You’ve explored digital experience monitoring (DEM) for solving your remote contact center challenges. You’ve done the ROI calculations and made the case to your stakeholders. The question remains – how do you actually evaluate a solution and know if it will work for your organization? Here are 5 key criteria to keep in mind when evaluating DEM for your remote contact centers.
Don’t Become a Victim of False Positives with Alerts
If there’s one thing all technical teams can agree on, it’s that unnecessary alerts or false positives are painful and annoying (at the very least). They distract from important work and lengthen remediation times.Remote contact center teams can trigger a lot of alerts due to their software mix of bandwidth-heavy UCaaS and CCaaS systems and many variables in play – one-off poor Wi-Fi coverage issue, ISP blips, and applications that temporarily slow down shouldn’t always send an alert and distract your team’s attention.
Configuration of alerts so that you can set clear thresholds for when alerts should vs. should not be sent to your teams is an essential feature to keep networking teams happy and minimize operational impact. When getting a demo or evaluating the software, check the settings for how alerts trigger so teams aren’t overwhelmed by unnecessary emails or tickets.
Get One, Clear Picture of Network Performance Monitoring and DEM
It’s likely if your organization is evaluating a DEM solution that they already have a network performance monitoring (NPM) solution in place. As more organizations adopt flexible working policies, having multiple dashboards and solutions measuring different network impacts (in-office vs. remote employees) will make resolution more difficult for teams internally.
Your dashboard should have NPM and DEM data in one place for easier diagnosis. Teams should be able to quickly see if a specific application, network, or user is experiencing problems at a glance.
And this dashboard should be usable for all members of your team – whether they’re help desk agents checking on a remote employee’s ticket, managers needing visibility into remote contact center user issues, or networking teams who need to dig into a problem. As more internal teams rely on these networks and applications being monitored, more teams will be asking for dashboard access, even if it’s read-only.
Ensure the Integrations are Plentiful and Easy-to-Setup
Networking products have a reputation for complex and lengthy setup processes, sometimes requiring the vendor to do it for you. But that doesn’t need to be the case.
Whether it’s ingesting information from popular UCaaS or CCaaS systems like RingCentral, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, 8×8, monitoring remote end user performance data from Mac, PC, or Linux systems, or tying alerts into popular IT tools like Slack, Splunk, or ServiceNow, DEM integrations and templates are essential to making a product deliver value to your organization in the long-term.
Newer vendors may have limited templates for setting up UCaaS or CCaaS solutions. Legacy vendors may not have clear documentation or self-service options – not ideal for when you need to set up new business-critical applications or networks and are under a tight deadline. When you do need help, it’s good to have a trusted and experienced partner that has set up remote contact center monitoring for organizations from Fortune 100 to fast-growing startups.
Get a Responsive Partner Who’s Constantly Innovating
DEM is a newer area of focus for a lot of vendors, and some companies may be looking at this as an opportunity to cross-sell but not invest as needed to keep pace. Considering the digital experience monitoring space is still rapidly evolving, make sure your partner isn’t just checking the box. When you’re evaluating solutions ask vendors key questions like:
- What new functionality have you added in the past year?
- Have you done DEM setups for remote contact centers?
- What product investments are you making from customer feedback?
- What kind of organizations have you worked with and what were the results (F100, startups, etc.)?
Without confident answers and supporting documentation, DEM may be just a checkbox, not a dedicated solution area for the vendor. An experienced vendor will be able to easily answer these questions and point to key outcomes – like >80% reduction in helpdesk tickets, to ensure you can demonstrate ROI and continue to receive funding for this area each year regardless of the state of the economy.
Don’t Take our Word For It: Get the Scoop From your Peers
You might be thinking – why should I trust anything from a vendor? And we understand. So we’d highly recommend checking out sites like G2 to understand what your peers are saying before you evaluate a solution.Ready to get started? See if NetBeez DEM is right for your organization by requesting a demo or trying it for free.
