Monitoring WFH UCaaS Environments with Nectar 10

The Last time I spoke with Ken Lasko, MS Teams Product Manager at Nectar Corp, it was hard to imagine that COVID and WFH were still going to be around a year later. During that year, the company’s UC&C Service Management solution, Nectar 10, has proved to be a true life-saver when it came to the WFH telephony environment.  

Now, Nectar continues to offer their support to help both individual companies and service providers get a clearer picture of WFH employees. 

Supporting the Home Front

Pretty soon after COVID started, Nectar implemented a robust suite of screens and tools to be able to help administrators assist WFH employees. One of the most useful features that Nectar 10 offers in this department is a geolocation tool, requiring only an IP address to gain detailed information about a user working from home. 

“We can tell what city, rough geographic coordinates and even the type of ISP they’re connecting from, and plot all that information on a map,” shares Lasko. “So the same sort of map interface we’ve always used for corporate locations, we simply rejigged to be able to support people working from home.”  

This effectively means that a Nectar 10 administrator can look at a map and see dots of all the people who are using the tool in their company according to their respective locations around the word, making it extremely easy to spot call quality issues.  

“You’ll see clusters of red amongst the green dots from locations where there are issues,” explains Lasko. 

This is all done through a single, cross-platform interface. This means that regardless of the UC platform a company is using, or whether it’s using one or multiple platforms, there’s absolutely no difference.  

“So whether you’re on Teams, Zoom, Cisco, Avaya, or even if you’ve got a mixed environment – we plot all that together to be able to give a unified picture for your WFH employees” 

Assisting Individual Users

Ultimately, it usually comes down to individual users (i.e., company employees) calling to complain about poor quality. Nectar 10 offers a comprehensive suite of insights, as well as a new focus user screen to help with that. 

“If a user is having problems, we have insights that can show you that, for example, other people on the same ISP in this particular city are also having issues. So you can go to that user and tell them to contact their ISP. That gives administrators the ability to offer concrete insights rather than the usual ‘reboot your modem’ thing,” Lasko explains. 

The new user focus screen goes even further than that, enabling to group all the various calls of a certain user by different criteria to help further diagnose poor calling experiences. 

“We can group calls by wired versus Wi Fi, by client version, by network type, by location. So users can see exactly where issues might be aggregated.” 

Being Proactive

Nectar 10 doesn’t only show insights after-the-fact, once a user has already (and often angrily) called to complain. The solution also encourages proactivity by providing the ability to set up alerts, notifying the customer once a high-value user is experiencing issues. 

“If you’ve got specific users that you are monitoring, like your C-level execs, you can add them to a list and be notified every day or even every hour if they’re experiencing an uptick of poor calls, instead of having to wait for them to call in.”   

The solution also provides various analytics and reports that can be automated and scheduled to be sent off to users on a regular basis, saving valuable time and effort. 

“Ultimately, we’re all about supporting customers through these difficult times. WFH is clearly not going anywhere, so our aim is to help monitor users working from home as easily as possible,” Lasko concludes.