It’s 2024, and in the past few years companies have experienced the full pendulum of remote employees and related IT infrastructure investments, as well as a continued shift to cloud regardless of where employees are working. One of the biggest changes we’ve seen with our clients is remote and hybrid call centers. 84% of companies have a work-from-home program in place according to Netbeez in their 2024 State of Remote Work, with only 6% planning to go back to the office full-time.
This has fundamentally changed network monitoring needs, with the addition of digital experience monitoring (DEM) because of these shifts. DEM is the process of monitoring and analyzing the performance of digital services and applications from the end-user’s perspective. Many of which are now working from home, beyond an organization’s network. According to research firm Forrester, 64% of technology leaders will invest in data and analytics technology to improve remote worker experience.
Having visibility to ongoing performance of your services, infrastructure, and user issues is critical to reducing operational costs and growing your organization’s revenue. Here’s how.
Remote Help desk Tickets = More Time & Engineering Escalations
With all these additional cloud and infrastructure projects, IT departments may be ignoring one of their ballooning internal costs related to IT – internal help desk tickets and engineering escalations. Help desk tickets for on-site employees are easier for help desks to quickly resolve – forgotten passwords, software license requests, and so on. Any outages would be easier to pinpoint when using the company network as the baseline.
Today with remote employees and especially call centers using delay-sensitive UCaaS, CCaaS, and VOIP applications, the support tickets have gotten more complex, especially when Internet outages occur. When employees are working remotely, the troubleshooting and resolution time of tickets increases because it’s hard to pin down the problem – is it the ISP? Is the employee out of WiFi range? Is the application down? Was the problem just a blip that’s now resolved?
Less technically capable help desk agents get these moderately difficult tickets and do what they’re trained to do – escalate them. Now expensive network and IT engineering teams are involved, not working on critical organizational initiatives but delving into the unknowns from remote employees. All this leaves teams overwhelmed by tickets and unsure of issues, as a Solution Architect in a Fortune 500 financial company shared:
“When 10 or 15 people call the help desk experiencing poor audio performance with their softphones, we had to scramble. We didn’t know if it was a platform issue, a SIP networking problem, or maybe just a network component in the path. Now we have the actual performance data that allows us to significantly reduce those efforts.”
Today’s help desk agents aren’t equipped with the insight they need to quickly resolve and close tickets – and this can be equally frustrating to remote teams and customers who are held up by unidentified problems.
Help Desk Ticket Volume and Costs Growing Substantially
It isn’t just the complexity of help desk tickets making the situation worse. It’s the overall volume. How much does each help ticket cost your organization? It could be $100, or more, depending on the channel being utilized, found by a 2021 study by MetricNet. Measuring benchmarks like average ticket cost or volume before and after a Digital Experience Monitoring POC could be the key to get executive buy-in and show the results.
For one of our customers, they saw their own ticket cost and volume skyrocketing and decided to implement DEM to cut costs and give better visibility to managers of call centers and support employees, a critical front line to customer interactions.
“We created a HelpHub that has IT recommendations and tools and documentation to help end users solve their own problems. There’s a manager tab so team leaders can see all their direct reports’ network and audio metrics. It’s a simple green or red on performance measurements.”
These tools have facilitated a greater than 80% reduction in the number of incidents being called in to the help desk.
Customer Experience Can Make or Break Revenue Growth
In the past four years it’s estimated that overall IT spending has grown by about 30%, from $3.8 trillion in 2020 to an estimated >5 trillion in 2024. These investments are increasingly critical to improving the customer experience and ensuring continued revenue growth, as consumers change how they engage.
“McKinsey research reveals that improving the customer experience has increased sales revenues by 2 to 7 percent and profitability by 1 to 2 percent. In addition to this, the overall shareholder return has increased by 7 to 10 percent.”
They’re also essential to validate cloud software like self-service portals, communities, AI chatbots, and that other customer experience software is working as expected, not just as advertised.
By having a DEM solution in place, organizations can ensure their expensive investments into customer experience infrastructure and software are meeting the reality of the ideal customer experience they’re hoping to deliver. And help them more intelligently invest in the future.
Register for the State of Remote Work webinar, which will be held on February 7 2024. Learn how Digital Experience Monitoring enables help desk teams supporting remote contact centers to cut troubleshooting time.
See if NetBeez DEM is right for your organization by requesting a demo or trying it for free.
