Unified communications platforms are now deployed ubiquitously at enterprises across the world delivering business value and improved efficiency. While the advantages of the various platforms are well understood, there are significant challenges involved in managing these and accessing call analytics and insights. These are essential to ensure the smooth running of UC environments and to optimise how platforms are utilised.
In addition, organisations need to ensure they comply with regulation and policies by storing call data in appropriate locations and for the correct length of time. These market needs are addressed by solutions for call and contact centre analytics but typically these address only individual platforms, rather than the full range of UC platforms an organisation might operate.
Fragmentation Hampers Visibility
The perfect world of a single UC platform does not exist and the various platforms offer a range of benefits of attributes and have large, established user bases. This has led to a fragmented marketplace served by Cisco, Microsoft, Zoom and others. There are few management tools that can support multiple platforms but there is an increasing need for organisations to have visibility into data across several platforms.
It’s common for organisations to utilise different platforms to meet the needs of different departments and different types of users. For instance, call centres may have been early adopters of one platform, while a sales team may have come to UC later and adopted a solution that offered a closer fit to its remote communications needs.
Further fragmentation occurs because of the nature of commerce. Businesses acquire and sell other companies and it’s not always possible to immediately migrate new users to a single platform. This compounds the challenge and results in multiple different in-company organisations utilising different platforms. In some cases, there’s also a need to engage with a different company’s chosen platform to aid collaboration among partners, for example.
