Most business leaders agree excellent communication forms the foundation for exceptional performance and productivity. Empowering team members with end-to-end multichannel communication services increases engagement, collaboration, and success rates. Unfortunately, there’s more to ensure a successful UC deployment than choosing the right service.

Companies also need to keep a close eye on the performance of their communication systems, adoption levels, and other critical analytics to ensure they’re driving the right results.

The trouble is that proactively monitoring communication quality, pinpointing faults, and leveraging powerful UC insights isn’t always as simple as it may seem. In today’s complex communication environment, businesses have multiple applications, tools, and systems to keep track of in an ever-transforming digital landscape.

So, how do companies ensure they’re leveraging UC performance management and analytics opportunities correctly in this complicated space?

Bill Dellara, VP of Product at VOSS Solutions, said: “Actionable intelligence enables companies to visualise and actively manage the performance and quality of their collaboration suite, across its lifecycle.

“With the shift to cloud-based UC services and hybrid working, organisations need a better understanding of employee productivity and user experience. So, companies are increasingly reliant on business reporting to get a real time insight into user experience, adoption, and return on investment.

“By integrating seamlessly with other business applications in the UC stack, UC performance management tools allow companies to resolve problems faster, make better, more informed decisions, and improve service delivery through automation. VOSS is in a rather unique position to offer both UC automation management, and UC performance management, that spans multiple vendor technologies, from a single point of control.”

The Challenges of UC Performance Management

The workplace for most modern companies has changed incredibly over the last three years. Hybrid and remote working are now the “new normal” for many workforces. Employees are distributed across various environments, and organisations need to ensure these team members have access to all the tools they need to communicate and collaborate anywhere.

This has driven companies towards an increasingly complex digital workplace. Organisations are building highly flexible multi-vendor environments with different deployment architectures, applications, and tools to monitor. These landscapes come with a host of challenges to consider, including:

Limited visibility: When all these tools are disconnected and distributed, business leaders and admins need to work much harder to monitor, optimise, and improve performance on a massive scale. Data silos and gaps can emerge, which damages decision-making.

Spiralling costs: Disconnected environments can necessitate additional team members and resources to keep track of all the various tools business users need. This leads to higher prices and reduced return on investment for brands.

Poor adoption: The more complex the UC environment, the harder it is to effectively provision and onboard new users. This can even prompt the rise of shadow IT and other complex issues which damage business compliance and security.

New challenges: Many UC services are now delivered from the cloud (e.g., Microsoft Teams), over which an organisation has limited control, and staff are working from home, where organisations also have limited control. This introduces new challenges that traditional UC management tools do not adequately cover.

A complex performance management landscape also leads to poor experiences for employees and end users. Ultimately, this impacts productivity, revenue, and even talent retention.

How to Simplify and Improve Performance Management

The key to enhancing performance management in an age of complex communications environments is “unifying” the various tools, and systems companies leverage in one environment for exceptional visibility, insights, and control. In other words, companies need an all-in-one environment for managing the digital workplace.

UC performance monitoring and management tools, such as VOSS Insights give you access to actionable intelligence and data about your UC and collaboration systems, enabling you to visualise and actively manage the performance and quality of your UC estate, across its lifecycle. Importantly, it should seamlessly integrate with your business applications, to allow you to resolve problems faster, make better, more informed decisions, and improve service delivery through automation.

The right UC performance management tools will provide insights into:

  • Collaboration platform health and performance
  • Environmental statistics like CPU, RAM, and memory
  • Bandwidth and device information
  • Adoption rates for tools and integration
  • The overall digital experience

The Benefits of Better Performance Management

The next level of value comes when businesses couple their UC automation management suite with their UC performance management tools. This will give companies a comprehensive “digital orchestration platform”, where they can gain a complete view of their UC platform’s operational and business performance, from a single pane of glass. These tools enable access to real-time troubleshooting, monitoring, and automated proactive problem resolution, across the UC suite, even if it includes multiple vendors and tools.

End-to-end automation platforms and performance management tools give companies more freedom to track the various components of their UC environment in one centralised space. This allows for more advanced proactive monitoring and fault detection throughout the UC stack. It also gives companies insights into opportunities to resolve problems faster, save money, and optimise the use of deployed licences and services.

With a comprehensive digital orchestration platform or “performance management system”, companies can leverage a range of automation management capabilities and analytics tools, accessing key benefits such as:

  • Improved visibility: Issues can occur in any UC environment. If a business doesn’t have the tools required to see and report on performance, utilisation, and other metrics, it takes longer to resolve each problem. A comprehensive orchestration platform makes it easier to pinpoint key issues as they occur and even prevent more extensive problems.
  • Intelligent insights: Performance management platforms can provide insights into meaningful metrics and KPIs crucial to transforming business performance. Tools like VOSS Automate come with access to VOSS Insights, where users can track the quality of service, examine licence usage, and even make intelligent decisions about reducing business bottlenecks.
  • Enhanced user experience: Problems with UC performance directly impact user experience. Performance management tools can expose the issues affecting user satisfaction and help eliminate problems affecting productivity, performance, and collaboration.
  • Flexibility: Performance management tools can make it easier to align and integrate multiple UC environments into one agile space. A single comprehensive solution gives businesses the freedom they need to build robust end-to-end solutions for controlling all UC solutions and requirements.
  • Cost management: Introducing performance management solutions into the business environment makes it easier for an organisation to understand and manage costs. Companies may even discover areas where they can cut costs by eliminating unnecessary licences or removing complexities.

Taking Performance Management to the Next Level

Once the right performance management platform is in place, companies can begin to take steps to optimise and streamline the business based on the insights they gain. For instance, VOSS Automate, which allows companies to rapidly create workflows to automate provisioning and deployment processes, integrates with VOSS Insights, which gives business leaders actionable intelligence about their digital workplace and transformation processes. The right analytics and insights can provide businesses with the data they need to increase user adoption, save time, and reduce costs. With an end-to-end performance management and analytics solution, companies can leverage all the benefits of actionable business collaboration intelligence with contextual insights and visibility into performance, usage, and degradation areas.

Harnessing both VOSS Automate and VOSS Insights puts organisations in the unique position to explore self-healing. Companies will be able to extract the UC data, analyse it, diagnose it, and apply corrective rules through automated workflows with minimal to no human intervention. Imagine the impact on end user experience when you can solve UC problems before your staff are even aware of them. Now that’s a game changer.

 

 



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