In the 6th and final blog in our Designing for The Cloud series, we take a look at the sources of downtime and how to mitigate failure to protect your CCaaS business.
The universal law of communications is that things go wrong. Every formal signalling protocol has this fact built into its design. But all too often, this doesn’t extend to the rest of the infrastructure that runs the contact center.
Of course, if you take a service from a cloud provider, they (in theory) have infrastructure, redundancy and so on that prevents outage. Some of them make great virtues of this, claiming 99.999% uptime, etc.
While a ‘high availability’ solution with redundancy is of course important, this will only prevent ‘lights-out’ outages, caused by server/OS failure.
But this is not a major source of agent downtime in any contact center operating at scale. If everything else in your solution is reliable, this makes only a tiny practical difference to reliability – perhaps the difference between 99.99% and 99.999% uptime.
The sources of downtime
In real life, the sources of downtime are a bit more mundane:
- misconfiguration leading to unexpected system behaviour.
- poorly-designed integrations creating bottlenecks and leading to Denial of Service (DoS).
- database logjam, created by somebody running a ‘get me everything from everywhere’ report.
- and last but not least, software defects.
These issues cause considerably more downtime than server and OS outage, so avoiding these problems is crucial to delivering a true ‘high availability’ system.
Mitigating failure
Key to this is design, starting with the APIs exposed by the platform.
- Misconfiguration – Having robust API processing involves not just reporting errors but also reporting on, and mitigating the effects of, misconfiguration.
- Integration design – The shape of the APIs also determine the shape of any integration with third-party software. Clear separation of concerns and having resource failure mitigation as part of the API contract are necessary to deliver system availability in the face of resource problems.
- Database logjam – Again design is the solution. Failsafe mechanisms can be built by having clear separation of concerns, and software that proxies database communication on behalf of other components in the platform.
- Software defects – The elephant in the room. All manufacturers attest to their great software quality – it is a mantra which sadly has no bearing on reality. The next time you’re looking to refresh your contact center platform, maybe the question you should ask is ‘What does your platform do to mitigate the effects of software defects?’ The first key element of this is to implement guard code as protection from ‘nonsense’ logic. The second is having systems to alert the service provider about potential problems.
Even in a well-designed and tested platform, integration of third-party technology and user configuration can have unintended consequences; for example agent scripts that run SQL queries that, when run for many agents in parallel, cause contention.
Being able to capture problems like this before they become an operational problem helps keep your clients happy, and your business rolling along.
What We Offer
Sytel Limited develops and supplies Softdial Contact Center® (SCC) – multimedia, multichannel, fully blended cloud contact center solutions.
Available by subscription as CCaaS, fully managed and supported by Sytel, or for quick and easy deployment by partners and enterprise users.
All Sytel cloud components are secure, resilient and scale seamlessly from 10 agents to 10,000+, whether local, mobile or remote.
Flexible Contact Center Software
Softdial Contact Center™ – rich functionality, all-in-one, designed to deliver at scale
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Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)
CCaaS for subscribers – global service, with no upfront costs
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Contact Center Platform – CCaaS Partners
Build your own CCaaS business using the power and flexibility of Sytel software
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Contact Center Platform – Enterprise
High performance platform to drive contact center productivity – cloud, on-premise or hybrid
Blended Media Desktop
Fully customisable, multi-channel, multi-session workspace
Work Anywhere
Browser-based tools, no software installation required
Customise, Localise, White Label
Design all user interfaces to individual requirements
Integration via APIs
‘Swap out’ components and integrate with 3rd party apps
World Class Development
Continuous evolution pushing technical boundaries
Capabilities
Softdial Contact Center™ (SCC) is designed to be flexible, extensible and scalable, integrating with any legacy equipment, and meeting the most complex of requirements.
All Media Channels
Voice, chat, email, social, etc – fully integrated and blended
Agent Multi-Tasking
Work with multiple live contact sessions of any media channel
Dynamic Workforce Management
Optimise agent usage and balance workloads in real-time without human intervention, across all media channels
Predictive Dialing
Best-of-breed performance under compliance
Optimised Inbound Routing
Smart rules and ‘best-available’ decisions to drive great customer service
Agent Scripts
Help agents achieve and maintain excellence
Voice and Screen Recording
See and hear exactly how agents are interacting
Analytics and Data Feeds
Measure and evaluate performance at every level
IVR, Bots & Conversational AI
Design effective automated flows or integrate with 3rd party providers
Customer Journey Tracking
Stored customer contact history, to aid routing and add context to conversations
Modules
Drive operational efficiency, increase customer satisfaction & improve agent performance
Softdial One™
Highly flexible unified web UI for agents, supervisors and administrators
Softdial Scripter™
Create complex process flow scripts for agents, IVR, chatbots and other applications
Sytel AI Dialer™
Maximum predictive dialing performance, under any compliance rules
Softdial Pathfinder™
Precise routing rules for ‘best available’ connection
Softdial Media Server™
Core telephony functions to manage all inbound/outbound SIP calls
Softdial Reporter™ 5
Fully customisable performance stats, charts and reports, across all channels
Softdial Publisher™
Comprehensive data output to build your own reports
Softdial Recording Monitor™
Audio and screen recording of agent activity to ensure the highest standards
Softdial Campaign Manager™
Automation to optimise any outreach strategy
Softdial Repository™
Central storage and configuration of common resources
Sytel Global Compliance™
Flexible ‘no contact’ rules to protect contact center and consumer
Solutions
Performance and efficiency for a wide range of business applications
By Business Type
Enterprise
A full featured contact center software solution, designed for optimum performance at scale
Small/ Medium Business
Options for SMBs to subscribe to our full-featured cloud service managed and hosted by either one of our partners or by Sytel themselves
By Industry
Customer Service
Connect quickly to well equipped agents
Market Research
Best-of-breed predictive dialing with CATI integration
Debt Collection
Automated inbound/ outbound blending integrated with any debt management app
Sales & Telemarketing
Maximise agent productivity with best-of-breed predictive dialing
Healthcare
Secure, highly-configurable multichannel communications for excellence in patient care