CEM: Current Buzzword, Old Methods

Do you ever get that feeling of being run over by a new trend or acronym that seems to have come out of nowhere? Welcome to CEM (Customer Experience Management). In the last few months not only has this new buzzword gained ever increasing levels of hype but it is being applied to everything, everyone and all products and services being sold today. So here we are in another hype curve at the moment. This feels a bit like when “CRM” came on in the late 90’s. Anyone remember “360 degree view of the customer” or “Customer Intimacy?” We heard all those promises and visions of turning the contact center into a profit center while simultaneously increasing ROI, reducing churn and delivering customer nirvana.

Do you remember life before and after CRM? Did you get the promised results? If not, what will change with the new buzzword of the decade? CEM holds similar promise as a methodology for increasing customer satisfaction. Promises made by vendors today tout the virtues of tools, metrics, analysis etc. Don’t get me wrong. I agree with the premise. I believe there are lots of good tool sets and methods out there today. I also believe there are tools and technologies inside your company right now that are not being leveraged to the fullest extent.

We are seeing a new set of organizational changes that are addressing the problems. Titles are showing up in companies like Chief Experience Officer, Director of Customer Experience, etc. Yes, the movement has momentum. Companies are realizing there is something to be done to improve customer experience – something they can control. I read in a recent article that “if all your products are the same as your competition, the differentiator has to be service”. How can you disagree with that? The global economy has commoditized all kinds of goods. Is one EBAY purchase significantly different from the next?

So how or should you implement a CEM solution? Earlier in my career, I worked as a practice leader in the CRM/Contact Center field looking at business processes and technologies to improve operations. Things haven’t changed too much. Traditional consultative methods still play nicely in today’s “new” market. Initiatives will start in the requirements definition/gathering phase. We’ll do a current state analysis to better understand our people, processes and technologies. We’ll look at where we need to go (future state) and what we need to do to get there (gap analysis).

Of course, it has always been harder than it sounds. But it is a proven approach to some pretty big problems.

Tony O'Brien
IQ Services
612.243.6700 | www.iq-services.com

IVR, Agents & Business Rules = Customer Satisfaction

During internal meetings last week, we got side-tracked on the subject of “the customer satisfaction silver bullet.” As we all know, there is no such silver bullet. A lot of folks talk like they have the only answer. But at the end of the day, it takes a great deal of coordination, information and determination to manage and improve the technology, people and processes that influence customer satisfaction.

Some services and methods help clients optimize the performance of technologies that support customer interactions like IVR and CTI. Some services capture the voice or opinion of real customers after using IVR and other contact center solutions (e.g., CallerBeat™ Real-Time Customer Experience Interviews). But somewhere in all the data provided via remote monitoring, internal measurements, analytics, customer surveys and more, companies find meaningful indicators about how to best manage technology, people and process in way that optimizes customer satisfaction. Does that mean every customer is 100% satisfied after every interaction? Absolutely not. But just because we can’t achieve the goal, doesn’t mean we should stop trying.

And no matter how we come at the issue, there’s always another meaningful perspective and source of actionable data.

Do you have any questions or comments about this blog? We would love to hear from you! Please send us an email!

Marla Geary

Hosted IVR: Letting Go Is Hard to Do

It seems so logical. IVR and other communications technologies evolve all the time. Each new advancement offers cost savings, efficiency and/or end-user benefits that can’t be ignored. And hosted IVR providers allow businesses to take advantage of these advancements without huge upfront investments.

In today's economy, if something isn’t part of your company’s core business, it is clearly a candidate for outsourcing or hosting – IVR is no exception. With hosted IVR offerings popping up on every corner, it can be hard to justify keeping IVR functionality in-house.

So why is it so hard for some of us to make the transition? There are security concerns of course. But these concerns can be effectively overcome in a variety of ways. Based on discussions with many of our clients, the pain really seems to be letting go of the control and first-hand insight. You and your team know how critical the IVR is to your business. If it doesn’t perform, there will be consequences for both you and your customers. If you move to a hosted IVR solution, you’ll have to rely on a middleman of sorts to interpret results and keep you informed. If problems arise, you’ll have to trust someone else’s team to solve the problem with the same vigor and concern that your team would exhibit. Despite assurances and SLAs, this leap of faith can be too risky for some teams and businesses.

But of course there is a way to move to a hosted IVR solution with much less stress and worry. Outside-In Monitoring is a straight-forward, efficient way to stay on top of the performance of your IVR solutions and hosted-service providers at the same time. By monitoring the end-to-end solution with transactions that do the things real customers do, our clients know their hosted, in-house and hybrid integrated IVR solutions are working as expected and delivering the desired customer experience.

