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Over the past few years, technological and business advancements have created increasingly grand expectations. Your customers expect an “always on” experience. (Today, you can also add “always fast,” “always intuitive,” “always successful,” and so on.) Fundamentally, if customers find it too difficult to engage digitally with your business, they’ll engage elsewhere.

Digital transformation: The implications for network operations

Meeting heightened customer expectations is basically what digital transformation is all about. In the race to meet these expectations, speed innovation, and stay competitive, organizations continue to adopt transformational technologies and services, such as cloud offerings, SaaS, SD-WAN, and more.

However, by adopting these approaches, network operations (NetOps) teams have to contend with some fundamentally different requirements and challenges. In the past, organizations like yours had data centers and remote offices, which were all connected via a network your teams owned and managed. Your NetOps teams had full visibility and control; they knew every packet, route, and device on the network.

Today, your NetOps teams are contending with a completely different paradigm. Now, critical services are fundamentally reliant upon networks that the NetOps team doesn’t own, manage, or have visibility into. 

The result is that NetOps teams contend with more complexity, while their ability to meet their charters erodes. According to recent research, 74% of enterprises are planning to deploy 10 or more new network technologies over the next two years. In addition, 81% currently report they have network monitoring blind spots. Another report found that between 2018 and 2022, the percentage of NetOps teams that are successful with their overall missions has declined from  47% to 27%.

Why is NetOps getting so difficult, and how can you beat these odds? Keep reading.

Broadcom

The advantages and NetOps obstacles of transformation

The adoption of SD-WAN, cloud, and SaaS, and the widespread reality of hybrid work have completely changed NetOps. While each innovative approach offers advantages, it also introduces NetOps challenges.

Public cloud

Public cloud services are popular because they offer organizations flexibility, lower costs, and more rapid deployments. But these services present entirely different traffic patterns than those of the past. The reliance upon external, third-party networks presents significant blind spots. This results in lengthy troubleshooting times, increased operations costs, and greater risk of user experience issues.

SD-WAN

Similarly, the adoption of SD-WAN presents both advantages and challenges. These technologies can give the business a more secure and cost-effective highway to the cloud. However, SD-WAN can also leave already-stretched NetOps teams contending with tens of thousands of new events and alarms. Further, SD-WAN vendors don’t offer coverage of cloud networks, your data centers, or the Wi-Fi networks work-from-home users rely upon.

SaaS

Replacing legacy apps with SaaS can provide an array of benefits, including reduced infrastructure and operational costs. However, you also lose visibility and control when your users start relying on apps that are running outside your data center.

Work-from-home models

The move to hybrid and work-from-home models provides many advantages, enabling employees to be productive, no matter where they may be. However, without a way to gain insights into the ISP and local Wi-Fi networks users rely upon, your NetOps teams have no way to spot and preempt potential issues. They’re stuck reacting to problems after the fact, and the business is saddled with diminished productivity.

Conclusion

Don’t let the “gotchas” of digital transformation get you. Make sure your digital transformation plans include a plan for NetOps transformation. It is only by gaining visibility and control of modern, hybrid network ecosystems that you can safeguard service levels and maximize the potential of your transformations.

To learn more about Experience-Driven NetOps, visit Broadcom.

Digital Transformation

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Your contact center serves as a key gateway through which customers interact with your brand, so you want to ensure that each customer’s interaction is smooth, fast, and informative. They should not only achieve their desired outcomes but have a positive experience along the way – one that makes them want to come back. 

That’s why businesses are finding more and more ways to apply AI in their customer experience planning. They love the many ways it can help them architect the desired experience for customers and employees and achieving and competitive edge… all while creating game-changing efficiencies.

Let’s look at a few examples.

AI reduces contact center costs and complexities while increasing efficiencies  

Chatbots and Natural Language Processing, or NLP, are driving billions in annual customer support cost savings. AI capabilities such as screen pops and real-time transcription shave off seconds from every customer interaction that collectively save millions of dollars while increasing first call resolution (FCR) and reducing handle time. AI-powered virtual agents and call deflection further reduce costs and keep call queues lighter for customers who need to speak with someone quickly. AI can even auto populate the notes section of your CRM to speed after-call work for agents. AI takes what’s complicated and makes it simple, with a proven ability to reduce costs over the long term.

AI gives customers what they want most for a superior service experience

AI supports effortless interactions with a personalized touch that keeps customers coming back, from front-end solutions like conversational AI and call deflection to back-end applications that customers have no idea are working behind the scenes to elevate their experience. For example, real-time transcription via speech-to-text that enables agents to know exactly what the customer is saying the first time, every time or identity-centered security that lets customers skip repetitive verification questions without compromising security or compliance. When done right, AI makes communication more effortless and drives more personalized engagement for long-term loyalty.      

AI helps you expand your pool of talent and create “super agents” 

Work is no longer somewhere that you go, it’s something that you do. A coffee shop, a co-working space, or a dining room table easily qualify as suitable agent workspaces in a post-COVID world. AI delivers next-level training and coaching that can be done from anywhere, so your company can cast a wider net and hire top-tier talent while creating an environment where agents know they can be successful. 

