Podcasts

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are facing challenges to profitability, customer retention and the pressures of being in a commoditized market. Ian McCarthy explains how MSPs can combine VSM’s “big data, AI, and cloud” to present a technology-centric view of the quality of interactions between a company and its customers. elecom Reseller Podcast: July 2019 Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are facing challenges to profitability, customer retention and the pressures of being in a commoditized market. Ian McCarthy explains how MSPs can combine the “holy trinity of big data, AI, and cloud” to present a technology-centric view of the quality of interactions between a company and its customers. According to McCarthy, end customers are trying to reduce effort, reduce complexity and increase revenue. McCarthy then outlines how Virsae can help with client retention, customer acquisition, growth, profitability, efficiency and innovation. We learn how AI, big data and other resources available to MSPs can be leveraged to overcome the commodity price war challenge by developing a differentiated product. McCarthy also profiles what a successful partner looks like, including a critical way of looking at service. Learn more at www.virsae.com.

Raymond Pearson knows first-hand how challenging it can be for a contact center manager to gather information about the health of their customer interactions. He discusses how Virsae Service Management (VSM) delivers on the gaps contact center managers are typically confronted with. Telecom Reseller Podcast: February 2019 As a former consultant who provided advice to large contact center customers, Raymond Pearson has a passion for those in charge of the customer experience. He also knows how frustrating it can be for contact center managers to gather information about the health of their ecosystem. That is why he views Virsae Service Management (VSM) as a Contact Center Manager’s best friend. “There’s a whole lot of (additional) information that can dramatically effect customer experience that most contact managers never see, and VSM shines a light on those data points,” says Pearson. Pearson says VSM alerts call center managers to logical faults with call handling systems, providing insight on how customer service could be affected. VSM can also notify call center managers whether or not calls are actually being recorded. A lot of contact center managers don’t even have basic data that shows usage of their carrier trunks, for example,” says Pearson, noting that VSM provides insight on all those data points. Pearson notes several areas, critical to customer service and to workforce management, where VSM provides crucial and actionable insights. We learn how VSM delivers call flow diagrams and color codes potential logical faults in those call flows, whether it be a call flow that is never called or steps in the if/then flow that occur after a stop step, for example. The logical faults are potential landmines for customer experience issues. VSM reports and alerts on failures within the call flows. For example, when queue announcements fail to play, or when agents and callers can’t be connected due to constraints with network bandwidth. We also learn how VSM helps call center managers with peripherals like call recording and WFO. As a cloud service, VSM collects data that is only available in the CC environment for seconds at a time and stores it for reporting. With VSM there’s no limit on storage and processing, which gives contact center managers information with historical depth for trending. “When I was managing 1800 locations across the US, if I had a platform like this, my life would have been much, much easier,” says Pearson. Learn more at www.virsae.com.

Ross Williams discusses VSM’s major step forward in data processing, including their experience with Data Lake technology, which he says puts Virsae ahead of the market. Telecom Reseller Podcast: October 2018 “VSM monitors tens-of-millions of UC network end-points,” says Ross Williams. “But the real magic is in the data VSM captures – things like interactions, new events, and log entries. All this data provides a live picture of network health, so clients can fix problems on their network fast, often before their customers notice,” he says. “And the really cool thing is that all our clients benefit from the intelligence gleaned from VSM’s global client base.” The idea of crunching big data so an entire community of users benefits from shared learning is part of the Virsae story we hear about in this podcast about Virsae Service Management (VSM). Williams discusses VSM’s major step forward in data processing, including their experience with Data Lake technology, which he says puts Virsae ahead of the market. He says the opportunity to store raw, non-archived, non-summarized data for up to 13 months has vastly improved VSM’s ability to understand customer interactions. Demonstrating the latent value in so much data, Williams says in one instance VSM analyzed over a half a million calls to resolve an ongoing issue in under 30 minutes. Williams also discusses VSM’s compatibility with vendors such as Avaya, Cisco, and Microsoft, and now NEC. According to Williams, VSM enables Virsae business partners to apply an IT service management framework to multi-vendor UC platforms. We’ll also cover AI and pick other trends likely to emerge in 2019.

Jay Byford provides an extensive overview of how Virsae delivers what the company describes as a, “45-point UC systems health check of availability, configuration, capacity, security, and customer experience”.

Telecom Reseller Podcast: July 24 2018 According to Jay Byford, “…UC managers sometimes struggle to see what’s going on in their UC environments. That’s why we created Virsae System and Application Assessment – to shine a light in every corner of the UC platform to provide managers with a picture of overall health and performance.”

Byford provides an overview of how Virsae delivers what the company describes as a, “45-point UC systems health check of availability, configuration, capacity, security, and customer experience.”

Byford explains how their firm’s deep relationship with major OEMs enables Virsae to offer a holistic point of view on the “UC cocktail”. Virsae’s insights help users find capacity utilization savings, misconfigured systems, and poorly ordered call-queue options, along with a host of other issues beyond the view of UC managers and their technology partners.

Ross Williams walks us through Virsae’s new Security Manager service. Recorded at Avaya ENGAGE, Williams also discusses Virsae’s long and very close relationship with Avaya. Telecom Reseller Podcast: February 2018 According to Ross Williams, “Any enterprise that is looking to improve quality, to lift their game… to provide a good quality customer experience every time,” should talk to Virsae. Virsae’s multi-vendor UC service management platform, VSM, manages more than 50 UC, customer experience and network infrastructure vendors, including Cisco, Microsoft, Avaya, Mitel, AudioCodes, Sonus, NICE, Verint and Juniper. Williams walks us through Virsae’s new Security Manager service that helps companies pinpoint vulnerabilities and shore up defenses to protect their UC networks from malicious attacks. “In the same way house alarms and CCTV intruder detection systems activate alarms to instantly alert homeowners, Security Manager watches and flags suspicious activity in real time, keeping UC managers in the picture and one step ahead of the bad guys,” said Williams.

Steve Shaw talks to Telecom Reseller about how cloud-based Virsae Service Management (VSM) reduces reactive break-fix activity through the use of the collected data and powerful analytics. Businesses rely on their unified communications (UC) technology to effectively function from day to day. It’s by delivering high quality, reliable voice calls, equipping remote workers with the collaboration tools needed to be operational or enhancing customer interactions in the contact center. Customers are looking for peace of mind around their UC system to ensure it is performing at the highest quality of service. You can buy the tools but are you going to effectively use them. A cloud based service can offer more tools at a lower cost and offer expert assistance. Steve Shaw discusses the tools that allow UC teams to prevent outages, improve end user experience, and right size resources across the network. The introduction of UC service management reduces reactive break-fix activity by up to 80 percent through the use of the collected data and powerful analytics. VSM takes a very different approach. VSM is designed to provide transparency and visibility of the customer’s assets to the customer’s own organisation, as well as the service provider. Using the easily configurable dashboard interface, VSM puts the user in control and lets them see what is important to the business. The dashboard is fully customizable too. Customers can pick and choose the items that matter to them from a range of information sources.