The government agency was facing a significant increase in network bandwidth consumption due to the sudden shift to remote work amid the COVID-19 pandemic. This was putting a strain on their existing VPN capacity and Internet bandwidth. In addition to this, the agency was also tasked with supporting a new temporary unemployment program designed to provide financial assistance to residents who had lost their jobs due to the pandemic. The launch of a new dedicated website for accessing these benefits was expected to further tax the agency's already strained Internet resources. The agency's IT team lacked the necessary visibility to determine how the additional VPN and Internet capacity was performing.

The bank was running some of their customer-facing and back office applications in a mainframe environment. However, the increasing operating expenses involved with this approach were becoming too high to ignore. The bank decided to refactor existing applications from the mainframe and migrate them to an on-premises, virtualized, data center environment. This process involved Webtiered, middleware, and multi-tier technologies that would function as production staging to monitor and stabilize these apps prior to an eventual cloud migration. During this process, the Network Operations team hit a roadblock: there were visibility issues into performance of existing mainframe applications that their open source and vendor app monitoring tools could not troubleshoot.

The financial group was undergoing a long-term data center transformation, network upgrade, Cisco ACI, and mobile application rollout. The near-term transition to a remote workforce was taxing VPN and VDI environments, with a bandwidth upgrade only leading to latency. The IT team was tasked with consolidating several production-level Data Centers to two on-premises corporate locations, upgrading to a Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) software-defined networking (SDN) architecture and 40G network speeds, and deploying a new mobile application.

The bank faced a significant challenge when the COVID-19 pandemic prompted management to instruct employees to work from home. This led to an unprecedented use of the bank's virtual private network (VPN), posing visibility and monitoring challenges for the IT team. As more employees and clients began to rely on digital platforms for their financial transactions, the bank's IT team had to ensure consistent, high-quality service delivery. The bank's financial livelihood became even more linked to its ability to successfully process online banking, bill-pay services, and other financial transactions that were now critically important for clients in financial need.

The bank’s IT team had long monitored overall performance of their virtual private network (VPN). The VPN represented a significant element of the IT delivery infrastructure – at times, nearly half of the bank’s employees used the remote network to conduct business from their home offices or mobile devices. Also accessing these same services were several thousand authorized, strategic partners and contractors, placing additional volume on this environment. For the IT team, VPN performance management was not as straightforward as assuring adequate bandwidth coverage was in place. The VPN also supported a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) based on Citrix technology that was showing performance strains based on increased users. Remote users reported regularly experiencing frozen virtual desktop screens and timeouts, with associated issues summarized in the trouble tickets forwarded to the Help Desk.

The company's call center agents began experiencing issues with dropped voice calls, resulting in customer service exchanges being interrupted before completion. Regardless of call status, telephone call lengths were varying from agent to agent, with customer exchanges abruptly dropping after 30 minutes. In addition to dealing with customer service issues and frustrated call center agents unable to perform their duties as a result of the dropped calls, the company was unable to consistently meet negotiated Service Level Agreement thresholds regarding voice performance for the companies they were contracted to serve. Existing third-party tools being employed by the IT team were unable to view the call flow architecture in a manner required for successful troubleshooting.

Nykaa, a beauty and fashion startup, was facing challenges in handling customer support. The company was using emails and query forms to follow up with customers during conflict resolution. This process was time-consuming and inefficient, with customer service executives spending over 32,000 staff hours a month answering and replying to support queries. Nykaa wanted to automate parts of customer support that were automatable, to free up time to focus on other important aspects of customer experience.

MediBuddy, a healthcare service provider, was struggling to manage the influx of customer queries across various service verticals such as health checkups, medicines, consultations, lab tests, dental care, hospitalization, and genome studies. The company was relying on traditional communication channels like email and phone calls, and a team of over 250 service representatives. However, the team was unable to handle the volume of queries, especially the 800+ concurrent questions in real-time. The challenge was to automate the customer service process without compromising on customer satisfaction.

Ansa, a leading press agency, was struggling with the heavy volume of news and the speed at which information circulates. Accurate and timely content sorting and categorization were of the utmost importance. The only way to keep up with current events and satisfy the needs of internal organizations was to have a classification system that is fast, uniform, complete and accurate (according to IPTC international standards). Ansa wanted a tool to improve information management, enabling them to better archive daily news and enhance the image search in their online database.

