ZC Sterling Corp. is a leading provider of specialty insurance and technology-enabled solutions for the mortgage servicing industry. The company provides hazard insurance tracking and outsourcing services, voluntary homeowners insurance, customized real estate tax services, back-office business process outsourcing, customer care solutions and Hispanic call center services for lenders, mortgage servicing organizations and homebuilders nationwide. ZC Sterling is headquartered in Atlanta, Ga. with operations in Calif., Fla., Iowa, Neb., N.M. and N.C.

Challenges:

With an extensive nationwide network of contact centers, ZC Sterling depends on VoIP technology as a more cost-effective alternative to traditional phone services. However, the company was finding that it faced challenges inherent with VoIP service such as intermittent lapses of audio, echo or other problems, which had potential to negatively impact ZC Sterling’s quality of service. Problems of this type are not uncommon for companies deploying VoIP technology.

ZC Sterling understood the importance of network monitoring technology and needed to find a network monitoring technology that would effectively monitor its VoIP communication. The company turned to its partner, Interactive Intelligence, an innovator in call center technology, for recommendations. Interactive Intelligence suggested several VoIP seminars to assess network monitoring software and VoIP troubleshooting.

ZC Sterling compared the offerings of Wireshark, Wildpackets and other companies and found that, although the software is powerful, the technology is not as intuitive as that from ClearSight Networks.

Solution:

ClearSight provided ZC Sterling with a demonstration of the network monitoring product, ClearSight Distributed. The demo was installed in less than one day and soon thereafter, ZC Sterling was sold on the technology.

ClearSight’s user-friendly network monitoring application required no employee training. ClearSight Distributed is a distributed system with a next-generation application flow analyzer. It allows for remote network monitoring, application performance analysis and troubleshooting for multiple LAN segments that are physically separated from one another.

ClearSight Distributed connects to multiple ClearSight Distributed agents via a console PC and opens each one in a separate window. It also performs centralized management of alarms detected by the agents, as well as monitoring and analysis of connected network segments.

ZC Sterling initially deployed ClearSight Distributed agents at its two largest contact centers. These network agents were able to actively monitor VoIP links between their locations, amounting to more than 50,000 calls per month. Best of all, the ClearSight product was able to alert the ZC Sterling telecommunications team when call degradation occurred.

Call monitoring and trending have been key features for ZC Sterling, as well as ClearSight’s easy integration into some of the company’s existing products, such as LadderView, for tracking communication between devices. ClearSight provides ZC Sterling with the ability to reconstruct calls, as well as to provide improved quality analysis.

Results:

ZC Sterling has been happy with its deployment of ClearSight’s Distributed product. Now actively monitoring more than 50,000 calls across multiple data centers per month, the product notifies ZC Sterling when any network connection issues arise.

The biggest “bang for ZC Sterling’s buck” has been ClearSight Distributed’s support for its virtual project, where ZC Sterling set out to virtualize its contact centers so that all operations were being controlled from one location. Over the course of this project, ClearSight was able to work with the company’s new technology and proactively alert administrators when VoIP quality suffered.

As a result, ZC Sterling was able to implement virtualization in each of its contact centers while maintaining the integrity of each individual network. In connecting each contact center, ClearSight enabled all of ZC Sterling’s resources to be used at optimal levels.

Jeff Gaedke, telecom systems manager at ZC Sterling, mentions that he is pleased at the way ClearSight monitors VoIP and MOS scores on the ZC Sterling network so thoroughly that network managers are informed of quality concerns before users could call with issues.