Toolwire, a member of Avaya’s Experience Builders ecosystem, crafted Spaces Learning, an AI-powered learning and development solution that offers learners more timely access to relevant, focused training and skill-building materials through both self-paced on-demand and real-time collaborative learning options. The platform features a carousel of micro-learning-oriented course content, sandboxed training environments for hands-on access, assessments, and AI-based insights on how employees, both in and outside of the contact center, are retaining and expanding their skillsets to better serve customers across the entire organization.  

AI in your contact center with Avaya

AI solves for so many challenges in the contact center related to employee retention, customer expectations, and the explosion of the surface area where customers and employees interact. Here’s how Avaya brings contact center AI to life:

 We have a rich ecosystem of AI partners like Google and Journey, a digital identity verification and authentication platform provider, who strengthen the value of the Avaya solutions we deliver to our customers. For example, in healthcare, a provider can use Avaya OneCloud to simplify routine interactions like appointment and bill pay reminders by securely sending notifications across the channel of a patient’s choice, with patients being able to make payments directly from those notifications with high veracity authentication via Journey. This delivers the kind of experience the patient wants (easy and frictionless) while improving identity verification, decreasing false acceptance ratio and costs associated with fraud.Avaya OneCloud – our composable, cloud 3.0-enabled experience platform – includes our award-winning Avaya OneCloud CPaaS, which speeds the creation and delivery of new processes and experiences, even for very narrow use cases. You can customize or make things easier by leveraging our pre-built apps (ex: Avaya Virtual Agent). You have full control over how you bring AI to life within your contact center.  Not ready to go off-prem? You can ease into the cloud with hybrid solutions, keeping core services in your data centers while augmenting them and infusing cloud-based AI innovations. You’ll get all the disruptive benefits of AI without the requirement of a disruptive platform shift. One of our customers delivering outsourcing programs for some of the largest companies in the country chose a hybrid solution with Avaya OneCloud. Combined with meetings and collaboration from the cloud within the Avaya Spaces browser experience, this all-in-one solution provides everything in one convenient place for the customer, as it replaced multiple systems previously used throughout the company, saving them over $1M.The Avaya Media Processing Core delivers faster AI innovation that creates the kind of competitive experiences I walked through earlier (ex: AI transcription). 

Customers and agents are beyond tired of experiences that underwhelm and frustrate. Aren’t you? The contact center is the single most impactful place an organization can implement AI. I can tell you from firsthand experience working with our customers, your customers, agents, and your entire business will love the results. 

See what you can start doing in your contact center today. Find out more here. 

Data Center

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

The once-common architectural pattern of backhauling network traffic to a central data center or headquarters has been augmented due to the rise of SaaS applications. SaaS uses content distribution systems that replicate data to points of presence around the world for closer and faster access. The applications are designed to use the nearest point of presence to serve content to the end-user.

The 2022 EMA Network Management Megatrends research reveals, “it is the first year that network operations teams have recognized public cloud, SaaS applications, and cloud-native application architectures as the most critical drivers of their network management strategies.”

Organizations still have to connect and secure multiple dispersed endpoints that need access to an ever-expanding enterprise network. Everything from branch offices and mobile users to cloud platforms and SaaS applications has its own separate requirements for connectivity and security.

This is where SASE (secure access service edge) comes in. SASE can be boiled down to an architecture that identifies users, devices, and network traffic, to deliver secure access to the appropriate application or data. It typically addresses the challenge of highly distributed environments where you need to secure access to corporate resources – no matter where users or applications are located.

However, even if SASE architecture aims to provide a set of unified capabilities, the reality check is different regarding actual deployments. Contrary to expectations, many organizations still take a multi-vendor approach, whether it is to avoid vendor lock-in, select best-of-breed components, or leverage existing investments.

As a result, the modern wide area network (WAN) edge infrastructure involves multi-vendor technologies such as software-defined WAN (SD-WAN), secure web gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB), and next-generation firewall (NGFW). This complex mix makes it difficult to monitor the infrastructure and detect misconfigurations. And this lack of visibility can quickly turn into performance issues or security breaches.

Understanding the user experience

As organizations embrace the advantages of SASE, many are facing gaps in understanding the end-user experience. Although individual components provide some degree of native monitoring, network operations are running short of options to detect and resolve the root cause of user experience degradations, especially when multiple ISPs and network device vendors are involved.

To deliver reliable edge networking, network professionals need advanced analytics capabilities to gain insights into the end-to-end performance, traffic management complexities, and hybrid WAN configuration. This can typically be referred to as Experience-Driven NetOps. With network teams already stretched thin, it becomes increasingly critical to adopt approaches that correlate user experience issues with the offending WAN edge component or carrier provider so that triage and root cause identification is completed in just a few clicks.

When IT employs continuous monitoring of every app, user, and location across the extended enterprise network, they can proactively detect network and application performance issues before they ever impact end-users. So while this will ideally help speed up mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR), it will, at the very least, accelerate mean-time-to-innocence (MTTI) when issues are blamed on the network team but are really the fault of a third party.

You can learn more about how to tackle the challenges of modern networks in this new eBook, Guide To Visibility Anywhere. Read now and discover how organizations can create network visibility anywhere.

Networking