Consistacom's Policy Agent Management, or "PAM", automates the process of adding, changing, and deleting agent logins on your Avaya ACD. It links to your existing Workforce Management System, or you can use PAM alone as a stepping stone between manual agent management and a full-featured Workforce Management System. With PAM, you must manage agents in the Workforce Management System, and the ACD changes happen automatically, accurately, and on a schedule that enforces your schedule for retention or deletion of old agent logins after an agent separates from your workforce. You will cut costs because human labor is eliminated, cut errors because the process is automated and audited daily, and gain a competitive advantage because you can make massive changes overnight with only a few minutes of planning during the day. PAM scales from a few hundred agents to hundreds of thousands, and is very affordable.
Consistacom's Policy Agent Management, or "PAM", automates the process of adding, changing, and deleting agent logins on your Avaya ACD. It links to your existing Workforce Management System, or you can use PAM alone as a stepping stone between manual agent management and a full-featured Workforce Management System. With PAM, you must manage agents in the Workforce Management System, and the ACD changes happen automatically, accurately, and on a schedule that enforces your schedule for retention or deletion of old agent logins after an agent separates from your workforce. You will cut costs because human labor is eliminated, cut errors because the process is automated and audited daily, and gain a competitive advantage because you can make massive changes overnight with only a few minutes of planning during the day. PAM scales from a few hundred agents to hundreds of thousands, and is very affordable.
With Consistacom’s Policy Agent Management, or “PAM”, every agent’s login is audited for accuracy every night. It is compared against the next day's policy configured for the agent’s currently assigned business function in the Workforce Management System. Deviations are automatically corrected, and you get an email report summarizing the nightly corrections. A detailed report is also available, so you know exactly what changed and why. This is much more effective and efficient than running a script to set every agent’s configuration every night because 1) New agents are automatically incorporated, 2) You can easily change the policy in a few minutes, without needing to change and test a script, 3) When an agent’s business function changes (for example, they switch from customer service to incoming collections) they are automatically governed by the policy for the new function – without the need to take them out of one script and put them in another. PAM operation is automatic, eliminating many manual steps you perform today. Eliminating human effort cuts costs and increases accuracy. PAM always shows up for work, always tells you exactly what it has done, can handle multiple call centers and / or multiple ACDs, and is very fast.
Consistacom’s PAM (Policy Agent Management) does just that. Add the agent to your Workforce Management System, and the agent is added to one or more of you Avaya ACDs, according to rules you set up. When the agent changes jobs within the call center, update the Workforce Management System as you always do, and the ACD is updated automatically. When the agent separates, mark them inactive in Workforce Management and PAM will “Park” them in a special skill on the ACD, then delete them after the number of days prescribed by your standard policy. If you don’t need agent parking, the agent is deleted right away. If your disaster recovery policy changes, agents will automatically be added to or removed from failover ACDs, as the new policy dictates.
A uniform caller experience is important to maintaining your brand image. Repeat callers should always hear the same prompts, choose from the same options, and have the same experience regardless of which call center or Avaya ACD their call lands on. This uniformity is one facet of broad-based Business Continuity. Understanding the need is easy. Successfully implementing it is hard. Proving complete and accurate execution is humanly impossible. Consistacom’s patented Multi-System Synchronizer is the only tool that automatically implements and enforces Business Continuity rules for Avaya Communication Manager call flows. Vectors, VDNs, announcements, skills, and other resources are selectively maintained in accordance with easy to define business policies that reflect the way you work. With MSS, you keep existing processes and procedures – except redundant and error-prone manual labor. Changes on one ACD are replicated to others in seconds. Every facet of every replicated call flow is audited every night. Policy deviations are automatically corrected, and you receive both summary and detail reports of it all. MSS does the humanly impossible, tells you all, and stays out of your way. Your callers get a uniform experience. You get error-free programming across all your ACDs in seconds. Your company gets reduced costs. Look into MSS today!
Rapid response to changing business needs is essential for success in today’s fast-moving world. Consistacom solutions replace error-prone, labor-intensive manual projects with continuous processes that are automatic, self-auditing, and massively scalable.
When you need to roll out a call flow programming change across multiple Avaya ACDs, the Multi-System Synchronizer (“MSS”) makes it as easy as programming a single ACD. The flexible business rules that govern MSS automatically replicate the adds, changes, and deletes from a designated ACD to the others. The ACDs don’t have to have completely identical programming. Only the common call flow components defined by the rules are replicated. MSS records a detailed audit trail of everything it does. MSS also audits all the ACDs every night, so any programming deviations that were accidentally introduced are identified, logged, and corrected automatically. The email reports you receive in the morning explain all the deviations and the actions taken to correct them.
