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SmartAction is a leading AI-powered virtual agent for contact centers over voice, chat, and SMS.
Fort Worth, Texas
Virtual customer interaction solutions
SmartAction is a leading provider of conversational AI for contact centers. So it knows a thing or two about automation and creating an engaging customer experience.
But a few years ago, it found it was running into difficulties with a lack of adequate automations—not with its own services, but as a customer itself.
According to Shaheen Ghavim, Senior systems administrator at SmartAction, the monitoring solution SmartAction was using was causing headaches.
At that time, SmartAction was using an on-premises Linux host that needed to be maintained and updated.
There was no agent. Everything was over SNMP and SSH, and everything was highly customized.
But Shaheen’s team found it was running into problems precisely because of that high level of customization and because it hadn’t updated the product in years.
It became a real pain to try to manage and update because we were so behind in our updates.
SmartAction needed better monitoring—better server monitoring in particular.
The monitoring system it was using wasn’t really set up to monitor disks or RAM. Essentially, all it provided was uptime monitoring.
And, according to Shaheen, things were failing that they simply didn’t notice or couldn’t see, all because of the way their old monitoring system was set up.
They needed a change, preferably an agent-based solution.
This was not the first time SmartAction tried to move away from its on-premises monitoring solution.
An alternative solution had been identified, however, it also required a lot of customization, and SmartAction found it needed a full-time employee just to try to make it work.
Yet, despite having an employee working full-time for over eight months on that project, the new solution didn’t work out, and they wasted a lot of money on it.
This meant they were back to square one with an old system they needed to replace.
But was there a solution out there that could provide the speed and simplicity they craved?
SmartAction finally found Site24x7, the agent-based solution they were looking for—something that was simple and fast to use.
Because Site24x7 is web-based, Shaheen’s team doesn't have to worry about maintaining a central management server or worry about availability levels dropping.
And with Site24x7, he found there were very few firewall rules that he needed to change or add. This made migration easy.
Site24x7 is simple to use. It’s plug and play for the most part.
Shaheen says Site24x7 gives him all the stats he was used to receiving from the old monitoring solution. It gives them all the metrics they want to monitor—uptime, CPU, RAM, hard drives, and much more.
For instance, there are specific tools for SQL server monitoring and interface graphs for switches and firewalls.
In short, Site24x7 gives SmartAction an enhanced level of monitoring with far less customization required.
What made Site24x7 the ideal choice for SmartAction? How well it integrates with other products and software.
Some monitoring solutions require customers to use the solution's alerting systems. But SmartAction found it could easily integrate Site24x7’s alerts with the incident management software it was already using.
That made it an ideal choice for us to use.
Another thing that Shaheen really likes about Site24x7 is the reporting in the graphical user interface (GUI). He finds the GUI very easy to work through. He can fine-tune graphs or whatever he wants to look at.
SmartAction runs weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports on uptime. Now, it actually has numbers on what its uptime has been.
And there are many other reports they can run; before, if you asked Shaheen how many servers SmartAction had, he would have struggled to answer. Now, with Site24x7’s reports, he can tell you exactly how many servers it has, how much RAM, and how many disks it uses.
And if a network interface controller goes down, SmartAction can look back over the stats to see what the traffic looked like over a specific custom time period.
The reporting aspect was something we didn’t have. So now that we do, we can’t live without it.
What does Shaheen like most about Site24x7? How easy it is to use, particularly when it comes to identifying and resolving problems. Because when you’re troubleshooting, you’re working against the clock.
With Site24x7, Shaheen can go to an individual single page per server–the summary page–and view the data he needs very quickly. He doesn’t need to click around a great deal.
He finds Site24x7 to be an intuitive solution that makes it easy to spot issues and bottlenecks, which means he doesn't have to worry too much about identifying issues.
To be able to go to one page where the host is and be able to just quickly tell the way that the GUI is set up makes it very nice to use.
When SmartAction was using its previous monitoring solution, there were a couple of times when it couldn’t figure out what was wrong with its bandwidth. Its internet and firewalls—everything was moving slowly.
But with Site24x7, Shaheen and his team are able to quickly look at SmartAction's firewalls, interfaces, and WAN connections and identify which one is causing the issue. From there, the team can work out which server is using the most bandwidth.
And when a server goes down, Site24x7 sends various alerts to Shaheen and his team. That means they can quickly tell where the issue is and which host, website, or data center is down.
We’re getting all the alerts for a specific data center.
SmartAction reduces the footprints of call centers.
Its clients don’t need to have call centers with hundreds of employees. It only needs 10 or 15 employees to man its call center just in case someone has to transfer out of SmartAction’s system to speak with a human agent.
SmartAction is not just an expert in conversational AI. It’s also in the business of streamlining services to saving clients' time, effort, and resources.
And that’s what Site24x7 has done for SmartAction. It has reduced the scope of errors by automating customer service.
We’re in a very good spot in terms of how our monitoring footprint has evolved in the past year or so that we’ve been using Site24x7.
Site24x7 also saves a lot of time, says Shaheen’s colleague Michael Vanca, chief product officer at SmartAction.
SmartAction doesn't have to dig down through lines of code. Instead, it has an easy way to identify problems and quickly resolve them, which translates into being more proactive with customers. It allows them to fix issues before customers even notice.
This leads to customer goodwill and improved customer relationships along with benefits for the team members themselves like quick problem identification and quick resolution to help save time.
Site24x7 makes life easier. We’re not stressing as much.
