Proving ignorance is not bliss, and what stays under the radar of UC service management ends up costing an arm and a leg, Virsae has crunched a mountain of live UC data to show customers where their money is going down the drain.
Unused trunk capacity topped the list of costly oversights, with Virsae’s analysis showing almost three quarters (74 percent) of businesses using less than half (50 percent) of their existing trunk capacity. Back-of-a-napkin analysis points to industry-wide wastage costing tens of millions of dollars, with surveyed businesses using on average 612 channels, indicating hundreds of under-utilised trunks per customer.
But while unused capacity costs businesses big time, it could be a drop in the ocean compared to the implicit cost of customer experience tainted by call flow events (known as vector events) that leave callers hanging or scratching their heads.
Virsae’s analysis of 307 million calls detected an ominous 3.2 million vector events relating to a range of glitches that left callers waiting for excessive amounts of time, hanging in silence, or routed them to the wrong destination.
On this front, misconfigured announcement resources – often the first point of contact offering queued callers push-button options to reach their intended destination – was the biggest offender, with one-third (33 percent) of businesses misdirecting or confusing callers with illogical announcement options.
Ross Williams, Virsae’s COO, said callers expect quick answers from tuned in sources, both human and machine.
“When technology gets in the way tempers rise. These days people don’t hang around – they’ll open a browser and take their business elsewhere, which in my mind is far more costly than unused capacity.”
The scale and projected cost of the service management oversights uncovered by Virsae’s analysis is behind the company’s launch of a new service that automates UC systems health checking to deliver a report pinpointing critical improvements.
Called System and Application Assessment, the service scans UC platforms and automates a 45-point health check covering availability, configuration, capacity, security, and customer experience, in the process smoothing out kinks and pinpointing potential cost savings. “All the hard-to-see stuff most other systems miss,” said Williams.
“Manually collecting and analysing millions of data points is difficult, if not impossible,” he said. “And with all that data, who knows where to look?”
“Sometimes the stuff you need to know is buried deep in databases and event logs. Virsae’s service knows how to prise it out and turns it into insights and action.”
Further analysis of data mined by Virsae highlighted shaky business continuity, with four in five businesses (80 percent) operating inadequately configured secondary servers that are unlikely to support business as usual in the event UC primary servers failed.
Monitoring nine billion UC transactions each month created by hundreds of thousands of end users worldwide, Virsae sits on a wellspring of data it is using to help customers and spearhead the development of new services.
Earlier this year the company launched a security module to provide real-time threat awareness to help network managers pinpoint vulnerabilities and shore up defenses.
Virsae’s multi-vendor UC service management platform, VSM, manages more than 50 UC, customer experience and network infrastructure vendors, including Cisco, Microsoft, Avaya, Mitel, AudioCodes, Sonus (Ribbon), NICE, Verint and Juniper.
Armed with VSM’s multi-vendor capabilities, customers and partners can get to the root cause of UC, contact centre, infrastructure, and security issues, using a single interface that simplifies management and reduces costs while aligning UC and network teams.
Find out more about the new System and Application Assessment service.
Businesses around the world use Virsae’s cloud-based business communications management platform, Virsae Service Management (VSM), to keep their communications technology running smoothly – so their channels stay open, workers keep communicating, and customers always get an answer.