Sometimes you need to simultaneously change the skills or levels assigned to a large number of agents. Consistacom’s PAM (Policy Agent Management) does this automatically, 100% accurately, and with only a few minutes of effort by your Workforce Administration team. Just update the configuration policy for a particular business function performed by agents in your call center, and every agent assigned to that function is updated automatically. There is a detailed audit trail, and PAM will make sure that all agents start every day in conformance with the policy. For one example of repeated massive changes, read this success story.
Consistacom’s Configuration Archive and Change History Management Service bridge the gap between the limited administrative history built into Avaya Communication Manager (also Definity and MultiVantage) telephone systems and the extensive audit trails maintained by other key IT systems.
An essential part of any IT operation is an automatic, reliable backup of server files every day. Database systems are more thorough, automatically logging every transaction as it is committed. These are standard capabilities, essential to the smooth operation of almost every IT system – except your Avaya Telephone System. Later generation Avaya systems have a History Log, but it only tells you what changed at a high level. You can see that John Doe changed station 12978 at 13:45:56 today, but you cannot see what changed – and this is usually exactly what you need to know.
The Configuration Archive, and the inexpensive hosted Change History Management service offered by Consistacom, tell you everything: what object changed, when, who did it, exactly what field(s) on the configuration form was changed, and what the old and new values are. With the Configuration Archive, you spend your time fixing problems and restoring full operations. Guesswork is eliminated. Root Cause analysis is easy, because all changes are recorded, regardless of how they were made. If it was changed, the Configuration Archive has a record.
Change management paperwork tells you what is supposed to be done, and when. Without Consistacom’s Configuration Archive, it is impossible to know for sure what happened. And if the change doesn’t work, and you don’t have a detailed backup of the system before the change, restoring proper operation is a time consuming and less than certain process.
With the Configuration Archive, you always have an exact record of what changed, when, by who, and what the changed resources looked like before the change started. It closes the information gap, replaces an honesty policy of change reporting with a fact-based information repository, shows you unauthorized changes, and does it all at an enterprise level rather than switch-by-switch.
Change management paperwork tells you what is supposed to be done, and when. Without Consistacom’s Configuration Archive, it is impossible to know for sure what happened. And if the change doesn’t work, and you don’t have a detailed backup of the system before the change, restoring proper operation is a time consuming and less than certain process.
With the Configuration Archive, you always have an exact record of what changed, when, by who, and what the changed resources looked like before the change started. It closes the information gap, replaces an honesty policy of change reporting with a fact-based information repository, shows you unauthorized changes, and does it all at an enterprise level rather than switch-by-switch.
The Consistacom Multi-System Synchronizer (MSS) expands your options for Disaster Recovery. This includes the ability to maintain your ESS server translations (configuration settings) in sync with your main server (what the ESS server backs up) in real time. In standard native operation, the ESS translations are only updated in batches, usually at scheduled intervals. If you schedule the batch transfer for 2 AM, and your call center has a failover to ESS at 4 PM, will the failover cause chaos because of outdated settings? With MSS, the ESS translations will be the same as they were on the main server 1 minute before the failover. That means you can design a Disaster Recovery plan that includes a continuity of operation, regardless of how many changes you made during the day.
MSS can also be used as an alternative to ESS in some situations. The best choice for you depends on your network architecture and specific functionality needs. For a free consultation with a Disaster Recovery specialist, please contact Consistacom.
The “Best” Disaster Recovery plan for you depends on your specific needs. Consistacom’s MSS (Multi-System Synchronizer) Business Continuity solution is an integral part of the Disaster Recovery plan for the world’s largest VOIP call center. Take a minute to read this success story and see how it saved the day just three weeks after it was installed. A similar architecture is in use at a US based International Airline.
For a free consultation with a Disaster Recovery specialist, please contact Consistacom
If you don’t have Consistacom’s patented MSS (Multi-System Synchronizer), you probably don’t have a safe way to prove that your Disaster Recovery plan works. Disaster recovery plans that include MSS are routinely and safely exercised. That is the acid test, but it isn’t even needed because MSS continually audits compliance with the plan and makes corrections as needed. The report it produces every morning objectively reports the current state of compliance.
Without MSS, executing your disaster recovery plan can be a nail-biting experience. With it, you know ahead of time if there are any problems. For a free consultation with a Disaster Recovery specialist, please contact Consistacom
Keeping call flow documentation up to date is a challenge. The very basic issues of who is responsible, where to keep it, and how to uniformly portray complex relationships (such as multiple Vectors playing the same announcement) have not been reduced to a best practice – until now. The first significant standardization is Consistacom’s ACD Auditor. It provides a standardized, comprehensive cross-reference of the complex relationships between vectors and the resources they control, plus the inter-resource relationships. It also goes beyond simply organizing and displaying the relationships by analyzing them. This analysis produces reports showing hard to find errors, such as vectors attempting to play an announcement that is no longer administered.