Community College of Denver (CCD) faced a significant increase in enrollment, which put a strain on their existing systems and programs. The administrative functions, particularly the Call Center, faced unprecedented pressure. The college needed a technology solution that would enable the Call Center to handle a higher volume of support calls without increasing resources. They realized that live chat could bring the economies of scale they were looking for. They also needed to improve their website architecture to improve students’ ability to self-serve.

Beau-coup, a leader in the online favors and gifts industry, was facing challenges with its customer service. The company prides itself on offering exceptional customer service, but technical issues with their previous chat provider were causing interruptions and a frustrating experience for both customers and service reps. The company was dropping a lot of chats due to connection issues, and they were missing 20 to 30 chats a day. They also lacked information about how their customers came to their site, what search terms they used, and if the resulting chat was proactive or reactive. There was no method to the madness in how their chat invitations were fired, and they experienced very poor acceptance rates as a result.

Lifeline Australia, a crisis counseling and referral service, wanted to add a live chat channel to its phone counseling services to reach a younger demographic that is less comfortable with calling in by phone. The organization initially tried a rudimentary live chat solution and an internally-developed application, but found these solutions lacking in several ways. The offshore service had slow connectivity and full-time support was difficult to obtain. The in-house system was not built with the right technology skills and had mistakes in the underlying architecture of the platform.

SAHAR, a nonprofit organization based in Israel, was facing the challenge of enabling real-time digital engagement with distressed individuals. They needed to offer mobile chat and leverage data insights to improve chat and information effectiveness. The organization was seeking to connect its network of approximately 100 volunteers with those seeking assistance, and they were conducting approximately 1,000 live chat sessions each month. They needed to add mobile live chat, which was becoming increasingly important for their Arabic-speaking audience who primarily used mobile devices.

The Michigan Legal Help Program was established to provide legal information for citizens who find themselves in the civil court system without a lawyer. The program offers a variety of resources, including informational content, referrals to legal services organizations, and automated online legal forms and documents. However, the complexity of these resources and the variables in people’s situations often led to questions and difficulties in navigation. The five-person staff of the Michigan Legal Help Program did not have the capacity to field inquiries from the public. The organization needed a cost-effective channel to answer legal information questions, help visitors navigate the tools available, and ensure that volunteer agents could log into the platform from anywhere.

Sunweb Holidays, a popular travel holiday company, was facing challenges in the increasingly competitive online travel industry. The cost of targeting customers had risen significantly, with 50% of the company's marketing budget being spent on Google Ad Words alone, which was not driving the required return on investment. The company also suffered from limited IT agility, with a small local team only able to control the site content via a Content Management System that offered limited personalisation and reporting capabilities. Sunweb Holidays wanted to capitalise on the growing number of visitors to its website and convert them into sales, rather than just focusing on driving traffic to the website.

StraighterLine, a provider of self-paced college courses, was looking for a way to engage with students and prospective students in a familiar channel. They wanted to provide engagement options for mobile users and improve conversion and customer satisfaction rates. The company had a live chat solution from LivePerson, but it was not being used to its full potential. They were completing around 100 chat conversations per month, with inquiries fielded on an ad-hoc basis by members of the telephone call center team. They realized they were missing substantial opportunities and needed to optimize their live chat.

Discount Tire Direct, a subsidiary of Discount Tire Company, was facing challenges in delivering an outstanding digital customer experience and increasing e-commerce conversion rates. The company wanted to maintain high in-store customer satisfaction rates via digital channels. They had experimented with an on-premise live chat solution when they initially added e-commerce to their website in 2003, but it was simply a passive button called Click to Talk and was soon removed. In late 2011, they decided to revisit the use of live chat deployment on their website to rethink how they engaged customers on their website, seeking to make it the best buying experience possible for their customers.

David’s Bridal, an international wedding dress destination, was facing a unique challenge. When shopping for wedding dresses, 50% of brides were calling stores to book appointments. If the stores were closed or sales agents couldn’t get to the phone in time, they were losing business. Agents sometimes had to step away from the brides they were helping to answer the phone, creating a poor experience for in-store customers. The company wanted to be available for customers 24/7 without having to add additional staff. They believed AI and automation could help and began looking at different chatbot providers.