Customer Stories • 3 MIN READ

Black Friday. 72 hours and counting. And Black is turning Red.

IR Team

Written by IR Team

info@ir.com

Black Friday, one of the biggest shopping days in the US is just 72 hours away.  And if last years figures are anything to go by, this year’s online and instore sales will total billions of dollars.*

But something is wrong. Very wrong.

As 75,000 contact center agents distributed across 29 contact centers prepare for the Black Friday onslaught communication systems start to fail.

At the heart of one financial provider 3 phone systems that are critical to providing customer service crash.

IT staff see the error “segmentation fault”.

And as they realize that the hardware is at fault, businesscontinuity systems systems also fail. Each of these systems can take up to an hour to restart. And no one knows what’s wrong.

36 hours

Shoppers camp out on pavements, students don’t go to school, excitement builds and crowd control staff move into place.

Retailers get ready to open their doors. Within hours lines will be deep at all registers and parking lots will overflow as stock runs out in seconds.

Phone systems are still down

IT staff at the provider reach out to IR Consulting for help.

The support team identifies what they observed as the leading indicators of the PBX crashes.

They explain that the segmentation fault can occur when servers send traffic to each other and there are severe network impairments or errors.

These are the kind that also cause multiple voice networks and gateways to go down.

The telephony vendor confirms that occasionally, the PBX will reset because of a segmentation fault.

A fix is available but now is not the time to implement that fix!

The teams get to work. They confirm that they can get visibility of these leading indicators through Prognosis.

They can apply predictive analytics and if these conditions arise create an intelligent alert.

Prognosis will provide the context of the relationship between different managed elements and identify where within the system the alert occurs.

Critically it will also show what other components are affected.

This gives IT staff a vital 15 minutes to switch to redundant servers and keep operations going.

Multi-vendor correlation

There’s a lot going on behind the scenes in any telephony environment and the many interdependent parts makes root cause isolation very difficult.

Prognosis for Contact Center simplifies managing complex multivendor UC environments with one consolidated view.

Staff can quickly find the root cause and who is responsible. By avoiding delays and outages you can identify issues before your customers do.

Happy customers

  • Deliver more value to business units
  • Shift from reactive to proactive performance management
  • Identify communication infrastructure issues
  • Resolve problems rapidly
  • Reduce occurrences
  • Make intelligent investment decisions

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Topics: Communications High availability Contact Center

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