One contact recently told us they couldn’t imagine moving to a hosted IVR provider without the objective, real-time insight we can provide through Outside-In Monitoring. If you and your team are concerned about making the change or you want more insight into the performance of an existing IVR application, please give us a call. We can give you peace of mind that you’ll know exactly how your IVR is working.

Marla Geary

http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

You’re Taking It Out of Context

Living with a writer for the last 36 years, one of my favorite books has become “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.”

The cover of the book shows two pandas, the vegetarian whiting out the comma, and the NRA member walking to the right brandishing a handgun.

The point is, of course, that punctuation matters. Why? Because punctuation establishes a context for words and thereby turns them into a thought & gives them meaning. Of course it’s not just about punctuation – content has to be coherent for there to be identifiable meaning – but context certainly matters.

How many times do we hear “I know I said that, but you took it out of context and that’s not fair?” And what that really means is that when we take something out of context, it can be misleading.

If you run a contact center, you’re no doubt swimming in numbers from all of your analytics, metrics and KPIs. It’s all important data of course, but without context, data are merely numbers that’ll drive you to distress. You may be using Tivoli or HP Operations Manager (formerly Open View) to help you organize your data and give it structure. Structure is certainly important, but I assert structure does not establish meaningful context.

To truly have context, you also need perspective. “So what am I getting at?” I hear you muttering.

You need to establish context for the metrics you get from your contact center technology instrumentation, and to do that you have to add perspective to the mix…your customers’ perspective.

Here’s what I mean…

All that data you get from your high-level system monitoring solution can in fact be nothing more than noise when there’s no context. Many times I’ve heard “The first thing we do is shut off the audible alarms because with a network like ours, there’s always something broken and if I jumped every time I got an alert that a server or segment had an issue, I’d be spending all my time chasing ghosts. Most of the time it’s just not that bad.

”What you really need to know is when the customers’ experience is being adversely impacted by a technology issue so you can use the raw data from your internal monitoring systems to identify the bad actor and get back to business. You can’t try to pursue every hiccup as though it were the end of the world – unless it is. And if it is, you need to know NOW. Whether the issue is trivial from the inside out perspective or a major failure, the context of what’s happening to customer is what you need to know so you can appropriately direct you attention.

Mike Burke
http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Monitoring! Monitoring! Monitoring!

Whenever we start talking about our remote availability and performance monitoring services (HeartBeat™), like I did just a few weeks ago during a monitoring webinar, there is invariably a little confusion at the outset about the differences between remote availability and performance monitoring, call recording/agent quality monitoring, and voice quality monitoring. So I thought it might be helpful and interesting to define these different monitoring methods in a blog post. And I promise to try to do it without talking like an engineer (too much). So here goes…

Call Recording/Agent Monitoring/Quality Monitoring refers to applications that record and capture data from conversations between customers and call center agents including tracking the agent desktop transcript during customer interactions. The application allows supervisors to playback an agent-customer conversation and at the same time see exactly what the agent was doing during the call. Some of these applications involve speech analytics to assist with call trends analysis. This information allows contact center supervisors to assess agent performance and business rules in terms of efficiency and appropriateness, as well as to coach performance and offer self-paced training to agents who need it.

Voice Quality Monitoring in the IP Telephony world is typically an automatically generated mathematical assessment or grade that asserts how good a call sounded and how it would be rated by people if they were listening to the call at the same point the measurement is taken. There are different ways to calculate Voice Quality; I’ll try to provide a few simple definitions of a few of the common methods:

• PESQ asserts what listeners would think based on the technology involved in the process and the measured performance of the network carrying the traffic.
  
• QoS is a way to look at and rate multiple characteristics about a call so ultimately you can try to improve on each of the characteristics until the quality is satisfactory.
  
• MOS is literally a subjective assessment by a bunch of people in a room voting on how good a call sounds.
  
• R Factor is a number or score that tries to quantify the subjective MOS assessment made by a bunch of people in a room.

Suffice it to say that a sniffer (or router) that watches voice samples and packets going by can determine how much packet loss, jitter, and delay is happening at the network segment where it’s inspecting the packets. It can also score the call, and report the score on an instantaneous or call by call basis. That’s voice quality.

The servers that make up an IP telephony implementation, whether contact center or unified communications, are constantly monitoring and reporting on voice quality and notifying staff in some fashion if voice quality gets out of an acceptable range. It’s really important to note that in an IP world, voice quality can be really great in one spot, and really lousy somewhere else. And depending on how the path is stitched together, the voice quality numbers reported can be 100% accurate but misleading, i.e., the audio could be completely unintelligible for some reason, but the network could be carrying that garbled audio perfectly, resulting in a perfect score. On the other hand, the network may distort the audio somewhat due to packet loss or jitter, resulting in a less than perfect calculated score, yet the message could easily be intelligible by a real person. Fun, huh?

