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Follow UsIt all started several years ago when Ayappan D, the man behind
Metrica Systems, along with some others started thinking about building a
performance system for optical and wireless networks. There were several
products that were available but for Ayappan, there was complete absence of an
SLA system for measuring the quality of services provided to enterprises. He
strongly felt the need for such a product-to address the crucial issue of SLAs.
Due to some constraint, he could not initiate the product development on those
lines.
The Spark
It was during Ayappan's stint as a CTO at a leading BPO outfit, that he
encountered problems to manage various internal and customer driven performance
metrics in contact centers. It was at this point that the idea of a management
solution which is custom made for contact centers was conceived. According to
Ayappan D, the managing director of Metrica Systems, "Contact centers are
very dynamic and too complex to manage and hence a robust end-to-end support
system has become a must today."
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| Ayappan D, Managing Director, Metrica Systems |
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After quitting the BPO outfit, Ayappan set up Metrica Systems in
Bangalore and worked on product development with a small team of 12 people. The
seed funding for the product development came from angel investors with various
interests in the BPO industry. The company plans to go for external funding from
strategic investors who specialize in the contact center space.
The Culmination
It was after some hard work that the company came up with an innovative
product named CenterWorks OSS, which, in a very short span of time, has
successfully carried out some pilots. Talking about the vision behind the
solution and the company, Ayappan says, "Our vision is to provide a very
affordable solution that can streamline various functional processes within the
contact centers in order to improve their productivity. Our collective domain
expertise helped us identify several critical pain areas in each of the
functions such as Operations, HR & Training, Quality and Technology to put
together a robust support system to address those pain areas effectively."
The hard work of Metrica Systems paid off and it got short-listed under the 'Product
Innovation Category' by Nasscom.
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| Tracking Technology: IT department related workflows can also be monitored by this. All different types of incidents that can cause a downtime of a process specific application, VoIP systems or other IT infrastructure can be tracked. A report will then show a consolidated view of the incidents. The pie charts provided allows the user to graphically view the incident data split up as per process, team or incident type. IPLC utilization can also be tracked. |
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The Product
The main highlight of the solution is that it enables enterprise level
management of contact center operations and has been architected in a way that
all the product modules are integrated with the existing contact center
infrastructure systems for unified reporting purposes. It includes unified
reporting and integration of disparate systems such as ACD, Dialer,Voice Logger,
WFM, MIS tools, e-mail support systems, real-time monitoring systems, ERP,
Multiplexer, users generated spread sheets, flat files etc for extraction of
performance data for reporting. The modules are designed to generate various
customizable reports with drill down options.
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| Tracking Attendance: A typical problem faced by most BPOs is managing attendance. This is one of the problem Metrica aims to address. It allows the team leads and managers to verify and mark the attendance of their subordinates. They can select from a range of options such as Absent, Present, Sick L eave, etc. |
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The solution takes care of integration of various processes and
metrics for transparent viewing and decision making by relevant managers across
all internal departments. The process managers can set KPIs and threshold levels
easily and can generate both historical and real time information reports. It
also allows easy interpretation of dashboards for processes and provides a
single repository of all the events in a contact center for further analysis.
Setting access privileges for each user ensures information security. All this
is based on a web-based system and even users with no specialized skills can use
it. The graphical views of reports allow CXO level executives to look at the
current situation and respond accordingly.
It helps handle key functions like recruitment, workforce
management, quality and IT support and is easily accessible by various levels
from Agent to CEO and even customers.
One of the major highlights of this solution is the it brings
together all the major workflows that an HR team is typically involved in. The
workflows include hiring, post hiring and the performance related activities.
Sudesh Prasad
sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in