Building Trust in Cloud Contact Centres A NewVoiceMedia White Paper
Trust but verify, said Ronald Reagan to Mikhail Gorbachev. He was talking about nuclear weapons but the maxim can refer to other things, such as the adoption of cloud computing. In particular, it applies to the use of internet-hosted call centre technology like ContactWorld from NewVoiceMedia. This white paper touches on the benefits of cloud-based contact centres but focuses on the concerns that businesses have about cloud computing performance, availability and security and it analyses how NewVoiceMedia is successfully addressing them. The benefits of cloud contact centres Traditional contact centres require expensive onsite technology to manage automated call distribution, interactive voice response, computer telephony integration, call recording and management reporting. It s capital intensive and labour intensive. It s also hard to guarantee high levels of security, availability and performance without expensive over-provisioning. Cloud computing offers a better alternative. Your business can reap substantial benefits by moving to a cloud contact centre like ContactWorld: l Deploy quickly l Avoid upfront capital costs; pay for what you use l Reduce on-going maintenance costs l Get the latest technology l Support multiple sites without multiple data centres l Cope with fluctuating demand l Securely process credit card payments with full PCI compliance l Get built-in continuity and disaster recovery l Integrate with Salesforce CRM Barriers to adoption Despite these benefits, some companies are still nervous about cloud computing. According to Elizabeth Herrell from Forrester: Many I&O managers express concern regarding the adoption of cloud services. They state the potential security risks associated with storing their data in the cloud and worry over the loss of control in managing their communications services. They also want assurance on business continuity plans in the event of a disaster. An analysis of 41,000 stories about cloud computing in Europe and the US echoed Herrell s analysis and identified three main concerns 3 : l Security. Will data be secure if held in the cloud? (31.8 per cent) l Availability. Will data and systems be available at all times? (31.6 per cent) l Performance. Are there likely to be problems with speed, latency and so on? (19.4 per cent) For customers, this technology means better service, reduced waiting times, faster dispute resolution, and great loyalty and satisfaction. (For a full list of benefits and more details see our white paper: 20 Reasons to host your contact centre the in cloud.) These benefits have already moved nearly a quarter (23 per cent) of North American and European businesses to consider contact centres-as-a-service, according to Forrester 1. Gartner estimate that by 2014, just under 10 percent of North American contact centre agents will be supported by cloud delivery 2. 10/11 ContactWorld is a registered trademark of NewVoiceMedia Ltd. 1. Forrester: CaaS Market Heats Up, May 27 2010 by Elizabeth Herrell among others 2. Gartner, Inc: Critical Elements of Cloud-Based Contact Center Services: Pricing, Service-Level Agreements and Service Integration, Daniel O Connell and Drew Kraus, June 2010 3. Coverage of Cloud Computing April to June 2011, Apollo Research
Frequent, detailed tests and transparent reporting Building trust These are legitimate questions. In fact, they are mandatory ones. Every potential customer should address these concerns with cloud vendors and weigh their responses carefully. They should also ask the same questions about on-premise alternatives. The remainder of this white paper outlines what NewVoiceMedia is doing to deliver performance, availability and security and equally as important be seen to deliver them. Trust is confidence built on the observation of repeated good actions. This is why NewVoiceMedia has developed its Trust site. There s a public version at http://www.newvoicemedia.com/trust and customers have an enhanced version with detailed graphs to provide a continuous window into ContactWorld s performance. The company was already running thousands of tests every day to ensure that its service was fully operational and to spot problems as early as possible and act on them quickly. The Trust site takes this data and makes it public in the interests of transparency. At the time of writing, NewVoiceMedia had conducted more than a million tests on the service. The tests are sophisticated; more than just a ping. They pull up web pages, validate displays, check telephony links etc. using four synthetic agents. The site is updated every 15 minutes to display the latest results. The level of transparency and the intensity of testing is clearly visible in the occasional, rare below good report. For example, on 27 September, there was a small decline in performance on one test for five minutes. In some cases, the system reports hiccups with third-party systems, such as a planned outage on Salesforce CRM. This level of reporting is rare (and perhaps non-existent) in the call centre industry. The Trust site also reports availability on each of the three data centres the service is provided from; ContactWorld 1, 2 and 3. These three data centres give NewVoiceMedia defence in depth against disasters and other problems the kind of duplication and redundancy that is very expensive to achieve on-premise. However, the figures tell another, more important story. The worst rolling year availability of any of the ContactWorld data centres is 99.992%. This amounts to less than an hour s downtime in a whole year. That s close to the fabled five nines of carrier-grade availability. And that s the worst availability. The best is 100% availability. Data centre availability A typical report and detailed graph for a minor occurrence In fact, at the time of writing, NewVoiceMedia is introducing a penalty-backed service level agreement (SLA) guaranteeing 99.999% availability. This kind of availability is normally the result of spending a great deal of time and money. If you do it on premise, it s hugely expensive. With NewVoiceMedia a contact centre with five agents gets the same reliability as a multinational with a multi-million dollar budget and thousands of agents. contact us 0800 280 2888 US 1 877 890 2244 International +44 20 7206 8888 sales@newvoicemedia.com www.newvoicemedia.com
