Network Enhancers - "Delivering Beyond Boundaries": Performance

Showing posts with label Performance. Show all posts

Sunday, May 5, 2013

Four Steps for Optimising Customer Service Operations

Customers want efficient, effortless service from the touchpoint and communication channel of their choice. They want to receive accurate, relevant, and complete answers to their questions upon first contact with a company.

Forrester data backs this up: Sixty-six percent of customers agree that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide good service. Forty-five percent of US online adults will abandon their online purchase if they can’t find a quick answer to their question. Why is it so important to deliver on customer expectations? Customer satisfaction correlates to customer loyalty, and loyalty has economic benefits.

Forrester calculates that a 10-percentage-point improvement in a company’s customer experience score can translate into more than $1 billion in revenue. Conversely, poor customer experiences are costly: Our data shows that 75% of consumers move to another channel when online service fails, which can incur a cost of many millions of dollars.

We also know that it is difficult to deliver customer service in line with customer expectations. Our customer service technology ecosystem is increasingly complex. Social technologies have disrupted traditional communications, and smartphones and tablets have made the delivery of consistent experiences across touchpoints more challenging. And the number of vendor mergers and acquisitions has complicated vendor selection.

So how do you do better? Forrester’s customer service playbook details a four-step prescription that can help you out:

Discover what matters for customer service. Understand customer-facing, agent-facing, and technology trends that are shaping the future of customer service-trends like changes in communication channel usage by demographic, mobility solutions for customer service, the value of tighter coupling of knowledge management to case management, BPM adoption, the rising importance of outsourcing, cloud-based technologies, and the evolving technology landscape.

Plan for improvements. Assess your current operations against best practices to understand your strengths and pinpoint areas of opportunity. This will help you build a concrete plan for improvements and lay out a technology adoption road map. It will help you answer questions such as

“Do I first fix my IVR navigation, launch web self-service, or update my case management solution?”

Act on your findings. With your planning in place, it’s time to choose whether to outsource customer service operations and/or technology, buy it from a vendor, or, in unique cases, build it yourself. This decision is very important, as the vendor landscape is broad, mature, and rife with mergers and acquisitions. Partnering with the right technology provider can make or break your operations.

Optimise. Customer service is no longer viewed as just a cost centre. Key success metrics have historically focused on productivity, efficiency, and regulatory compliance instead of customer satisfaction. However, forward-thinking organisations are gradually adopting a Balanced Scorecard of metrics that include not only cost and compliance, but also customer satisfaction, which is more suited to drive the right agent behaviour and deliver outcomes better aligned to customer expectations.

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Customer Experience Is Greatest Untapped Source of Profits

Courtesy - Computer world

Analyst firm Forrester claims that customer experience is the greatest untapped source of profits in business today, and that projects commissioned to target this are putting pressure on technology departments.

Harley Manning, co-author of “Outside In: The Power of Putting your Customers at the Centre of your Business”, told Computerworld UK that companies need to rethink how they approach customer experience.

“If you look at customer experience from the perspective of what it can do to decrease your costs, what it can do to increase your revenue, and then look at the return on investment from doing those kind of projects, then the discussion of customer experience happens on a very different level and you realise that is probably the greatest untapped source of profits in business today,” said Manning.

“If you set out to be the best in the world at marketing you would struggle because it is a mature discipline and well understood. However, if you said you are going to focus on providing a better customer experience than your competitors, suddenly you are competing in a different arena.”

Manning said that it is hard to assess your systems internally to understand what impact they are having on the customer’s experience, and as a result the technology department should take an ‘outwards-in’ perspective, whereby it assesses every point at which the customer interacts with the business.

“Take each of those touches that the customer has with your company. Perhaps in a retail location, over the phone, on a website, on a mobile app—looking at whether the underlying people, processes, policies and technologies that contributed to the experience that the customer had at each of those points makes you quickly realise that you have an opportunity to do very specific things with technology to improve that experience,” he said.

Bill Band, principal analyst for Application Development & Delivery at Forrester, agreed with Manning and said that companies are beginning to waken up to the benefits of making customer experience a priority, which is placing pressure on IT departments.

“Improving customer experience is putting new demands on technology departments. In particular, one thing that I have noticed is that the projects that get backing tend to cluster around digital interactions with customers because in this day and age a lot of these revolve around mobile or web.

“As a result, a lot more technology-heavy projects are being commissioned around these customer experiences,” said Band.

“Also, the role of technology employees inside these organisations is changing as companies start to focus more on the customer experience. Technology employees have to become more strategic,” he added.

“There is more of a spotlight being placed on the IT organisation to help execute business strategy. So it’s no longer about maintenance and support, these people are now important strategic assets. A lot of them are moving out of pure IT roles into business technology roles and are moving closer to marketing/sales business units.”

The book will be published on 28 August and includes more than 80 case studies from across 15 industries in 16 countries, including examples from Boeing, E.ON Energy, FedEx, T-Mobile and Virgin Media.

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Top 10 Best Network Monitoring Software Tools

The network monitoring tools used to monitor the entire network devices and services constantly and it notifies the Network Administrators if any network devices or services effected (any Node or Links down and services affected with high utilization).

