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OpsTel Services: When Performance Matters
Paul Prinke, Co-Founder & CIOThis question kept DeGaetano—a corporate executive with 25 years of experience in contact center management and customer support operations—up at night. Having led many contact center transformational engagements, DeGaetano observed how companies struggled with presenting real-time performance indicators that assist operations teams in making the right decisions at the right time. He was quick to notice that all these successful optimizations and transformational initiatives leveraged business intelligence reports—based on “after the fact” or historical information—for gauging the performance of their contact centers.
With his thinking cap on, DeGaetano deduced that this “rearview mirror” approach needs to be replaced with Operational Intelligence—activity-based metrics that coincide with the real-time performance of what companies are measuring.
Having realized that operational intelligence is the missing link and the next frontier in a rapidly evolving contact center environment, DeGaetano partnered with Prinke in 2010—a technology expert delivering innovative ideas and software solutions unique to the contact center space. He decided to fuse his experience with Prinke’s keen understanding of business operations and technology functions. Voila! OpsTel Services was born. A combination of two words— Operational and Intelligence—OpsTel was founded with a singular focus on improving contact center efficiencies and enabling synergies between technology and operations to enhance the customer experience.
"At OpsTel we pride ourselves in providing our clients what they need from our tools to drive important business decisions"
A major breakthrough for the company was their custom operational intelligence tool developed for a major U.S. healthcare provider with a large-scale contact center operation. The multifaceted tool included not only OpsTel’s foundational operational intelligence but also an automation capability that would take the operations to the next level. OpsTel created a tool that enabled the client to automatically provision managed contact center agent profiles across their solution stack through an integrated user portal system. This was seven years ago when OpsTel went live with 150 agent profiles and had less than ten user administrators. Fast forward to today, OpsTel now looks into 13,000 employee profiles and has over 1,000 administrators utilizing their application to manage the entire enterprise.
Harnessing Every Bit of Performance
With a sharp focus on software asset management, profile identity provisioning, and proactive skills management, OpsTel has developed a powerful contact center solution suite. It integrates with the administrative functions and manages different environments to improve data handling along with highly visual, automated measures and metrics.
Our tools and services provide an integrated view of performance metrics specific to an individual and his job responsibility
“In the wake of the ever-changing trends and introduction of newer technologies in the contact center industry, the operations teams require to adapt quickly. Organizations may have the best-in-class intelligent call routing technology, however, transforming obsolete versions of their workforce management solution diminishes the benefits of these technologies,” reveals Prinke, co-founder and CIO, OpsTel. While a highly siloed data environment adds to the complexities in managing and administering data, contact centers need to adapt and be flexible to address newer technologies and the associated integrations.
“Our tools and services provide an integrated view of performance metrics specific to an individual and his job responsibility,” explains Prinke. OpsTel’s solutions are built from the ground up to enable agile operations. “Our application-agnostic solution enables high levels of integration across systems in our client’s contact center environment, regardless of whether it is cloud-based or on-premise,” he adds.
The Power of Operational Intelligence
OpsTel’s contact center suite of offerings comprises three modular solutions: SPEED, VIEW, and PLUS. SPEED is the skills configuration management solution that provides a broad, top-down view of employees’ profiles across the enterprise with an added feature to handle unplanned and unforeseen events in contact center operations. It allows scheduling both future and temporary changes in the agent state, which auto-revert to the original state when scheduled time expires. Through a single interface, SPEED supercharges the operations staff’s ability to react quickly to service level fluctuations. The solution optimizes the way operational staff painstakingly searches for the last percentages of stranded capacity. It leverages automation techniques that reduce the possibility of human error and speeds up decision-making on the fly.
When it comes to diagnostics, extracting and validating different employee profile data residing on a client’s existing point solution applications that enable agents to take calls is time-consuming. OpsTel’s VIEW is a profile diagnostic, validation, and auditing solution that can be hosted on cloud or on-premise. VIEW allows clients to see what they may have missed in the past with auditing capabilities that provide diagnostic information in 10 minutes or less! It analyzes profile, skill configuration, reporting data, and hierarchical and organizational information in the environment to ensure all identity profiles are accurate, licensed, and compliant. In the case of an anomaly in reporting data, the solution prompts users to take the necessary action and maintain compliance. Clients have the benefit of an offline, non-intrusive way to view the environment. They can leverage OpsTel’s automated auditing system to detect mistakes and make corrections while also identifying possibilities for saving money.
The value proposition of VIEW can be best explained with a customer success story. One of OpsTel’s customers was going through a transformation and needed to migrate from their legacy technologies to newer systems with enhanced features. The transition led to misconfigurations, resulting in inaccurate reports and unanswered calls and thereby increasing the risk of non-compliance with federal and union regulations. Soon after OpsTel’s assessment and recommendations, the client adopted OpsTel’s VIEW diagnostic solution that helped them examine their workflow and recognize issues and process errors. The diagnostic tool enabled them to track the changes that occurred in the last 24 hours.
Tony DeGaetano, Co-Founder and CEOVIEW also helped them analyze logs and detect anomalies that allowed them to fully meet compliance mandates.
Lastly, PLUS, OpsTel’s profile orchestration solution, as Prinke defines it, is the key to eliminating all the inconsistencies in profile administration. At the core, it simplifies the maintenance of profile data across multiple applications and complex technologies within the contact center stack. PLUS cuts down the provisioning cycle from months, weeks, and days to a matter of minutes. It also eliminates the massive amount of labor hours normally spent on creating spreadsheets to record profile data and track them. The profile orchestration solution enables the client’s staff to focus on their critical needs rather than engaging in manual data entry tasks, which carries a risk that is inherent in human data entry. PLUS allows users to leverage the power of automation and bring additional value to their technological investments.
The Recipe for Success
At the heart of these successful products lies OpsTel’s unique approach to understanding a client’s needs and issues by collaborating with operations and technical teams through discussions and assessments. By fully understanding the client’s requirements prior to the introduction of any new technology or procedural changes, OpsTel provides options that are measurable and in alignment with the client’s desired business outcomes. “Adding the right ingredients is like a recipe for a great meal! At OpsTel we pride ourselves in providing our clients what they need from our tools to drive important business decisions,” extols Prinke.
As he guides OpsTel with thought leadership and innovation, Prinke maintains his focus on the cogs that keep the machine running—happy and productive employees and satisfied clients. As a “motorhead” with a fascination toward how engines work and squeezing every last bit of performance out of them, Prinke has a knack for understanding the underlying mechanics, diagnosing issues, and bringing in modifications to improve features. His hands-off approach to leadership empowers OpsTel’s employees with the ability to solve issues independently and help them become as self-motivated and self-starter as he is.
Reaching the Ultimate in Performance
The OpsTel team embodies the mission of its company and goes above and beyond to build tools and services based on industry needs. In doing so, they also constantly monitor a client’s activity to ensure their offerings are delivering results in conjunction with stated business requirements and expectations.
Since its inception, OpsTel has been experiencing increased revenue year-over-year. The company has expanded its executive, development, and support staff to underpin OpsTel’s vision of continued growth over the next five years. OpsTel is constantly innovating to develop new solutions and explore better methods of implementing those. Besides expanding to Denver, CO, OpsTel is also fortifying its presence in the market by striking partnerships with other leading application vendors and managed service providers. “Further, we envision incorporating artificial intelligence into our systems and software; with this added capability we expect to introduce new mobile and cloud features in the next 12 to 18 months,” adds Prinke. With an excellent track record of enabling a high-performance contact center, OpsTel looks forward to providing the best customer experience with an approach that is hard to duplicate.
April 05, 2019
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