Digital transformation has become a strategic imperative for virtually every business in recent years. The rise of new work styles, such as hybrid and remote work, combined with changing customer expectations, has accelerated the need for innovative technology.
For many companies, the path to digital transformation begins with unified communication (UC) tools; solutions that align their teams, data, and workflows, for enhanced productivity. By 2032, experts say the market for UC technology will reach $511.21 billion, showing a clear demand for these aligned resources in the digital age.
Unfortunately, while UC solutions offer a range of benefits to businesses, from improved collaboration to greater agility and flexibility, a complex UC estate can be difficult to manage. With various vendors, interfaces, and applications to manage, companies need a comprehensive strategy for not only improving ROI, but also enhancing user experiences.
“VOSS Insights enables organizations to optimize the user experience and boost productivity. By actively monitoring and analyzing performance data, you can identify areas for improvement, such as network bottlenecks or collaboration tool usage patterns. With this actionable intelligence, you will be able to proactively address issues, optimize resource allocation, and provide a seamless and efficient UC experience for employees. And, by enhancing the user experience and minimizing disruptions, VOSS Insights enables employees to work more productively, leading to increased job satisfaction and a more productive workforce.”
- Jamie Litherland, Solution Owner, VOSS Solutions
The Role of UC Performance Management in UX
In today’s experience-focused world, companies often concentrate on elevating the customer experience, paving the way for brand loyalty and retention. However, the performance of any business and the success of its CX strategy relies on first addressing the needs of employees.
Ensuring an excellent user experience for employees accessing communication and collaboration tools is essential for a variety of reasons. It enhances employee satisfaction and engagement, reducing turnover and burnout. Great user experiences also ensure employees can remain productive and efficient in any environment, unlocking their full potential.
Additionally, a focus on user experience ensures companies can effectively encourage the adoption of critical tools and resources, boosting the return on their UC investment. However, there are many factors that can negatively influence UC user experiences.
Latency and lag in network environments, issues with quality of service, and technical problems can all disrupt teams, cause frustration, and create unnecessary downtime. That’s where UC performance management tools come in, giving companies the comprehensive visibility into their UC estate they need to maximize operational performance, and eliminate issues.
Performance management solutions allow companies to access real-time solutions for monitoring, troubleshooting, and addressing service problems, even across multi-vendor estates.
The 3 Pillars of Performance Management for UX
Comprehensive performance management tools automate the collection of structured and unstructured data, surfacing insights that allow companies to quickly analyze, understand, and address UX issues. They can help businesses to rectify issues before they affect user experience, and even take preemptive measures to minimize risks.
Here are three ways companies can use performance management tools to improve user experience.
1. End-to-End UC Monitoring
At a core level, UC performance management tools elevate a company’s visibility into its UC estate, providing a comprehensive view of service performance, issues, and potential solutions. The right technology allows organizations to configure monitoring capabilities for all their UC vendors, tools, and applications, creating a “holistic view” of the UC fingerprint.
Monitoring tools allow companies to rapidly visualize and understand the performance and health of UC applications, ensuring they can take proactive measures to manage, maintain, and attain thresholds. They can automatically alert business leaders to potential performance problems, and efficiently isolate the root causes of issues. This leads to an improvement in “mean time to resolution” (MTTR), and a reduction in service disruptions.
Companies can even use service management tools to monitor “network hop latency”, ensuring communications remain smooth, uninterrupted, and intuitive for all users.
2. Powerful UC Analytics
While monitoring solutions provide real-time visibility into the health of a UC estate, analytical solutions make it easier to draw insights from data. The right tools can rapidly generate insightful reports on the duration of incidents, and the impact they have on productivity.
Automation features built into service management solutions empower the technology to analyze call paths and call issues, surfacing insights into issue resolution opportunities. Plus, with tools to capture and report on call detail records, businesses get an overview of communication patterns and usage, helping them make decisions that empower their teams.
With powerful insights and analytics, companies can quickly address quality of service issues, and preserve mean opinion scores (MOS). Plus, the right analytical tools can give companies the information they need to make decisions that improve productivity, support adoption, and even reduce operational costs.
3. Proactive Call Testing
Various factors can influence the performance of call paths and technologies in a UC environment. Proactive call and network testing capabilities in a UC performance management platform can help to minimize these issues and accelerate problem resolution.
With the right tools, companies can proactively test their chosen call paths, ensuring they maintain high levels of performance and reliability. You can identify potential call hops and latency for each call hop, allowing for rapid and precise troubleshooting.
Plus, intelligent call testing solutions ensure organizations can quickly gain insights into the root cause of specific problems, allowing them to take proactive measures to maintain optimal communication performance. This all paves the way for a stronger, more consistent user experience, regardless of where your employees are accessing your UC tools.
Improving User Experience with Performance Management
The demand for UC solutions will only increase as the workplace continues to evolve. As businesses build more complex communication technology stacks, it’s crucial to ensure their resources can effectively and consistently empower and support their teams.
Performance management solutions give companies the visibility, insights, and metrics they need to evaluate the performance of their entire ecosystem with minimal effort. With the right solutions, business leaders can proactively monitor potential problems in their estate, and surface valuable insights that accelerate issue resolution.
At the same time, the right tools give business leaders the reports and information they need to make intelligent decisions that boost adoption, reduce costs, and preserve the reliability of technology.
“Work with VOSS to unlock the power of real-time UC monitoring and analytics. We will help you improve the employee experience and fuel productivity by increasing adoption and optimizing the performance of the UC tools that your staff use, regardless of their location,” says Jamie Litherland.
With UC performance management tools such as VOSS Insights, organizations can ensure they’re creating the exceptional user experience for their employees that leads to increased productivity, better customer experience, and new opportunities for growth.
