1. Congratulations on Empirix being named in its top 5000 fastest growing private companies. In your opinion, what have been the main reasons for Empirix’s significant growth?

• I see three fundamental reasons for our growth. First, networks have continued to evolve. Today a dizzying array of applications and services are being delivered over an IP backbone. We offer enterprise and mobile customers a complete set of solutions for mastering those complexities to assure a better customer experience, tightly control costs and find new opportunities to profit.

Our expansion internationally is also fueling growth. We have made significant investment in the Asia Pacific and Latin American regions where the demand for mobile services is increasing rapidly. Empirix is helping companies in those areas address important network optimization and customer experience concerns. At the same time, Empirix has expanded its Partner Channel enabling us to reach a broader community throughout the world.

2. The emergence of relatively new customer touch points such as social media channels, mobile, and video have added to the complexity of a company’s communications networks. What specific problem areas are surfacing in this fast growing environment?

• I think contact centers today are still struggling with multichannel communications and how all of the elements – voice, video, presence, chat, web – work together cohesively.

Unfortunately, some of the new data intensive applications such as video chatting are having a significant impact on Voice Quality and customer experience. In many cases, the networks are not provisioned or configured properly to handle these complex traffic patterns. This can lead to service delivery problems and poor voice quality across the board. Today, we are working with many contact centers to preempt issues with pre-deployment testing and active monitoring of production environments.

3. It appears that we can no longer separate contact center technology issues from the overall enterprise communications technology. If so, does this put additional burdens on the contact center management?

• Absolutely. As companies continue to move to new IP technologies and SIP, we are seeing an overlap of services between multiple groups. For example, knowledge-based workers are now being used in both the contact center and enterprise. Naturally, this creates a wide range of routing and availability issues. In the past few months alone, we have helped multiple companies identify and correct problems to ensure that these solutions are performing as required. And, this is just one application among many.

4. Is voice quality still a major issue in contact centers?

• Voice is definitely still king in customer service. Poor voice quality is viewed by customers as a sign that the company does not value their business. Unfortunately, there are many data-intensive services in the complex world of IP communications that can affect voice services. Often times, problems manifest themselves sporadically when multiple conditions occur, making them difficult to identify and diagnose.

5. What new products and services can we expect from Empirix in the next twelve months?

• Empirix is expanding its offerings in a variety of ways. First, we are creating more flexible, convenient ways for our customers to access Empirix’s pre-deployment testing solutions, including managed and cloud-based offerings. We are also enhancing our network performance monitoring solutions to provide greater visibility into the customer experience as a whole, across multichannel environments.

At the same time, Empirix is investing in new technologies to provide predictive analytics to the enterprise. Rather than pages of statistics, Empirix can provide real insight into customer, network and operational issues for smarter decision making across the board.

6. What services that you provide are proving to be most beneficial to your users?

• We have found that many customers prefer the convenience of a services model for accessing our Hammer Test solutions. This enables customers to better match testing to different milestones in their project plans. It also helps us quickly assist companies whose projects are stalled because system failures or interoperability issues cannot be identified with internal resources. Empirix Testing as a Service has saved many a contact center project over the past year.

7. How do you create a business case for your services? What components should go into it?

• We recently conducted an extensive study of our value and found that companies committed to providing a great customer experience will always invest a comprehensive quality assurance plan.

Some of the metrics people use to support their case include the impact technology failures have on customer retention rates, cost per call, revenue loss, time to repair, agent latency and more.

Empirix possesses extensive information for developing ROI calculations for specific industries, contact center solutions and business models.

8. What type of analytics do you provide to your customers?

• Empirix is introducing a rich portfolio of visual analytics and real-time dashboards to predict issues before they can impact customers. We can leverage data from Empirix probes and other data collectors throughout the voice and data network to provide a complete view of customer experience and operational performance. We can also enrich that information with other corporate data points to provide insight for optimizing infrastructure investments, understanding evolving customer behaviors, tightly controlling costs and uncovering new opportunities for profits

9. What are some of the best practices that you would recommend in implementing a strategy for testing and monitoring in a multi channel environment?

• Preempting issues, performing at peak levels and predicting problems before they impact customers is the best way to boost satisfaction, build stronger relationships and increase revenues.

On the testing side, best practice recommends a methodical, end-to-end approach – first validating foundational elements (carrier to IP network) and then each technology layer (IVR, CTI, CRM, presence, chat, etc.) successively. Ongoing contact center monitoring is then needed to ensure a great customer experience, every time. A comprehensive, end-to-end approach, which encompasses both active and passive monitoring of all contact center elements, is the only way to know that everything performing optimally.

We recommend that companies look at testing and monitoring strategically, from a proactive rather than reactive viewpoint. The costs associated with contact center failures are too high not to.