With more than 7 000 installations of Siebel CRM software BT the British telecommunications giant decided it needed a better understanding of how this massive investment was performing.
The best view according to Philip McBurney director of the CMP Program at BT Design was from the desktop. Six months ago BT deployed end-user performance monitoring software from N.Y.-based Knoa Software Inc.
'The main driver for taking on Knoa was to get an end-user view of the application performance ' McBurney said. 'We had various other mechanisms before that gave us a gauge of how the application was performing at the caller interface but Knoa was the first time we used live data from desktops the first time we saw the real performance.'
That gave BT insight into not just the server side but the application side with its pilot program of roughly 1 500 users. Since then BT has expanded the program to more than 7 000 Siebel installations and is now looking at user behavior -- to see where there may be a need for more training for example.
| For more on CRM application performance | See why Microsoft and other CRM vendors are targeting usability Download a book chapter with tips on optimizing CRM performance | ||
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| For more on CRM application performance | ||||
| See why Microsoft and other CRM vendors are targeting usability Download a book chapter with tips on optimizing CRM performance |
End-user performance monitoring is gaining traction in enterprise companies as well as smaller organizations according to J. P. Garbani research vice president with Cambridge Mass.-based Forrester Research.
'It has been slow taking off over the past 10 years ' Garbani said. 'People were more preoccupied with managing servers and networks. Now we're getting into an era of service management. IT services is a very strong differentiator now that should logically promote this sort of technology. All the forecasts we have done have shown a steep adoption curve in the next three to five years.'
While a company with only 10 desktops may not see the advantages of end-user performance monitoring it's not for large enterprises only.
'It's for any company that is interested in understanding several things -- what is the performance the end user is getting; what is the quality of the application; and the usability of the application the use of resources at the desktop level ' Garbani said.
BT is running Knoa across contact centers for multiple product lines. OneView its business and consumer division runs Siebel on 20 000 seats. Its Siebel1 operation runs large contact centers with heavy volumes of calls across the globe including a number of outsourced centers in India. The BT Local Business division allows third-party vendors to sell BT products as if they were BT and also runs Siebel and Knoa. BT runs multiple Siebel instances on versions 7.3 7.5 and 7.8.
'We don't have it on every desktop ' McBurney said.