Modern businesses heavily rely on Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) to connect employees and customers, making the proper functioning and utilization of these platforms key to business continuity, efficiency, and customer satisfaction.
“Today more than ever, connectivity has a monetary value attached to it,” says Kasey Fitzpatrick, Account Manager at IR.
“When it’s impaired, customers grow frustrated with disrupted service and delayed resolutions, while employees struggle to perform their jobs effectively.”
This all ultimately comes down to one thing: the “experience” – a crucial component for organizations today in gaining a competitive advantage.
Whether it’s bad customer experiences leading to churn; poor agent experiences leading to failed adoption of technologies and reduced ROI; or the fact that bad connectivity leads to multiple calls rather than “one call resolutions” – any downtime is enough to cause discernible damage.
What can businesses do to optimally navigate the use of UC&C platforms to ensure high uptime and great experiences while maximizing their ROIs?
Let’s start by reviewing the main hurdles businesses face in UC&C management.
UC&C Management: The Challenges
Businesses managing large, complex UC&C environments struggle with limited visibility into the fine details of what occurs in their systems, which makes it hard to get a true picture of performance and even harder to make informed strategic decisions.
Operational inefficiencies also mean IT teams can be slow to diagnose, troubleshoot and resolve UC issues when something goes wrong.
Limited visibility might also make the business more vulnerable to security risks, potentially breaching compliance requirements. Finally, outages can impact both the employee experience and the customer experience, which can have a lasting effect on overall business performance.
Why are these issues still so common, despite all the advanced technology most businesses have in place?
“Currently, most businesses take a reactive approach to UC management, with 80% of all incidents reported by end users rather than existing systems,” Fitzpatrick explains.
Once an incident is reported, IT must locate its source: Voice, Network, or Platform. Surprisingly enough, 80% of Mean Time to Repair tends to be what IR refers to as “Mean Time to Convince:” the time it takes to convince the relevant department or service that they’re the source of the problem. Only then can they begin to dig down, reveal the root cause, and drive resolution.
“Not only does this make the process incredibly slow, but it also escalates the number of people required to handle an IT incident – eight on average, and costs organizations plenty of money,” Fitzpatrick notes.
Enter UC Monitoring tools, taking things from reactive to proactive.
Reactive to Proactive: Ahead-of-the-Curve UC
Connectivity issues lead to poor experiences, which impact businesses in a range of negative ways. The good news? These are preventable with advanced UC monitoring tools.
“The idea is to shift from a reactive to a proactive approach through automation,” Fitzpatrick explains. By automating continuous scans of UC components – voice, network, and platform – businesses can use alerts to support proactive monitoring. This is where UC management tools such as IR Collaborate come into play:
“Collaborate sends alerts directly to the monitoring team, enhancing visibility, reducing outages, and streamlining operations,” he says.
The tool’s multi-vendor capability allows it to handle large and complex environments, accommodating businesses using a mix of UC platforms, from Cisco and Avaya to Teams and Zoom.
IR offers insights into a business’s entire UC environment, including surrounding products and endpoints, like session border controllers and video conferencing devices.
“We can track a call from start to finish, pinpoint issues, and resolve them proactively, before they’re even noticed by the end user,” Fitzpatrick adds.
IR’s UC performance monitoring capabilities provide IT teams with a clear view of what’s happening, enabling them to resolve issues quickly and address potential problems before they escalate. This means less time spent putting out fires and more time focusing on big-picture projects that enhance experiences and drive better business outcomes.
Visit the IR website to learn more about how IR can help you create better UC experiences.
This post originally appeared on Service Management - Enterprise - Channel News - UC Today.