UC Management

By Irwin Lazar, VP and Service Director, Nemertes Research

Nemertes’ recently released our latest Workplace Collaboration: 2019-20 Research Study, capturing deployment trends and success correlations for technologies including calling, meetings, and team collaboration. The study gathered data from collaboration leaders from 645 end-user organizations in North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region.

To determine what makes for a successful strategy, we first had to define success. We established a success group by uncovering those who had measured quantifiable examples of business benefit such as revenue increases, cost savings, or productivity gains as a result of their collaboration investments. We then analyzed our data to determine what those within our success group do differently from those outside of it. Here are five key correlations:

1. Best of Breed Strategy:

While most participants (46%) rely on a single primary UCC vendor, those who adopt a best-of-breed strategy, enabling selection of collaboration apps that best meet identified need, are more likely to be successful. A best-of-breed strategy avoids vendor lock-in, and allows organizations the flexibility to deploy emerging applications that deliver demonstrable value.

2. Use a Hybrid Architecture:

The age of cloud is here with just 35.7% of participants now relying only on on-premises UC platforms. More than a third of on-premises users are moving to, or evaluating a move to cloud. Successful organizations are more likely to use a hybrid approach enabling them to move to cloud only where and when it makes sense. They may continue to leverage on-premises platforms until there is a clearly identifiable business benefit to moving to the cloud

3. Leverage SD-WAN:

SD-WAN allows organizations to reduce WAN costs, while adding additional flexibility to take advantage of options like public Internet connectivity while still meeting application requirements for latency and jitter. Almost 30% of all participants now use SD-WAN, while more than 63% of SD-WAN users say their cloud implementations have been successful

4. Use Third-Party Management Platforms as Needed:

The use of specialty tools for performance and administration management of UC platforms enables IT groups to reduce costs and staff time associated with troubleshooting, repairing, and provisioning UC platforms. Even as companies move to the cloud, specialty tools can continue to support deployments by giving IT insight into the performance of the cloud service, and by interconnecting internal systems, like HR platforms, with the cloud provider for provisioning and for managing moves/adds and changes. Successful organizations leverage specialty tools as necessary more often than non-successful ones

5. Deploy Team Collaboration Enterprise-Wide:

Team collaboration enables workgroups to chat, meet, and share files and data within the context of a space associated with a team, project, or other activity. Apps like Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams, and more are rapidly transforming collaboration and converging formerly separate UC apps.  Half of successful organizations have deployed team collaboration apps on an enterprise-wide basis, versus just 20.3% of the non-success group

Collaboration success is more than just ensuring that apps work. Rather, true success requires that apps provide demonstrable business benefit. Address strategy, architecture, network and management considerations as part of your strategy, and plan to converge your separate calling, meeting, and chat apps into a team collaboration workspace to affect positive impact on your organization.

By Robin Gareiss / President and Founder of Nemertes Research

Digital Customer Experience (DCX) efforts enable organizations to provide new means of engagement including via mobile apps, chat, virtual and augmented reality, and by using AI to improve engagement routing and response. As organizations invest heavily into DCX strategies, they are bolstering their contact center technologies to improve both customer and employee engagement.

Contact center providers are investing heavily in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and a variety of analytics capabilities to deliver more automation and information to reduce costs, increase revenue, and boost customer success ratings.

Given the core role of contact centers to high-profile DCX strategies and initiatives, it’s vital to have a rock-solid administration management tool. Because organizations often use multiple providers for UC and contact center, they may wind up with multiple provisioning tools that do not integrate—potentially increasing the length of time to provision new users, bots, or apps.

When evaluating provisioning providers, assess which vendors and technologies they support. The more they support, the lower the cost and easier the management becomes.