Remote Availability & Performance Monitoring is an external monitoring method that periodically calls or interacts with self-service customer facing solutions to ensure they are available and performing as expected. It is external because the transaction is generated outside the system being monitored just like a real end-user transaction.

Let’s step back a minute. Think about how a contact center is put together. Now overlay the sequence of interactions a caller has with the self-service or communications technology and all its supporting functionality (e.g., switching, routing & hunting, speech reco and text-to-speech technologies, data access & retrieval methods, CTI screen pop, etc.). Now associate each step of a typical telephone call with a unique part of the contact center’s self-service infrastructure including CTI and routing processes required to transfer a call to an agent as well. Because each test call follows a carefully defined script from the time the equipment goes off-hook and dials all the way through the end of the call, a remote availability and performance monitoring transaction acts just like a customer doing a specifically defined activity (such as checking an account balance, reporting a power outage, etc.). It verifies at each step that the system is saying exactly what is expected and responding to the end-user’s inputs within established response time thresholds. It is accessing and interacting with the self-service system. By doing so it is literally monitoring the availability and performance of that system. If the test call process determines the system is not saying what it is supposed to at any step, or taking too long to respond to end-user inputs, notifications alert someone specifically designated to assess the severity of the issue and to deal with it.

So there you have it – Agent Monitoring, Voice Quality Monitoring, and Remote Availability and Performance Monitoring – side-by-side.

Mike Burke

www.iq-services.com
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Poll Results and Filling the Gap between Internal Metrics and Customer Experience

Last week I had the opportunity to present a webinar called “Internal Monitoring Isn’t Enough.” It was an opportunity for me to educate attendees about a critical gap many companies haven’t bridged between internal performance stats and the true picture of how their contact center and communications solutions are performing – in other words, the customer experience. The simple method (or in our case, the cost-effective service) we discussed for filling this gap is Remote Availability & Performance Monitoring (RAPM)*. As you all know, polls in webinars are good, so we included several in our webinar to get a sense of the make-up and experiences of our audience. Not surprisingly, more than 60% of the attendees identified themselves as IT or service providers.

Much more interesting were the responses to our poll questions about what people are doing today to find out if their systems are working.

* Over 60% experienced outages lasting 2 or more hours
* 30% reported outages going undetected for more than a day
* Only 1 in 3 attendees relied on some kind of monitoring at all to learn about customer-impacting technology issues
* Another 13% get performance news weekly when they review performance reports or have no idea at all

Most shocking of all to us (despite the fact that we sell services to address this problem) was the following poll results:

* More than 55% of the respondents indicated they count on call center agents or customer complaints to tell them about customer-impacting technology issues!!!

Ultimately it appeared that 68% respondents were not proactively trying to determine how communications technologies impact customers.

Can you imagine trying to drive a car that’s low on oil for 2 hours before the Check Engine light comes on? Or driving with a flat tire for more than a day?

You wouldn’t do these things intentionally unless you thought it was too hard or you didn’t have an alternative to fix the issue. Similarly, no one would intentionally irritate customers (and ultimately the agents who talk with customers) hoping their complaints would provide enough information to help resolve a technology issue.

But off course that’s why we held the webinar in the first place…to let folks know there is a simple and effective way to sample and report upon customer experience that also lets you know exactly what’s going on so you can ACT when it matters.

Mike Burke

You Are Here

Last week, we were talking with a few people from a well-known research institute. We were just introducing ourselves and one of the women started talking about quality and service assurance issues for the contact center. She talked about the value of bottoms up and top down metrics for the contact center. But she also talked about a lingering gap that still remains when it comes to the ability to associate this plethora of great information with what is really happening to customers at a given moment. How do you effectively and simply put all that info into context? There are so many cures out there like speech analytics and surveys. And yet the cures sometimes come with more obstacles to overcome like: high costs, information overload, disassociation from actual transactions, lack of real time data and the possibility that the cure could itself impact the customer experience (e.g., a survey).

That’s where we got to jump in and say “Thank you for making our sales pitch for us.” She was effectively describing the gap our services fill.

Do you remember the first time you went to a mega mall or foreign airport? Do you remember how relieved you were when you found the map with the little yellow “You are here” arrow? That’s what remote availability and performance monitoring does for people navigating the megamall of contact center performance technologies and metrics. It offers the simple, straightforward view of integrated technology performance without impacting an actual customer. By monitoring the steps of a real end-user interaction, it lets you know when something goes wrong in the interaction and where to look for the problem. It provides that little yellow arrow saying “start here.” In the whirlwind of data (e.g., AHT, BHCC, abandoned calls, etc. etc.), remote availability and performance monitoring provides context so your data isn’t just data, it is actionable information.

Want to learn more? Join us for a live webinar on Tuesday, March 16 at 1 PM Central or download the recording whenever the time is right for you: REGISTER HERE.

