Driving Quality Care through Call Center VoIP Solutions

Anyone that has ever called a company for support is familiar with the message “This call will be recorded for quality assurance and training.” The recording and storing of all these calls requires complex and robust technology. For Cincinnati-based Convergys, the process of ensuring that recording takes place is critical to their core operation.

In a call center environment, conversations that do not get recorded can result in lost information. With over 150 call centers in 31 countries and 90 voice over IP (VoIP) recorders in its call system, Convergys needed a solution that could manage over a million voice calls per day across multiple recording systems.

To ensure that all calls are properly recorded, they required architecture to ensure high availability and scalability for the VoIP system. They also needed to eliminate downtime during regular maintenance of the VoIP infrastructure. Convergys decided to look for a load balancing solution that could support all of its call centers.

Ultimately, Convergys chose the Radware Alteon 5224 ADC solution to support their existing Verint IP Call Recording platform. Together, the two systems combine to create a powerful solution that gives Convergys end-to-end VoIP services that are always available through local and global load balancing technologies for mission critical applications in both their data and call centers.

“Radware allows us to load balance over a million voice calls per day across multiple recording servers for a large enterprise call recording system,” said Shawn Anderson, Director of Interactive Recording, Convergys.

The Alteon ADC offers high performance, high speed connectivity to process traffic enabling the device to intelligently identify incoming calls and split them so they are simultaneously recorded on redundant systems and available for the operator.

In a large call center environment, any scenario where recordings are lost can result in customer dissatisfaction. Convergys needed a solution that provided the ability to detect failures in the VoIP system and automatically fail over to backup systems. Regular downtime of VoIP recorders for maintenance resulted in lost data, even though they were using a different load balancing solution across many recorders.

Radware’s Alteon ADCs provides Convergys with application layer health checks with automatic failover capabilities that detect when an application or server is down and reroutes the recordings to another server. With advanced application healthcheck capabilities, when a server is down the solution automatically reroutes all the recordings to other servers, significantly minimizing downtime during planned and unplanned system outages.

With over a dozen Alteon devices deployed across four sites supporting more than 90 VoIP recorders in its call system, Convergys does not have to worry about missing any recorded calls because of downtime, scheduled or unscheduled, in any of their call centers. Convergys plans to deploy the Radware solution as a key part of its standard high availability architecture for its call recording infrastructure with plans to add another 30-40 recorders in the future.

This case study will help you learn more about how Convergys load balances over a million calls a year without downtime.