The main changing trends

In our research, we see several changing trends in how organizations are using communications and collaboration capabilities in DCX, including the following:

• Organizations are integrating Unified Communications (UC) capabilities such as calling, instant messaging, and videoconferencing into their contact centers. By doing so, front-line agents are more easily able to engage with back-office resources to quickly obtain necessary information to respond to a customer inquiry, sales opportunity, or service request. As UC and contact center merge,
• Automated provisioning and management of moves, adds, and changes, gets people online faster to deliver value by eliminating manual steps required to configure user account information such as phone numbers or extensions
• Moving forward, companies will extend their team/workstream collaboration tools (i.e., Cisco Webex Teams, Microsoft Teams, Slack, etc.) to the contact center or even to external customer portals. Integrated provisioning tools will speed the value to customers by enabling automated configuration of agent accounts, as well as federation with customers.
• AI-enabled chatbots augment human agents, allowing customers to resolve common issues via the bot, or use the bot to provide information that can then be passed on to an agent, delivering faster response. Provisioning new agents and chatbot instances is crucial to successful routing and hand-offs for when chatbots must escalate to human agents.
• Self-service, both internally for employees/agents and externally for customers, are on the rise. For example, employee provisioning portals can help agents set up their communications preferences (call forward, password resets, voicemail, etc.). Customer portals also can provide customers with answers to questions and potentially connections to employee presence data or a customer workspace. Administration management tools can provide and/or provision these capabilities.

Increase efficiency by using UCC management platform

Companies frequently overlook the need for specialty management tools until they are one to two years into their overall UC and contact center deployments. This not only makes it more difficult to find new budget, but it stalls the value integrated, automated provisioning delivers to customers. That’s why it’s vital for IT and business leaders to incorporate provisioning and performance management tools into their initial budgets for any new UCC or contact center project. It’s even more important to ensure that tools are able to support DCX initiatives like the use of AI, as well as the expansion of customer interaction channels.  Leveraging tools that automate provisioning and management can provide a competitive edge by increasing speed of deployment, and customer responsiveness.

By Robin Gareiss / President and Founder of Nemertes Research

IT staffs have an incredible responsibility to implement and support enabling technologies to transform their companies. In fact, more than 70% of companies have digital transformation initiatives underway or planned, involving numerous technology deployments to drive business value.

Before jumping into a technologically advanced digital transformation initiative, IT leaders must make sure the technology foundation is properly engineered to support emerging applications that transform everything from internal processes to customer experience.

Often, this means pushing the brakes for an innovative project that, for example, may require more robust network engineering or communications capabilities. After all, without a strong technology foundation, the project is at risk for failure.

Each year, Nemertes conducts research on digital transformation, interviewing and surveying 600-700 organizations. Consistently, the research participants cite Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) as one of the top five technologies required for successful digital transformation projects.

UCC serves multiple functions for digital transformation initiatives, including the following:

• Provides internal communications and collaboration channels (voice, team collaboration, video conferencing, web conferencing, instant messaging, etc.) for project teams to execute on and manage their digital transformation projects
• Reduces travel costs by eliminating the need for at least some in-person meetings, replacing them with video conferences
• Delivers collaboration channels to use externally–for example, enabling communications with customers over video conferencing or team collaboration
• Provides ongoing communications channels to track success or issues from the transformation projects themselves
• For any use of the UCC apps, helping to make quick decisions by reaching the right people at the right time.

Given all of these uses, it makes sense to keep the communications infrastructure operating optimally—leveraging management and monitoring tools automate provisioning and administration to ensure fast-moving digital transformation initiatives won’t be stalled. Today, 46% of organizations use third-party administration management tools for UCC.

In doing so, they are able to reduce UCC operational costs by 31% and implementation costs by 65%. And, employee productivity increases by 21% when companies use administration management tools. When communications apps are running efficiently, employees can get their jobs done faster and better.

The bottom line: Digital transformation initiatives are high profile in most organizations, and they rely on a well-managed, feature-rich communications infrastructure to succeed. One of the best ways to ensure that communications infrastructure is nimble is by using administration management tools to automate provisioning and administration—making it easy to add new employees, locations, devices, and features to that vital part of the technology foundation.