The world of unified communications (UC) has evolved significantly in recent years. Trends like remote and flexible work, evolving communications technology, and new customer expectations have left IT teams struggling to manage increasingly complex operating environments.

For many organizations, there’s no one-size-fits-all UC solution. In fact, the majority of companies, and especially large enterprises, use multiple platforms from an ecosystem of vendors for customer engagement, calling, video conferencing, messaging, and file sharing. These complex ecosystems are made up of more than the base UC platforms from Cisco, Microsoft, Zoom, Avaya, etc.- encompassing complementary solutions that enhance the communication experience. Some even use a combination of cloud and on-premises services to enable extensive customization, advanced data control, and cost containment.

Unfortunately, while diverse UC toolkits can improve productivity, efficiency, and even customer service outcomes, they place significant strain on UC managers, who struggle to keep track of multiple solutions at once. Fortunately, there is a solution: Multi-Vendor, UC service management software for provisioning and automation.

5 Ways IT Automation Empowers UC Managers

UC Service Management software eliminates the need for companies to manage each individual communication platform and tool through its own native interface. These solutions bring multiple applications and tools together in one environment, giving UC managers a single pane of glass solution for provisioning, security, and more.

According to Micah Singer, CEO from Kurmi: “UC Service Management software has the potential to revolutionize how large enterprises provision multiple UC solutions and their ecosystems, support users, and optimize their UC investments.

It streamlines countless tasks, improves scalability, and can even help preserve security and compliance.”

With a service management solution, UC managers can automate repetitive tasks, maintain comprehensive visibility into their UC environments, and, most importantly, reduce operational costs. Here are some of the top ways service management empowers UC managers.

1. Simplifying the Management of Complex Environments

As mentioned above, IT and communications systems are often highly fragmented. Most companies need to manage a broad spectrum of critical cloud-based and legal applications from a range of vendors.

Without a service management platform, UC managers and IT teams need to configure, monitor, and maintain each platform individually. This leads to greater complexity, much higher requirements for individual system knowledge and training for IT staff, as well as wasted time and resources pressing extra buttons and navigating different types of authentications.

A UC service management platform bridges the gaps between these ecosystems, allowing companies to manage their entire environment with a single application. They can handle everything from provisioning users, endpoints and resources to IT tickets in one space, significantly improving efficiency, and maintaining service agility.

2. Enabling Comprehensive Automation

Repetitive, manual tasks, such as provisioning numbers and services to users, or handling “moves, adds, changes, and deletions” in a UC ecosystem are time consuming for UC managers. An IT automation solution enables many-step workflows across multiple vendors and technologies. UC managers can save time by performing tasks in the same centralized place – automating, reporting, and more.

Some solutions even enable bulk administration for larger teams, enhance zero-touch provisioning for remote and field-based workers, and even streamline the process of tracking service metrics. With an all-in-one solution enabling end-to-end automation, UC managers can spend less time on repetitive work, and more time focusing on valuable, strategic projects.

They can simply accomplish more with less. According to Metrigy, a UC service management platform reduces provisioning time by 47% and reduces management costs by up to 37%.

3. Preserving Security and Control

Security and control are often the single most important issues for IT administrators to consider. A UC service management platform doesn’t just help UC admins ensure they’re allocating the correct resources to team members based on department, location, or other criteria. It can also help to reduce the risk of security and compliance issues. UC management tools ensure IT teams can provide each user with the right permissions to access certain tools and services, based on their specific needs.

Additionally, they offer access to role-based access control, which allows companies to assign management access according to rules for internal security compliance so that common UC tasks can be delegated. They also offer a holistic view of the UC ecosystem, enabling the creation of comprehensive audit trails and analytics that can provide insights into potential security and compliance risks.

Plus, with UC service management solutions, managers have simple solutions they can use to automatically de-provision users no longer working at a company. This reduces the risk of data breaches, while also ensuring that resources are being used efficiently.

4. Simplifying UC Growth

The UC landscape is constantly evolving, along with the needs of different businesses and teams. As organizations upgrade their technology stacks, leveraging new tools for communication and collaboration, they need a way to manage this migration and inevitable UC sprawl.

UC service management tools ensure businesses can adapt and evolve quickly and easily. They streamline managing new technologies alongside current tools, providing a centralized platform to view multi-vendor environments. Service management tools simplify implementing new rules and workflows, while some highly configurable platforms enable IT teams to deploy their own existing scripts in parallel with these new processes. It can even empower organizations to implement new innovations like artificial intelligence into ecosystems, without the need for complexity.

Plus, UC service management tools can enable end-to-end integration of all the tools businesses use, allowing for a simplified flow of data throughout an ecosystem, and enhanced decision-making.

5. Optimizing User Experience

The role of a UC manager isn’t just to ensure employees have access to the right tools, it’s also to ensure that team members can take full advantage of the resources they have. Service management software empowers UC managers to delegate control to department managers and even to end users as a way to enhance speed and accuracy with UC system management.

It enables businesses to create self-service portals, where authorized team members can solve day-to-day issues independently, without having to source help from specific IT and HR teams. This helps to boost user experiences and efficiency, while also reducing the workload on valuable IT experts.

On a broader level, UC service management ensures that it’s easy to rapidly provide employees with new tools and resources as they need them.

“Kurmi’s UC service management platform ensures businesses can provide employees with all the tools they need, regardless of their location,” Singer said.

“It helps UC managers take full advantage of their available resources, rapidly troubleshoot issues, and optimize the unified communications experience.”

Kurmi’s platform, for instance, ensures every user has full access to the features they need. There’s even a widget that flags if someone’s Enterprise Voice setting hasn’t been turned on or is using a wrong policy, and admins can diagnose configuration drift if a user is provisioned with features outside its template.

Discovering the Power of UC Service Management

UC managers are facing increasing pressure to manage and optimize highly complex communication and IT stacks. As companies continue to embrace digital transformation by providing employees with more technologies, managing each communication tool and resource independently is becoming less effective.

With service management solutions, CIOs and other business leaders can empower UC managers and IT teams to accomplish more with less, simplifying crucial tasks, and improving user experiences. In fact, these tools can even reduce operational costs and improve the ROI of communication systems. According to one study, specialized administration tools can improve ROI by over 30%.

Whether you’re looking for ways to enhance user experiences, reduce security risks, improve visibility, or minimize costs, now is the time to invest in UC service management.



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