The ACD Auditor also organizes and documents the use of vector variables and VDN variables in a unique way that makes their use faster, easier, and safer because of the clearly documented relationships between variables and the dialable resources they represent.
With up to date documentation from the ACD Auditor, your programming team works more efficiently and effectively to reduce errors and introduce safe changes in less time.
The Configuration Archive from Consistacom gathers a comprehensive record of administrative activity across your network of Avaya telephone systems. The detailed audit trail shows what changed, who did it, when, and how to undo the change. Standard reporting included with the Configuration Archive shows key indicators of activity levels. The open database schema and ODBC connectivity of the Configuration Archive make custom reporting and comparison of individual administrators’ activity, plus comparison of individuals or teams, a straight-forward task in any ODBC capable tool including Microsoft Excel and Access.
Most Consistacom solutions are designed from the ground up to work on an enterprise level.
- The Configuration Archive collects, reports, and analyzes administrative activity across all the Avaya telephone systems in your network and is massively scalable.
- The Multi-System Synchronizer automatically replicates and monitors common programming in multiple systems faster and more accurately than humanly possible.
- Policy Agent Management automates call center agent provisioning on multiple ACDs
Consistacom solutions for call center management are controlled by clear policies or rules, with the flexibility to mimic the way you already work.
- Policy Agent Management automatically translates the contents of your existing Workforce Management System onto your Avaya ACDs, eliminating manual labor and speeding deployment of updated operational strategies across chosen business functions in the call center.
- The Configuration Archive provides the missing piece of Avaya change management. It automatically records a comprehensive audit trail of Avaya user programming changes across the enterprise. When you need to know what changed, when, who did it, and how to undo it, the Configuration Archive does in seconds what used to take an exhaustive exercise in reporting, research, and intuition.
- The ACD auditor organizes and analyzes the programming of your Avaya ACD and call flows. It goes way beyond simple reporting, to find programming errors and stranded resources that used to take days or weeks of effort. Programmers spend more of their time implementing improvements your business needs, and less doing tedious and error-prone manual research.
- With the Multi-System Synchronizer, policies control the automatic replication and maintenance of the programming in one ACD to all other ACDs hosting the same call flow.
Consistacom solutions for call center management are controlled by clear policies or rules, with the flexibility to mimic the way you already work.
- Policy Agent Management automatically translates the contents of your existing Workforce Management System onto your Avaya ACDs, eliminating manual labor and speeding deployment of updated operational strategies across chosen business functions in the call center.
- The Configuration Archive provides the missing piece of Avaya change management. It automatically records a comprehensive audit trail of Avaya user programming changes across the enterprise. When you need to know what changed, when, who did it, and how to undo it, the Configuration Archive does in seconds what used to take an exhaustive exercise in reporting, research, and intuition.
- The ACD auditor organizes and analyzes the programming of your Avaya ACD and call flows. It goes way beyond simple reporting, to find programming errors and stranded resources that used to take days or weeks of effort. Programmers spend more of their time implementing improvements your business needs, and less doing tedious and error-prone manual research.
- With the Multi-System Synchronizer, policies control the automatic replication and maintenance of the programming in one ACD to all other ACDs hosting the same call flow.
By replacing manual procedures with continuous automated processes, Consistacom solutions eliminate the need for much of the manual labor traditionally associated with maintaining Avaya systems. They don’t just shift it somewhere else; the labor, cost, and delays simply disappear.
Consistacom management solutions eliminate many redundant and error-prone manual processes in the Avaya powered call center
- The Configuration Archive knows what changed, when, who did it, and shows you how to undo the change when needed. Fix breaks fast and keep new initiatives on schedule.
- The ACD Auditor analyzes your call flow programming in minutes, finding errors and stranded resources. The need for telephone switch “cleanup” is something that gets a lot of lip service, but few enterprises do it because it takes so much time. With Consistacom, you can do what you know is needed, and save programmer time in the end.
- The Multi-System Synchronizer automatically replicates programming and maintains consistency across multiple Avaya ACDs. It was humanly impossible before, as evidenced by Consistacom’s extensive experience with actual customer networks. Now it is automatic and accurate, with an audit trail and daily analysis to prove consistency and compliance with Business Continuity standards.
- Policy Agent Management automatically translates the contents of your Workforce Management System into agent logins on the Avaya telephone system. New agents are added, existing agents are audited and corrected daily (something you don’t even do today), and separated agents are removed. You already have the data you need. Why pay humans to repeatedly translate between different technology platforms?