Marla Geary

www.iq-services.com
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Communication Mishaps

We all know business is about generating revenue. In today’s era of social media, instant gratification and self-service, customer communications have a dramatic impact on revenue (just ask Toyota). Arguably, communication is the key to happy customers and a thriving business. And communication mishaps can ruin customer relationships!

I observed an example of a communication mishap at lunch yesterday. Being one of those busy people with an overloaded to-do list, I decided to go through a “fast food” drive-thru. The line was long but I expected it to move fast. It was a “fast food” restaurant and they should be prepared for a lunch rush, right?

After a 5 minute wait (5 minutes = 1 hour in fast food time) the voice from the speaker said, “We are only taking cash right now… is that OK?” I thought to myself “What if it wasn’t OK? What if I didn’t have cash?” Clearly the 2 cars ahead of me didn’t have cash evidenced by the way they squealed out of the line! I even watched one of them go across the street to a competitor.

Think about the goodwill this company could have created by having an employee walking through the drive-thru informing customers about the issue. Maybe those customers could have gone into the restaurant to use the onsite ATM instead of squealing away. I know the next time I’m in a hurry and I don’t have cash, I will pass by this place for sure.

Since I work at IQ Services, this of course got me thinking about communications technology and the importance of first call resolution objectives. Some companies (maybe not enough if you check out GetHuman.com) put a lot of effort into making sure customers know what they need to know in order to successfully complete a transaction the first go around — whether they hit the call center or just the IVR app.

But I wonder if these same companies realize the frustration customers feel when they can’t even get to their expensive, well-designed apps and technologies. A few nights ago, my husband was working on a budget and needed information from the bank. He called numerous times throughout the evening and repeatedly heard an “All circuits are busy…” message. Why didn’t they know their system was down? What good was their first call resolution strategy when my husband couldn’t even get his call through? Like the fast food place, why didn’t they have a backup plan to alert customers to the issue? To re-route them to the info they needed or at least to an agent? I wonder how long it took them to find out about it. I know it was at least 5 hours because that’s how long my husband tried before he gave up.

I wonder how many transaction fees and other revenue generating and customer service opportunities they missed in those 5 hours.

Kristy Buddensiek

www.iq-services.com
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

What’s on Your Roadmap this Week?

Just for fun, I thought it might be interesting to talk about some of the exciting trends we’re seeing in the industry. If you work for a company that owns, supports, services or sells to contact centers, you no doubt have a similar list of your own. You’ve probably got a roadmap that identifies the trends appropriate to your market and how you can best leverage and evolve your product or service to meet tomorrow’s customer requirements.

So here’s a partial list of the things we have addressed or are preparing to address with our services in the near future:

• Multichannel touchpoints
• SIP
• Cloud services
• Virtualization
• Unified (not merely converged) contact centers that extend into the enterprise
• Virtual contact centers, i.e., contact centers without walls
• Voice + Visual
• Video self-service
• Multi-modal transactions that demonstrate, not merely explain

As pipes get bigger, servers faster and applications more capable, the user experience gets richer and your responsibilities become more complex. Our challenge is to find ways to help you evaluate and monitor those complex and ever-evolving end-user interactions. In order to do that, we have to shut up and listen to where you are going with your plans to implement, support, service or sell contact center technologies.

So what’s around the corner for you? What challenges/opportunities are you prepared to take advantage of? Who are you listening to? You may only be self-service IVR with screen-pop to an agent today, or perhaps a website with a click-to-chat window, but you probably already know what’s coming if you don’t already have it.

Mike Burke
http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Being a Small Business: Part 3

A couple of weeks ago, Gregg Williams kicked off a blog series about “Being a Small Business.” He wrote about a question that many small businesses hear from their prospects.

Why should I do business with a small business?”

Gregg talked about some of the advantages of working with small businesses and posed the very interesting and amusing question “Given all the great stuff small businesses can do, why would you want to do business with one of those bigger guys?”

The following week, Jim Jenkins weighed in on the topic. He pointed out that small businesses have the opportunity and responsibility to stay close to customers and to see every business opportunity as a partnership, not merely a transaction.

In Part 3 of this series, I’d like to explore the “Why should I do business with a small business?” question from a slightly different angle. What I’ve learned over the years is that sometimes a prospect asks this question when what they really mean is “If I invest time and resources into a partnership with you, how will I know your small business will still be around in 6 months or a year?”

When you get this kind of concern from a prospect, you want to help them get comfortable with partnering with your small business. You want them to share your confidence that a small business can be a partner they can turn to year after year. Small businesses play a pivotal role in many markets. They make products and services accessible to customers who might not otherwise have an appropriate option. Small businesses provide that all important alternative to the “Big Guy” in the market who might otherwise monopolize price, distribution, scope and more. I want my prospects to know I understand our special role in the food chain.