Security Security is an important issue. Companies need to protect customer details such as name, address and credit card information. They must also comply with industry standards such as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and regulations such as the Data Protection Act. That doesn t necessarily mean that outsourcing is inherently less secure than keeping data on site. In fact, everybody is comfortable with outsourcing security when it comes to their money; otherwise banks would go out of business. We trust banks with our money because of our assessment of the balance of risk; homes are more likely to be burgled than our bank and if we keep our money in the bank and it is stolen, the bank will sort things out for us. A similar calculus applies to online services. And, as with banks, it may be safer to rely on a trusted partner to protect your assets than to look after them yourself. Outsourcing to a specialist automatically brings security benefits. They can afford full time dedicated resources to look after security and they can do more than protect the perimeter with firewalls. For example, NewVoiceMedia has: l Multiple levels of firewall protection l Intrusion detection systems l Regular external penetration testing l A dual-key rule for changes to code or hardware l Staff vetting for employees with access to hardware and software l Audit trails to trace any changes or problems l Integrity checking on servers l Internal traffic monitoring with daily log reviews l Encryption for application traffic The service is backed up by tough external audits. NewVoiceMedia is PCI-DSS Level 1 compliant, making it the only cloud contact centre vendor with this accreditation in Europe. This is one of the highest security standards out there because it allows the company to process credit card payments securely, not only for themselves but on behalf of their customers as well. This attention to detail is essential but challenging, and expensive to do yourself. But without it, your data could be at risk. In many companies, IT security is a small part of one or two people s job description, but by outsourcing it to a cloud provider; companies benefit from the expertise and resources of a specialist. In short, when it comes to security, with NewVoiceMedia, your data will be much more secure in the cloud than on-premise. Try asking your IT team or on-premise vendors if they can guarantee the same security measures. Availability If your contact centre is the main gateway to connect with customers, it is business critical and you can t take risks with availability. You need to know that your agents have the right tools to do their job. As with security, outsourcing to a cloud provider may initially look like an added risk. However, the risk is more apparent than real, especially compared with the availability risks of on-premise systems. Taking infrastructure continuity first, NewVoiceMedia has systems in three separate data centres. Geographical redundancy is an insurance against natural disasters and other big problems. Cloud providers like NewVoiceMedia can ensure that their data centres are more robust with fire suppression systems, multiple internet connections, power sources and backups. It is expensive for individual companies to recreate this kind of redundancy and resilience. Within each data centre, constant monitoring and transparent reporting (described above) ensures that systems are kept up and running. This constant attention allows NewVoiceMedia to offer a 99.999% availability SLA (or less than 10 minutes outage a month on average). As the analysts at Gartner Consulting observe 4, on-premise vendors may report similar levels of resilience for on-premise systems on an individual basis, there is an additional unquantifiable risk that the customer s IT staff may not be able to maintain and operate the systems. Further, without a resilient, redundant infrastructure, they are more vulnerable to external factors such as power outages and network downtime. NewVoiceMedia offers an additional benefit when it comes to availability over on-premise solutions. As a cloud solution agents have the ability to work anywhere they have a phone connection and an internet-connected web browser. This makes it much easier for businesses to recover from a problem with systems on their premises or hiccups with their infrastructure. For example, everyone can decamp to a disaster recovery site and carry on or just go home and work from there. NewVoiceMedia supports this kind of flexibility ensuring a seamless service to customers at all times. So, NewVoiceMedia delivers a very, very high level of availability with penalty-backed SLAs. It offers multiple, geo-redundant data centres and frequent monitoring with detailed reports. These capabilities are difficult and expensive to reproduce in-house, but ContactWorld delivers them as standard and also support for remote, flexible working on a routine basis, and in the event of a disaster. 10/11 ContactWorld is a registered trademark of NewVoiceMedia Ltd. 4. Gartner, Inc: Critical Elements of Cloud-Based Contact Center Services: Pricing, Service-Level Agreements and Service Integration, Daniel O Connell and Drew Kraus, June 2010
Performance NewVoiceMedia s infrastructure is load-balanced and over-provisioned relative to the number of users to ensure resilience and consistent levels of performance. The graph below displays the response times of the desktop agent on a typical day and demonstrates that there is almost no increase in response time during busy periods. This information is available to customers through the Trust site. The graph below is really important. It shows that the customer agent experience is the same at 3am with three agents as at 3pm with upwards of 3,000 agents logged on. This level of monitoring means that NewVoiceMedia can provision new capacity to ensure consistently good performance even as the number of users increases. Cloud providers have a big advantage over on-premise software and hardware vendors. Because all their customers run on the same system, they can ensure that they all benefit from new features, system updates and patches as soon as they become available at no extra cost. This means that companies can benefit from enhanced performance and new features without the IT overhead of maintaining on-site hardware and software. Detailed availability and performance charts are available to customers For a cloud vendor to provide complete visibility of their service availability and performance gives us a huge level of confidence both in the vendor and their service. Making that level of information publicly available requires a significant investment in infrastructure, people and processes, not to mention leadership. This is definitely a case where action speaks louder than words. Jag Tucker, Global Front Office Support Manager, SHL Group contact us 0800 280 2888 US 1 877 890 2244 International +44 20 7206 8888 sales@newvoicemedia.com www.newvoicemedia.com
