Johannesburg, 18 Mar 2011
As technology advances continually increase system capabilities and the overall benefit for organisations, they also increase reliance on these systems to be available for use at all times.
System reliability and availability, which have always been a core attribute for any organisation, have become even more important with the evolution of the next-generation consumer, who is empowered more than ever by choice, influence and control in a 24x7 marketplace.
According to Ebrahim Dinat, chief operations officer at Ocular Technologies, service availability and reduction of unplanned downtime collectively contribute to a customer's overall sense of the availability and reliability of a system.
“A system designed to ensure that customers can always contact an organisation and complete a desired interaction while continuously maintaining the 'conversation' will result in a highly satisfactory customer experience. The use of redundant system components reduces the detrimental effects of isolated failures and even physical component failures,” he says.
Availability is often evaluated as a percentage of uptime maintained over a measurable time period, and also typically ties to an organisation's service level agreements (SLA) between business units and across the organisation. Different services and systems within the business may have different SLA requirements that are typically determined by the overall cost/benefit analysis associated with the system and its consumers. Service level is, of course, also a very familiar contact centre metric and represents one measure of the contact centre's efficiency for responding to a customer's initial inquiry.
High availability for contact centre systems typically targets 99.999% availability or five 9s. “An environment that achieves the five 9s industry standard for high availability delivers significant benefits to organisations by minimising downtime that often incurs undesirable financial and customer relations costs,” explains Dinat.
He adds that high availability is a design and implementation approach for ensuring a system meets a certain level of operational performance. Simpler systems with fewer failure points may appear to support higher availability, but cannot sustain operations when key components fail. Parallel systems/service operations provide a very powerful mechanism for making a highly reliable system from many distributed components/services.
“To achieve high reliability, mission-critical systems are designed with redundant components. At Ocular, we believe that a successful customer contact solution must consistently provide significant benefits, and so we have partnered with Aspect Software as the high availability configuration for Aspect Unified IP ensures the contact centre system is resilient to common failure scenarios and isolated network disruptions, and the automated recovery processes supports an availability standard for five 9s,” says Dinat.
Five 9s or 99.999% reliability means no more than 5.26 minutes of unscheduled downtime per year for a given computer system. As a measure of uptime, five 9s data points include mean time between failures (MTBF) and mean time to recover (MTTR).
Vendors or system owners may calculate this metric somewhat differently, making direct comparisons challenging.
Dinat says Aspect Unified IP applications provide five 9s reliability for contact centre processes that include:
* Sustaining maximum capacity and availability.
* Maintaining in-progress conversations between customers and agents.
* Preserving contacts in a queue.
* Safeguarding that the system is always reachable for customers initiating new inquiries.
* Ensuring quality of interactions is maintained by preserving recording/monitoring of customer interactions.
* Retaining contact information for reporting.
“The Aspect Unified IP solution is designed to maintain call delivery and call routing reliability of 99.999% uptime. Its high availability architecture provides redundancy to ensure that high availability components take over the processing responsibility in the event of a failure, and that appropriate functions are load balanced to reduce the risk and impact of any localised failure. This translates to increased customer satisfaction, better resource utilisation and more financial benefits to the bottom line,” he concludes.
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