So how do I get customers to understand all this? Clearly each small business has its own way of addressing the “How do I know you’ll be here?” question. At IQ Services, the initial answer sounds something like…

Because we want to be here. Because we care. Because we have fun. Because we know where the industry is going. Because we listen. And because IQ Services builds partnerships that grow into relationships.

And then we get to the “prove it” stage of the conversation. That’s where our service offering roadmap comes in…

Our roadmap is the tangible evidence of our experience, care, market knowledge, listening skills and commitment to being a reliable partner. Our roadmap is about doing a better job of what we already do for our customers as well as anticipating and providing testing techniques and services that will help customers have confidence the next time they implement that “next big” thing in their contact center.

When prospects understand we have a vision and roadmap for our offerings and for staying relevant in the market, they get comfortable. Prospects recognize our sincerity. In our case, they sense our very real commitment to staying in business so the marketplace has an expert, cost-effective testing service to turn to when the “Big Guy” can’t move quick enough or provide that high-touch service that meets their unique needs. We know our presence in the marketplace makes remote testing and monitoring available to companies that don’t have the internal resources (time, money, schedule, expertise, and commitment) to do it themselves.

So what are other small businesses doing to address “will you be here tomorrow” question. Do you agree this is the question prospects are asking? Let us know what you think. mgeary@iq-services.com.

Marla Geary
http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Being a Small Business: Part 2

One of the great things about being a small business is that you are never too far from your customers.

When we started our company, we committed ourselves to delivering the best possible customer service. Sounds like many small companies, doesn’t it? We knew we could make it by always focusing on the customer’s need. For IQ Services, it was the customer’s need to have confidence in the end-to-end performance of their contact center and communications business solutions. It seemed to come easy for us because of our collective experience in implementing telecommunications, contact center and IVR solution. We were naturally sympathetic to our customers. We’d walked in their shoes. We instinctively understood the need for a highly adaptable testing platform and related methods to meet very unique architectures, applications and business requirements.

But we also knew our customers needed to “see” our vigilance in action…not just hear the customer service spin. And because we’re a proud small company like so many others, they do get to “see” it.

Feedback from customers reaches all the people in the organization. We respond quickly to customer ideas and requests. And if someone in the company senses an issue or opportunity to make things better, we proactively make the change right then so our customer has the best experience we can possibly create for them.

When we sensed customers needed a flexible approach to test pricing and scheduling, we responded. We created customized pricing options to meet the unique technical, schedule and budget requirements of each customer. Incremental packaging and explicit re-test scope give customers control. Flexible scheduling practices 24 x7 with no up-charge give customers peace of mind.

When we saw the value of having everyone on the customer’s implementation team – including vendors – participate in the test real time, we immediately responded. We made it a part of our recommended testing practice.

When we saw how powerful it was to have recordings of all calls, we responded. We quickly added recording capabilities so customers could listen to each test call as it completed.

When we saw the power of providing on-line, real-time access to testing activity and results, we created tools and methods to provide customers with the visibility they needed to quickly identify and fix problems.

As we start our 14th official year as a successful small business, we continue to look for ways to improve our testing practices and customer service. For our company like so many other small businesses, it isn’t the size of the company, but the dedication and responsiveness of the staff that make us an ideal partner for companies of any size. Our ability to leverage technology doesn’t hurt either. We react quickly and make changes without the need to jump through management approval hoops. We give customers what they need when they need it.

Being a small business is a good thing. Working with one can be just as good…maybe better.

Jim Jenkins
http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Being a Small Business: Part 1

The other day, an Account Executive and I were talking with a prospect about testing their voice systems. The customer asked an interesting question. Why should my company do business with a small company like IQ Services? Of course, we’ve heard this question before and we have a response (which we’ll share in an upcoming blog post) that usually allays any concerns our prospects might have. But what I find most interesting about this question is that we – IQ Services employees and management alike – don’t think of ourselves as a small company. Yes, we fit the definition in terms of employee count and in terms of the many hats you get to wear when you work for a small company. But it doesn’t feel that way. It got me thinking about why.

Is it because so many of our customers are on the Fortune 500 list? Is it because we’ve served hundreds and hundreds of customers with communications technology that supports just a handful to hundreds of thousands of transactions per day? Or is it because we deliver services all over the world including North America, EMEA, CALA and Asia/Pacific? Is it because we are able to test with 20,000+ concurrent telephone calls or unlimited browsers? Or that we have distributed facilities for generating millions of monitoring transactions?

When I look at the ability of small (albeit talented and dedicated) group of people to so successfully leverage technology to do so much, I understand why we don’t feel small. I’m sure there are many other small businesses out there that feel the same way for similar reasons and more. When you couple this kind of success with the kind of unique responsiveness a small company can offer its customers, it makes you wonder why the prospects aren’t asking the bigger guys “Why should I do business with a big corporation like you?”
Mike Burke

http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Test at the top of the stack™

Remember trays of Hollerith punchcards & clunk clunk clunk clunk card readers? Fortran?