Now most of the organizations from the smallest office to the largest enterprises looking for some kind of network monitoring tools to help them analyze performance issues, alert them to threats, and provide reports on the health of the network environment. For any organization it is highly crucial to invest on Network Monitoring Tools. This below list comprises of some free and some paid but all desirable Network monitoring tools, you can find customized package or an open source code tool as per your requirements.

Cacti

Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool’s data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box. All of this is wrapped in an intuitive, easy to use interface that makes sense for LAN-sized installations up to complex networks with hundreds of devices.

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PRTG Network Monitor

PRTG monitors system availability using a variety of methods from simple ping through SNMP and WMI protocols to specific tasks such as HTTP, DNS, and Remote Desktop availability using various sensors. Using specific sensors for specific machines, an administrator can monitor service availability–including Exchange and SQL–and be notified instantly of problems. Also, PRTG comes with some bandwidth monitoring sensors, so you can ensure that malware designed to do DoS, “phone home”, and other overload activities are not operating on your network.
PRTG supports all Windows versions, XP/2003 or later.

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Nagios

Nagios is a system and network monitoring application. Nagios XI extends on proven, enterprise-class Open Source components to deliver the best monitoring solution for today’s demanding organizational requirements. It watches hosts and services that you specify, alerting you when things go bad and when they get better. Some of its many features include monitoring of network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, ICMP, etc.), monitoring of host resources (processor load, disk usage, etc.), and contact notifications when service or host problems occur and get resolved (via email, pager, or user-defined method

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Orion Network Performance Monitor

Orion Network Performance Monitor is the ticket for large, complex network environments. Stand-out features are the Web interface, an integrated Wireless Poller to monitor wireless devices, and easily customizable reports.

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Colasoft packet graphing

Colasoft software includes a Diagnosis console that lists events separated by OSI layers and enables sorting by severity, source address or event type to help speed recovery. A special Matrix view is available, too, that depicts connections at-a-glance, further enhancing diagnosis.
Supported operating systems are Windows-only: Windows XP (32- and 64-bit versions), Windows Server 2003 (32- and 64-bit versions), Windows Vista (32- and 64-bit versions), Windows 2008 (32- and 64-bit versions) and Windows 7 (32- and 64-bit versions).
Update: Capsa 7.2.1 no longer supports Windows 2000.

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Munin

Munin is an open source application that enables the administrator to monitor and collect data for networks, PCs, SANS, and even applications. It is designed to be very plug and play. A default installation provides a lot of graphs with almost no work.

Munin is available for UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems including: Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, AIX, OS X / Darwin supported in trunk, and HP-UX.

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Zenoss

Zenoss provides insight and unified operations for large-scale physical, virtual and cloud-based IT environments. Zenoss is available for a number of operating systems. You can install packages built for most flavours of Linux and Mac OS X, or build it from source on any other system where there are no packages pre-built. Also available are virtual appliances for VMware.

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Zabbix

Zabbix is an enterprise-class open source distributed monitoring solution that has Advanced cache module for much better performance.

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collectd

collectd gathers statistics about the system it is running on and stores this information. Those statistics can then be used to find current performance bottlenecks (i.e. performance analysis) and predict future system load (i.e. capacity planning).

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Observium

Observium is an autodiscovering PHP/MySQL/SNMP based network monitoring system focused primarily on Cisco and Linux networks but includes support for a wide range of network hardware and operating systems.

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Argus

Argus is a system and network monitoring application. Argus is a fixed-model Real Time Flow Monitor designed to track and report on the status and performance of all network transactions seen in a data network traffic stream. It will monitor nearly any applications like TCP + UDP applications, IP connectivity, SNMP OIDS, Programs, Databases, etc. Argus provides a common data format for reporting flow metrics such as connectivity, capacity, demand, loss, delay, and jitter on a per transaction basis. The record format that Argus uses is flexible and extensible, supporting generic flow identifiers and metrics, as well as application/protocol specific information.

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Ganglia

Ganglia is a scalable distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and Grids. It is based on a hierarchical design targeted at federations of clusters. It leverages widely used technologies such as XML for data representation, XDR for compact, portable data transport, and RRDtool for data storage and visualization.

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Monit

Monit is a free open source utility for managing and monitoring, processes, files, directories and filesystems on a UNIX system. Monit conducts automatic maintenance and repair and can execute meaningful causal actions in error situations.

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Splunk

Splunk allows you to index, search, alert, and report on both live and archived IT data. Splunk is a modular Web-based tool that allows you to add or subtract apps to match your needs. There are both free and enterprise versions available for Windows, Linux, Mac, AIX, Solaris, and BSD.
Splunk collects data from multiple sources on your network and analyzes that data in one, centralized, Web-based location.

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LogicMonitor

LogicMonitor allows you to add an agent to a machine and have it monitored from your own, personalized dashboard that can be reached from anywhere using a web browser. It will keep you apprised of the status of your network, network equipment, cloud, databases, applications, power infrastructure, and more.