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?"