On-premise vs. cloud Ultimately, the only zero-risk contact centre is no contact centre at all. Like every business decision, the choice to move your contact centre to the cloud is a balance of risk and reward. But what is certain is that the status quo has risks too, even if they largely go unstated. Just because your call centre works now or on-premise vendors make big promises, there are no guarantees that you can deliver better performance, reliability and availability than a cloud provider. In fact, NewVoiceMedia s Trust site, routine testing and open disclosure are a challenge to the status quo. Intuitively, it makes sense that a company that specialises in something is likely to do it better than a company where it is not a core function. NewVoiceMedia can devote resources and technology to achieving better performance, reliability and availability than almost any of its potential clients. And this commitment is backed by external auditing, objective standards, SLAs and public, transparent reporting. These are powerful reasons to trust NewVoiceMedia with your contact centre. Perhaps Ernest Hemingway hit upon the most important truth: The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them. Availability and performance are critical attributes of the contact center and a key metric for anyone considering a cloud-based service. With ContactWorld Trust Site, NewVoiceMedia is able to demonstrate availability and performance in real-time and make that information available publicly. The ability for customers to see the results of benchmark tests being conducted every five seconds will go a long way toward eradicating potential concerns about service performance levels. Sheila McGee-Smith, Principal Analyst, McGee-Smith Analytics 10/11 ContactWorld is a registered trademark of NewVoiceMedia Ltd.
About NewVoiceMedia NewVoiceMedia introduced the ContactWorld Platform in 2006 to bring Cloud technology to the telephony market, and radically change the way that businesses receive and deliver their calls. ContactWorld is an enterprise class contact centre, delivered via a true cloud model. It is rapidly scalable, end-user configurable and provides powerful functionality to deliver the technology and information that drives effective contact centres. Our customers benefit from fast, flexible and cost effective access to contact centre capabilities that would normally be very complicated, expensive and slow to acquire, integrate and use. Rather than having to buy expensive software from multiple vendors, spend months integrating everything, and then being locked into that solution for years, we provide the whole solution as a service that customers access for a monthly fee per agent per month. The ContactWorld platform provides a market leading 99.999% service availability SLA, and processes hundreds of millions of calls, for thousands of agents working across the globe. We have customers in 14 countries on 5 continents, including Berry Bros & Rudd, Long Tall Sally, Parcelforce, QlikTech, Royal Mail and SHL Group. NewVoiceMedia Services All NewVoiceMedia customers have access to comprehensive training and support. The Professional Services team works closely with all customers to design call plans and agree rules to be configured when they go live. Training the Trainer is a key part of the approach, ensuring that all customers have the ability to configure the system to meet their specific needs. In addition, all customers have access to free Customer Support from the NewVoiceMedia Service Desk. The team is available 24/7 to answer queries and requests. ContactWorld users can also log cases via the support portal and view the solutions resource for answers. NewVoiceMedia Products ContactWorld offers customers an incredibly rich suite of integrated call centre technologies. We leverage a company s customer data to provide complex data driven routing of their calls on a real time basis to deliver enquiries to the most appropriate agents. Customers can select from different modules to build a plan that will handle their calls most effectively. The solution can be implemented in days not months, additional users can be added in minutes, and home agents activated instantly, in response to demand fluctuations. ContactWorld for Salesforce is a fully certified solution providing seamless CTI integration into Salesforce CRM. All users benefit from a single, easy to use interface to manage their calls, and view all contacts, accounts, leads, opportunities and cases. Calls can be prioritised and routed accurately, based upon the data stored within a business s Salesforce CRM records and agents are presented with a link to the caller s details for a full history of contact with the company. ContactWorld for Salesforce requires no adaptors or APIs to transform how contacts and customers are handled when they interact with an organisation, and works effectively on Mac or PC. All merchants who accept payment by cards over the phone are required to be PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards) compliant to ensure their customers card details are not compromised. ContactWorld PCI is a fully PCI DSS compliant interactive voice response (IVR) solution to securely process credit card transactions over the telephone. The technology removes the agent from the payment transaction by automating the process to meet data security standards, and reduce the risk of fraud. contact us 0800 280 2888 US 1 877 890 2244 International +44 20 7206 8888 sales@newvoicemedia.com www.newvoicemedia.com
10/11 ContactWorld is a registered trademark of NewVoiceMedia Ltd. contact us 0800 280 2888 US 1 877 890 2244 International +44 20 7206 8888 sales@newvoicemedia.com www.newvoicemedia.com