Remember hearing (and saying) “…but I only changed one blessed card!?!”

Remember the lesson that came from that exercise?

You have to test the whole thing together, not just the pieces by themselves... that if the whole thing doesn’t work together, it doesn’t matter that the pieces individually are works of art.

Fast forward 40 years – to BUTT Sets, T-BERDs and unit testing. Then add RFC compliance, protocol testers, sniffers, network assessment, Nessus, nmap, nikto, PerfMon, et al – it is all very important and all very, very necessary. But not sufficient.

Why?

Because it’s all about whether or not your contact center solutions can be used the way you want them to be used under the traffic conditions you expect. Not just whether or not the servers respond to a ping or a traceroute, and your ports are provably secure from attack.

And the Users interact at the top of the stack, not somewhere down in the layers. The layers all have to happily interact with each other but in the end it’s about what happens when someone tries to use it, not just whether or not Tivoli or Performance Center show no red or amber alarms.

You need more than your technology’s inside-out view of the world to make sure your customers are being served. In this situation, the top-down view is the one that matters.

Test and monitor at the top of the stack and you’ll know how your customers are really being treated by your technology.

Mike Burke

IQ Services
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423
http://www.iq-services.com/

Wishing You A Great Holiday Season!

We decided to spread some giggles this shortened holiday week - without putting an eye out - and thought we’d poke a little fun at ourselves in the process. Check out these videos that include many of the folks at IQ Services you deal with every day – anyone correctly identifying all of the IQ Services celebs in these vignettes wins an IQ Services coffee mug!

Here’s wishing everyone out there the very best for the Holiday Season and for all of 2010.

May you travel safely and not get stuck on a tarmac, and may all your dreams of virtualized implementations come true.

Twitter is like howling at the moon

So you probably tweet, right? I’ve got a couple of accounts so I can be myself (@bznbdad) & then also put forth the corporate persona (@mfrburke). But I’m a geezer and it’s just weird, that’s all there is to it. I’ve lived most of my life trying to fly under the radar, and now I’m supposed to let my peops know every time I buy a Powerball ticket, enjoy a walk in the sunshine or sip a Summit EPA? Blogging’s bad enough. Coming up with a stream of consciousness post on a topic never seems that hard when I write the first sentence or have that flash of brilliance & jot down a phrase or topic on the corner of a napkin and jam it in my pocket. But telling the world that I just had the most awesome cup of coffee at Caribou or was grimaced at by the butcher when I asked how long to cook a well-done steak – does anyone really care?

I follow a few tweeters – I guess that makes me their peops – so I guess I should be able to answer the question myself. I guess I do care. I just don’t want my cell phone going off every 3 seconds, so it’s all on my computer. And I do like to scream every once in a while and think someone heard me. And then said under their breath “Yeah brother. You and me both.”

So maybe tweeting is the human equivalent of howling at the moon? Looking for a friend or a pack-mate? A hopeful contribution to social dialog that affirms I’m not alone. Or perhaps a form of cultural evolution? Wolves howl at the moon, right? They seem to enjoy it. I’ve heard variously that they howl so their pack-mates know where they are, whose territory is whose, or that maybe they’re just singing. Why not, I guess? At least when you tweet you don’t have to be able to carry a tune.

SIDE NOTE: If you have a minute, come follow our company howls @IQServices. We look forward the conversation and howling.

Mike Burke
http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

So what if IT won!

So what if IT won…it still has to work, right?

Remember Datamation’s voice & data are like oil & water cover from Spring of ‘86? What a difference a quarter of a century makes. Just ask Nortel or AT&T or even Cisco! Where am I going with this? Technological schizophrenia.

Datacomm and data networks are truly wonderful things. They remind me of the analog computers of my misspent youth in the subbasement of Tech - all those wires (think patch cords) going all over the place. But I digress.

By telecom standards, data networks win ugly. Stuff goes bad by design and the network simply fills in around it, no problem. But telecom always had a different approach. Telecom was all about 2 hours of downtime over 40 years (http://www.greatachievements.org/?id=3639), i.e., the telecom network always had to work. None of this fall down & get up & fix itself stuff. Hence the arrogance of all us telecom types over the last few decades. We looked at IT encroaching on our domain, shook our heads & rolled our eyes and said customers just won’t put up with that kind of performance. Voice communications must be inherently reliable, but data networks are built to fail and recover. Dial tone comes from God. They’re just plain incompatible. Period.

