Managing CX – Hidden Downtime and Blind Spots

Surprises can be fantastic and energizing, but for IT professionals not so. Hidden downtime and blind spots raise anxieties in network teams. However, in the increasingly complex arena of information and communications technologies, careful change management protects business. Systems monitoring is comprehensive.

As businesses grow and evolve, so does their infrastructure. In general, this makes it difficult to maintain total visibility of key systems. Blind spots emerge. In effect, these are sources of downtime which cost money and turn staff attention away from productive activity to firefighting.

Cost of Downtime

According to Gartner, the average cost of IT systems downtime is impacting business at a rate close to $5,600 per minute. In essence, revenue streams slow to a stop while employee effort and expense fight the burning fire, and the reputational risk increases with each passing minute.

The New Customer Experience

Businesses depend heavily on telecommunications to engage with their customers. In fact, research from Statista shows that the preference for shopping online versus in-store decreases with increased age:

• 67% of millennials prefer to shop online
• 56% of gen-Xers prefer to shop online
• 41% of baby boomers prefer online shopping
• only 28% of seniors prefer online shopping

The B2C trend reflects also in B2B markets and many businesses are simply not investing in brick-and-mortar premises. Rather, they are engaging with their customers online, and via telephone and contact centre technologies.

While email, web-chat, and others are important communication channels, the humble telephone conversation remains the “number 1” choice. This is particularly true where the business transaction value is high or the customer service request is complex.

It is simply more satisfying and comfortable for the customer to engage in conversation with a person.

Blind Spots in the Global Telecoms Network

Blind spots can lead to surprises or worse to a complete lack of awareness. With centralized contact centres servicing global markets, a simple phone call is far from simple.

For a customer to talk to an agent, a connection is established which transits the customer’s own network, the business’s network, and more.

Basically, the “more” comes into play as carriers and network providers leverage intermediary relationships (other networks) at peak times, or for specific routes. The end result is a phone connection involving multiple international interconnects. Call go through multiple regulatory jurisdictions, and things can, and do, go wrong.

Critically, if a customer connection fails before reaching the business network, the business is totally unaware and blind to the issue.

Additionally, if a customer does successfully connect, the long-distance network routing often experiences issues of latency, post-dial delay, and poor audio quality. These do not allow for a productive business conversation.

Customer satisfaction ratings are hurt when customers cannot make a call. The potential to foresee an outage and prevent it from happening is attractive. Using a platform, telecoms teams and customer experience teams can proactively monitor services. They can identify interruption signs before customer impact.

According to Insider Intelligence, US ecommerce sales will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in 2022. Prior to the pandemic, forecasting put this milestone in 2024. Worldwide ecommerce sales will likely reach $6 trillion by 2024.