IVR monitoring, reporting: making it real

Take 1.8 million subscribers making a staggering 1.5 million calls a day, and what do you have? A very successful business with a big headache.

Why? Because even with a best-in-class call centre and interactive voice response (IVR) system, the sheer logistics of monitoring a system of this magnitude, and reporting at an operational and customer level, can be overwhelming, to say the least, especially if you want to do it in real-time. Unless, of course, you have the right system and processes in place to do this for you.

This is what Molo Innovation and ASG Performance Solutions do best. So, when Molo was approached by one of its top clients in the telecommunications space to provide a real-time monitoring and reporting solution for its IVR, ASG was a logical partner to bring on board.

So, let's start off talking technical. When all is said and done, reporting should always be underpinned by an appropriate data solution and process. In order to gather information about the status of various IVR systems, each client IVR node needed a data gathering application that would report activities on each IVR system (call volumes, call status, etc) to a centralised monitoring server that fed the data into a specially configured MySQL database.

SQL stored procedures then updated aggregations of existing data, which the ASG dashboards would use as a data source. Molo was responsible for this critical phase of the project, which provided the data foundation required for monitoring and reporting.

Molo's IVR experience and ASG's expertise in the reporting and business intelligence (BI) arena was then put to the test in designing and building a set of monitoring and BI dashboards.

The adjacent table provides an overview on each dashboard and what it does:

The following product and services were used in the initiative:

* The core of the solution was Molo's Monitoring Server alongside an Apache Web server with PHP and a MySQL database.
* Two blade servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux hosted the solution with real-time replication between the two to ensure redundancy and load balancing.
* The clients only needed an Internet browser to access the dashboards.

The client can now, for the first time, get meaningful real-time business intelligence “at a glance”. Critical business information is highlighted to decision-makers, with the detail available in a “drill down” format via the dashboards. This leads to faster and more informed decision-making at all levels of the organisation.

As for Molo and ASG - here's to a new chapter and partnership, which we look forward to growing down the line!