So what happened? Cell phones. They weren’t a big deal 20 years ago when they weighed 3 pounds, you needed a bag to haul them around, they had an antenna that stuck up 6 inches, and they cost $3 a minute to use when you could find coverage under you carrier or plan. But cell phones softened everyone up over time…changed everyone’s expectations. In exchange for convenience, customers accommodated what was, by classic telecom standards, unacceptably lousy performance. And now everyone has one.

So what’s that mean to us in the contact center industry? Can we slacken our standards to meet the lowered expectations of cell phone customers familiar with networks that go up & down like yoyos and conversations that periodically turn to hash & evaporate?

I don’t think so. In fact, we have to take it up a notch!

Why? Customer expectations about the reliability and integrity of “stuff” on our end really haven’t changed. With their end so unreliable, we in the voice world have to compensate on the contact center end of the call.

Just thinking about voice apps on an IT-managed infrastructure using IP gives me chills. But that is of course where we come in. IQ Services represents the conscience of telecom professionals past. We’re the “2-hours of downtime over 40 years” people looking over the CIOs’ shoulders and helping them deliver networks that live up to customer expectations of what voice – and web – self-service should be. That is…solutions that are always available and work well 24 hours a day, every day of the year.

Just like Ma Bell always said it should be – no matter who’s minding the store.

Telecom’s still telecom, even if it has been homogenized. It still has to work. Period. Even if there’s no such thing as dial tone any more.

For those of you who didn’t mind the earlier digression, take a peak at these:

http://www.sys-bio.org/sbwWiki/_media/sysbio/labmembers/hsauro/vs-heathkit-ec-1-analog-computer.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bdu/94291699/

Mike Burke
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423
http://www.iq-services.com/

Thanksgiving Day

It may be a bit cliché, but we can't help ourselves. It is Thanksgiving week. And despite everything we all seem to be worrying about these days, there is still so much to be thankful for. As you've probably heard one of us say before, everyone at IQ Services is thankful for our great customers and for the company environment that encourages us to do the best job we can for those customers. But we thought it would be fun to ask our colleagues what they are personally thankful for this year. Here's what we heard:

Kristy - I am thankful it's a 3 day work week! And for people who open their hearts and homes to abandoned and abused animals.

Mike2 – I'm thankful this year for good health throughout the whole family.Gary – I am thankful for the soldiers who are spending this time away from their families. May God bless them and their families and keep them safe and at peace.

Mike B – Mostly, I’m happy just to be here, and that the kids & families are in good shape

Cheryl – I am thankful for my wonderful family. They are caring, loving and most of all supportive. Not too mention, they haven't kicked me out of the house for taking up playing the drums!

Matt – I am thankful for family and friends. Evan – I am thankful for life, love, and happiness.

Shan – I am thankful for the fact that even though my son is 6 going on 12, he still calls me “Daddy.”

Jim J – I am thankful for my family and the opportunities I have had because of the country we live in.

Marla – I am thankful for husbands who do housework, 6-year old daughters who love the Vikes & birthdays that fall on Thanksgiving. Happy 19th David!

Mike3 – I'm thankful for the good health of my parents and my brother and his family.

Steve - I'm thankful that I have loving family and friends to share my time with.

And since two of our best natured colleagues weren't available for comment, we thought it would be fun to create fake statements of gratitude for them – comments in line with their character (hopefully they will be thankful that we were thinking of them):

Suzanne – I am thankful for the chance to visit my daughter in Chicago so her chef boyfriend can treat me to 4 days of great food.

John – I am thankful for fast cars, tire gauges, turtle wax and a dog named Tobey.We hope you have a lot to be thankful for this year too. Happy Thanksgiving!

http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Groundhog Day

For me, one of the more interesting aspects of a typical performance and load testing engagement is how much bad news we deliver and how often we hear in response “OMG – that was horrible. Thank you! When can we do it again?”

As I think of it, the “can we do it again” sentiment describes the big picture when it comes to performance and load testing of a new contact center or communications solution. Proactive performance testing shouldn’t be thought of as a one-off activity. When most effectively applied it’s a process that allows you to try things out until you get them right. Kind of like Groundhog Day, but with you playing Phil Connor.

Something always turns up and most of the time it’s a big deal, which means you really do have to stop and think about what to do to get it right. Often, you need more than 5 or 10 minutes. Most often, you need a few days or even a week to get it right. Experience tells us that things aren’t usually right the 2nd time either, so you have to plan to do it more than twice too…sometimes more than three times.

The advice I give early in every project is to budget enough resources (your team, internal & vendors & suppliers) and plan enough time to test and re-test at least three to four times over a two to three week period.

Yes. Multiple sessions, two to three weeks, time in between.

If your team is prepared for the do-overs and you include the time and resources in your schedule and budget, the Groundhog Day type experience can have a positive effect on your project, your team and eventually your customers.

Mike Burke

http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

So what do you learn?

