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.