Whitepaper: Total Economic Benefit of Operata

Contact centers around the world are undergoing a wave of modernization, enabled by the use of cloud platforms and emerging voice technologies.

They are increasingly migrating to cloud based contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) options, to implement new powerful capabilities without the complexity and cost of  traditional on-premise legacy hardware and software environments.

Modern voice technologies are opening up all new areas for enhanced CX and reduced costs. From transcription to translation, sentiment to biometrics, bots to voice assistants. New voice applications can deliver more value than ever before.

Organizations are increasingly able to expand customer services and improve customer experience without increasing overhead — a real competitive advantage. It is this context that all new CCaaS solutions such as Amazon Connect have emerged.  

But this potential brings with it high stakes.

Voice performance is more important to AX & CX than ever before as it is no longer (just) a human to human channel. There are a whole range of new use cases and capabilities such as Bots, Assistants, NLP, Biometrics. The quality of audio, speech and voice applications is more impactful than ever, directly impacting CSAT and handling times and cost of agent interactions.

The simplicity of these new CCaaS solutions also belies a series of new challenges. The shift to CCaaS sits atop a dynamic, rich, yet sensitive operating environment with new intricacies and complexities:

• Success is an outcome of an end-to-end solution. Many elements make up solutions, multiple parties manage change and SLAs, there are various contributing services and service owners, networks and systems and all of these need to be allocated and tested.
• Rapid contact center projects depend on proven performance - scalability, accuracy, quality and ongoing management capabilities all need to be tested and evidenced for transition.
• Measuring performance and troubleshooting needs new tools: Data resides in different systems. It is hard to surface issues without noise, correlating data to find the cause of problems and verify and test fixes.

Until the past few years, businesses had few options but to manually test the technical and functional requirements of their various contact center systems. Those processes are costly and time-consuming, requiring testers to call their business’ phone systems and engage in web chat or other outreach channels to identify defects, disruptions, or disconnections in their experiences.

Performance monitoring has also been underserved, particularly for modern cloud communications stacks where traditional quality measurement techniques are ineffective in both measuring customer experience quality and providing the level of detail needed to focus improvement.

"Operata was vital to accelerating our migration, testing services & assuring end-to-end quality across diverse environments. It enabled us to assess readiness for cutover of services and monitor ongoing performance. We love the Operata tool!"
— Craig Robson - IT Project Manager, Origin

The Operata Solution

Operata is a performance monitoring & experience management platform built for Amazon Connect.

Monitoring, testing and optimizing performance is critical to the successful delivery and ongoing quality of your contact center. Operata gathers information across the end-to-end environment.

In seconds the results, including playable audio with waveforms are visible in the end-to-end environment. It provides correlated quality insights, learning service quality norms to better predict issues, automate actions and speed problem resolution.

Operata accelerates contact center transformation, assures quality migration and provides key measures for ongoing business optimization and performance.

Key features include:

No-code adoption toolkit

• Reduces time to deploy and need for dev resources
• Customize your softphone simply, demonstrate business value rapidly

Automated testing

• Simulate load to validate scaling, troubleshoot issues and test fixes.
• Evidence performance to expedite project implementation

Continuous monitoring

• Measure quality from Connect to the desktop & everything between
• Detect change impacts to manage assurance and SLA’s

CX insights and analytics

• Bring together data from every call, from agents and AWS and systems
• Measure real-time performance visibility, presented for the business

Operata has conducted a Total Economic Assessment study to examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying Operata. The purpose of this study is to provide businesses with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of Operata on their organizations.

Our research

To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Operata compiled data from available third party research and interviewed a range of customers, to capture their experience and business results from using Operata.

Prior to deploying Operata, the businesses we interviewed tested and monitored their contact center systems with a range of tools and manual processes.

Although they could usually identify problems and inefficiencies, the time and effort was significant, with results subject to the human error associated with the approach.

As a result, the businesses sought a solution that could expedite and improve the accuracy of performance monitoring, without the resource overhead.

A key stakeholder from Origin, an energy utility shared:

"Operata was vital to accelerating our migration, testing services & assuring end-to-end quality across diverse environments. It enabled us to assess readiness for cutover of services and monitor ongoing performance. We love the Operata tool!"

— Craig Robson, IT Project Manager, Origin

Operata took industry collateral to establish the cost benefit derived from optimizing the customer experience, having end-to-end measurement and automating test cycles.

The results show that a significant year on year Return On Investment is gained with an investment in Operata, exceeding 360% annually. Moreover the pay-as-you-go nature of the service delivers immediate return on investment with the cost savings exceeding the solution investment from week 1 of using the platform.

Key findings

Operata customers have found their are four key factors that determine the ROI from using Operata platform:

• Direct cost benefits: AWS cost reduction
• Business costs: Service issue costs and rapid innovation
• Business performance benefits: Customer Experience
• The costs of Operata

The study found Operata delivers the following key ROI metrics:

• US$1.358M in total benefits per annum.
• Return on investment of 368% per annum.
• A payback period that is Immediate on a pay-as-you-go basis, 13 weeks if calculated on a ‘straight line’ annualised basis.