ‘health domains.’ And out of those different health domains, the endpoint has always been the most difficult one to handle,” says Tim Armstrong, VP Product Marketing at Nectar Corp.

“It was easier when it was a phone sitting on someone’s desk. But nowadays, the endpoint is one of the more challenging areas for IT operations to troubleshoot.”

The Endpoint Client is designed to give full visibility to contact centre operations teams regarding the health of the network connection, testing the connection between two or more points across the network. One is always the final endpoint (in WFH terms, the agent’s laptop); and the others can be in a public cloud service like Azure or AWS or in the company’s data centre.

Based on synthetic testing, the solution allows support staff to determine if poor call quality is being caused by internet provider connections or other types of remote network issues.

“The testing is typically done in context of other call quality information that we have from platforms being used by the contact centre such as Avaya, Cisco, Teams, Zoom, etc.”

Fast Troubleshooting, Optimal Call Routing

How does the Endpoint Client effectively help contact centres avoid agent downtime and maximize productivity and cost-efficiency?

First, it allows extremely fast troubleshooting.

“When a contact centre agent is aware of poor-quality calls, they can contact their Help Desk, who can then very quickly run a test to the Endpoint Client and help determine whether or not the network is the quality-impacting factor,” Armstrong explains.

This is particularly helpful in WFH environments since the network in those environments is not controlled by the enterprise. In this context, the Endpoint Client can also be used to look for time-of-day issues.

“For example, if every day at 3 pm there’s a sudden degradation of network performance for an agent, there can be decisions made to optimise or to avoid that time for that specific agent.”

The second major innovation that the Endpoint Client offers in terms of agent productivity is its contribution to what Nectar refers to as the Agent Health Index. The Agent Health Index, introduced as part of Nectar 10, is a numerical score attached to every agent that reflects a constantly updated view of how their individual call quality is trending.

The synthetic tests from the Endpoint Client are calculated into the Agent’s Health Index alongside actual call quality.

“It’s a very powerful tool that we believe will eventually be used by call routing platforms to determine whether or not agents should receive inbound calls,” notes Armstrong.

From Early Adoption to Public Launch

Nectar’s Endpoint Client was launched as part of their Early Adopters Program earlier in 2021 and was rapidly embraced by clients from various customer-facing industries such as travel, finance, insurance and banking.

“We’ve actually had so much demand for it that we had to wait a bit before we could announce it more publicly,” Armstrong shares.

After an incredibly successful early-adoption phase, the Endpoint Client is now officially available to all.

 

This post original ran on CX Today here.