UK-based cloud contact centre provider NewVoiceMedia has launched a Trust Site to offer customers a clearer idea of how its service is performing, something it claims other companies are reluctant to do.
The Trust Site updates every fifteen minutes with metrics for various aspects of NewVoiceMedia’s products. It uses a traditional traffic light alert system: green for no issues, amber for a minor issue and red for a major issue.
The Trust Site also introduces a blue alert, for what it deems to be an acceptable level of performance. Information on the site suggests this is when service experiences a ‘small decline in performance’.
The company says it is putting its money where its mouth is by offering 99.999% availability and uptime as a contractual SLA and displaying information on the Trust Site about any outages, so customers will know what the issue is and how long the services is likely to be disrupted for, Jonathan Gale, CEO of NewVoiceMedia told CBR.
"We’re the only player globally to publicly expose our performance; it’s there for the world to see," he continued. "Other companies have aggressive SLAs but no Trust Sites, so there is no public information."
The company is backing up its claims by releasing the results of a survey that reveals many customers feel cloud-based contact centre service providers are not being open with them when it comes to availability.
Nearly half (42%) of the respondents said a lack of service visibility and low confidence in suppliers is causing them to question the viability of cloud computing.
"It’s worrying but not surprising that businesses simply don’t trust their cloud computing suppliers to give them the level of service they are promised. Cloud vendors, particularly in the contact centre space, don’t appear to focus on, or even understand, the importance of the customer experience in building a compelling proposition," Gale added in a statement.
Drew Kraus, research vice president at Gartner added: "Clients are concerned about service availability and performance from cloud vendors, particularly when it comes to critical functions like contact centre. Cloud vendors prepared to ‘lift the lid’ on how well their service is performing in real time or near real-time will help to instill confidence with their customers as well as provide a benchmark to support their SLAs."
Gale said that NewVoiceMedia competes with the likes of Avaya, Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent in the contact centre space. The company takes a multi-tenancy approach to cloud computing and offers clients the ability to have a dispersed contact centre without the people contacting the call centre knowing, something Gale says providers a better experience for the end-user.
