Optimal unified communications and collaboration (UCC) management can be the gateway to enabling successful digital transformation. In early 2017 Nemertes Research surveyed over 700 IT leaders and found there are a number of barriers stopping companies from optimally managing their systems. Considering 70% of companies are currently undertaking digital transformation initiatives it's surprising that so many IT leaders sidestep third-party management and monitoring tools when they are designed to overcome many of these barriers. So what are these challenges?
To find out more about the findings download the Nemertes Research report here.
Many companies learn about problems with apps or networks through users calling the help desk or filing an electric trouble ticket. But by that time the damage has already been done: the problem has affected numerous customers, employee meetings sales calls, etc.
Once companies know a problem exists they must figure out what is causing it: the call server, handset, circuit, application or perhaps it's an interoperability issue. Time after time, administrators are forced to manually recreate the problems, pulling pieces of data from various sources to discover the root cause. The ordeal rarely takes less than a few hours and often takes days - or even weeks in a complex network or contact center.
Without proper information and transparency about network and application performance it can take many calls and refereeing between providers who each deny ownership of the problem and blame someone else. Since partner, employees and customers are all dependent on UCC to communicate and collaborate, outages and disruptions in UCC will slow overall performance. This affects the metrics that are critical for digital transformation projects to be successful. As UCC adoption increases across an organization, the pains that result from poor performance become more evident because more people are affected.
Determining root cause certainly helps with the actual repair. Often though, IT leaders say they only found the general cause of the problem and needed more specific details to uncover the actual cause. Service providers and vendors point fingers at one another because the root-cause analysis only points to a problem outside the network and no one has the details to determine where outside the corporate network.
Customer experience has become a key competitive differentiator and one that has merited increasing attention in recent months. Proactive management can address problems before they become serious enough to affect customers. And, they can generate useful analytics to show which UCC apps are the most widely used – and most successfully used, helping with employee training and improving overall customer experience.