In my last blog, I talked about test setup and the value of collaborating during the early stages of test planning – even when you’re just talking about who needs to do what and when.

Clearly the setup process has a lot to do with success. But the next question – the one I actually seem to get asked the most – is “So what am I going to learn? Why should we put ourselves through this when we’ve managed the living daylights out of the project, held everyone’s feet to the fire, and the budget’s already tight – running out of time & money (and patience) due to bumps in the road along the way? What’s in it for me? And don’t be vague & give me more of that value prop stuff, give me some real examples!”

Ok. We’ve got a long list of examples to help answer that question. (Check out this webinar to learn more).

But I’m going to suggest something you might not have considered. Not the obvious stuff like un-provisioned trunks, incomplete translations & routing, under-capacity servers, incompatible standards between components from different vendors, misconfigured or under capacity VLANs, etc.

Instead…think licenses. Yep. Licenses.

I hear that more and more, especially in the BC/DR context.

It’s a tight economy and nobody wants to buy more than they need, not that they ever did. But now more than ever it matters. And with IP plus virtualization & cloud computing in the mix, it’s not just about counting trunks or ports anymore. It’s not even CPU cycles or memory. Moore’s Law’s taken care of that one.

It’s about licenses.

“If everyone’s not logged in over here, can I use their licenses over there? If I lose power in Omaha, or the pipe to Chennai, will the licenses be re-distributed & usable in the back-up location?”

Well of course you thought so when you set it up. But what I’m hearing from the folks in our test facility, issues with license configurations almost always show up – often early on – and again in the BC/DR phase of our StressTest™ performance and load testing engagements for new systems.

Don’t overlook or make assumptions about something as simple as licenses – test it & see what really happens.

Mike Burke

The Unexpected Benefits of Contact Center Load Testing Setup

Launching a new contact center? Preparing to load test it to make sure it works? It isn’t just about throwing 100 or 1,000 or even 10,000 calls at a solution to see what happens. That’s taking the “let’s see if this breaks it!” approach, and like I’ve mentioned before, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Many of our customers have been surprised to find that preparing for “the dreaded load testing event” can actually help everyone – employees and vendors alike – work more effectively as a team. Everyone benefits (including end-user customers) when you approach testing as a team effort instead of a series of isolated exercises to generate reports, which can be used to beat up vendors & colleagues later.

(Warning … necessary plug approaching) IQ Services pioneered the team testing approach for contact center load testing over 13 years ago. So we know from experience that a successful contact center launch starts with common objectives and widespread, shared understanding. This doesn’t happen by fiat – it takes effort & guidance (and the earlier you start the better). It is still exciting for us to see how the techniques we use to prepare for a load test also encourage everyone on our customer’s team to invest some skin in the game. Talking through what’s supposed to happen – from the end-user customer’s perspective – really helps the team get their collective head screwed on straight. It’s all about the customer experience, not just the CPU consumption or the routing plan or the VLAN partitions. If it doesn’t all work together when hundreds or thousands of customers each try to do their own thing, it really doesn’t matter if the web services building block works in isolation or under twice the load as expected. You can’t imagine how many times we’ve been in the early stages of a test engagement and heard astonished customer team members say to each other “You expect it to do what?!?”

No, really.

But that’s great news! Because it happens during a test planning session, not at 10:30 AM on the morning the system goes live.

One of the key items we review (which seems so obvious to the team after the fact) is the list of who’s responsible for everything – internal and vendor – and making sure each person is plugged into their piece of the action when we start to light up the test. For example, routing and hunting are huge, whether you’re doing it yourself or counting on a toll-free network services provider. You want those resources online & participating during the test activity – not just available by pager or cell phone. Because if there’s an issue and Theo isn’t available to (1) dump the logs before they roll over, (2) interpret the results, and then (3) fix the translations right now, you might have to bring down the curtain. Then you’ll be making plans to do it all over again tomorrow night or next week or probably when you’ve promised to chaperone your kid’s traveling soccer tournament over in Fargo.

By preparing for contact center load testing early in the process, you start considering critical questions that can impact everyone on the team but that might not otherwise be discussed. Which applications are the riskiest, which data feeds the most tenuous? How are the various sites supposed to function, individually and collectively? Caching? Record locking? How do we find out if the SIP trunks really can handle the same burst rates that PRIs dealt with? Early contact center load test discussions seem to help everyone:

• Stay focused on the real business objectives
• Have a keen understanding of their role/their component’s role in meeting those objectives
• Clearly see where responsibility for any issues lie
• Pitch in where possible to get things resolved and working so testing can continue
• Have a shared understanding of what a successful launch will look like
  

Go through the load test planning and setup process in a methodical fashion. It gets your team onboard, you’re prepared to handle just about everything and you’ve probably addressed a myriad of issues before you’ve even launched the first test call.

Mike Burke
http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423