VOICE NETWORKS

From the December 2003  issue of Communications News

Gathering reports and analyzing information helps keep customers happy.

With the many options customers have today for purchasing products and services, they will not tolerate poor service for long. Network administrators need real-time information on voice system performance, and the ability to quickly modify configurations to avoid or remedy these situations.

While most PBX and key systems have basic call detail recording (CDR) capabilities, gathering and presenting the information in a timely manner is a complex process. With numerous sites, the problem becomes almost unsolvable. Here is a checklist of the steps and equipment required to pull CDR records from multiple standard key systems and present reports:

• Determine if the system supports CDR or station message detail recording (SMDR). Most, but not all systems do, but the feature may or may not be installed and configured. This will require remote access or the first of many visits to remote sites.
• Install a third-party CDR recorder. Because most key systems do not store their CDR records locally, a separate product is needed to capture records as they are written out from the SMDR/CDR port. These products vary from a dedicated PC to a small appliance with an analog modem.
• Gather and correlate the data. Accessing and downloading the stored data from remote SDMR devices can take from 10 minutes to an hour per site. In large networks, this process becomes untenable, with a system that automates the entire process needed.
• Develop or purchase a reporting package. Either way, the challenge becomes both scale (the absolute number of call records) and the complexity of the network (numerous sites that need to be handled separately for some information, but as a group for other types).
• Generate automatic reports across the network. Because of the size and complexity of these networks, having a network administrator generating and distributing these reports is not feasible.
• Develop trend analysis across the network. Critical information for identifying the problem and the solution often comes from comparing how one office or region is operating in relationship to others.

Complicating the situation is that many large retailer and enterprise networks sport different types of voice systems, each with its own CDR format.

Next-generation communications platforms ease the process of remotely and quickly gathering and presenting critical customer-experience information, enabling better decision-making. Items to monitor and track are those that affect the customer directly. While the number of incoming or outgoing calls, calls to specific extensions, duration and call toll charges are interesting, they do not reveal what customers are experiencing when they call.

Here are some important data points to look for:

• exception reports on busy seconds per trunk line;
• call-holding times for individual agents; and
• number of times a caller opted for the help option, or returned to help in the automated attendant script.

Some of these elements may be incorporated in applications like auto attendant/voice mail that run on systems separate from a PBX. If the system does not include integrated applications–such as automatic call distribution, auto attendant/voice mail and interactive voice response with voice recognition natively in the PBX–then the reporting problem becomes more difficult. The reporting solution needs to gather information from all of these applications, in their own formats, and combine it with PBX information.

These steps are required whenever desired customer interaction information is gathered. The system needs to generate trend analysis and exception reports outside of set parameters. Being able to report on numerous sites is critical to understanding what is causing the problem and to solving it. Of equal importance is the ability to manage those sites from a central location.

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