UC Management

Unified Communications & Collaboration (UCC) solutions evolve fast in order to match the speed of business demand. So it’s fair to ask how IT can make investing in this type of project sustainable – especially since it’s essential to factor in the company’s business challenges: staying adaptable, updating working methods, always improving collaboration practices, and so on.

When it’s time to choose keep these four best practices in mind:

1. Support for all deployment models

This should be the starting point… unless you’re migrating to the cloud (UCaaS).

Unified Communications is complex by nature. Many companies prefer to deploy on-premises – where they can still own and manage the platform.

But this total control brings a certain complexity with it, which may dissuade IT departments that are already overworked. So then the cloud looks like a welcome option.

And it’s common to use a blend of the two. But to support hybrid Unified Communications, you need to be absolutely certain that your provider can actually provide both deployment methods: on-premise and cloud.

2. Assessing the collaboration needs and preferences of the business lines

IT has to understand what the business lines want. What do they need to collaborate effectively? How are their current tools not measuring up?

Unified Communications can support a wide range of applications. The goal here is not to do “more” but to do “better” and support a wide range of preferences.

Why? Because most workplaces are multi-generational. Each age group collaborates differently.

The starting point is recognizing that UC is not a universal, turnkey, magic solution. Some solutions are more call-focused, while others lean more to video or messaging.

The best way to ensure the sustainability of a project and of your investment in Unified Communications is to understand these needs and preferences, to ensure that the platform you choose fits all the different expectations as closely as possible.

3. Automate deployment to avoid the risk of errors

Here, provisioning software makes the difference. So the numbering plan is one of the key steps in deploying any Unified Communications solution – especially since it varies by company.

In fact, which kind of call management you need depends on which technical infrastructure you have. It’s during this phase that the company sets the internal numbering rules.

Before deploying one or more UC solutions, it’s important to define your service packages upstream. These can be created and adapted to each user profile in the company (commercial package, VIP package, or external package). This allows bulk user creation, assigning them to a given service package.

Likewise, with a large number of users to be managed each day, the option of simultaneously creating several users (bulk management) can prove very useful.

Finally, to optimize deployment of UC solutions, being able to connect your provisioning tool with ITSM (IT Service Management) software like ServiceNow is crucial. This integration can automatically add initial data to user files so that administrators can finish the job in just a few keystrokes. This can also be done by integrating directly with Active Directories or any type of business directory.

Simple operation based on an intuitive graphical interface means that people who aren’t UC experts can administer communications solutions autonomously. To do this, they have forms that are easy to handle, sparing them from writing lines of code or PowerShell scripts for Microsoft.

The needs of companies and service providers are evolving. So it’s not uncommon to find at least two technologies deployed. This is especially true for organizations that have performed buyouts. So when you’re evaluating provisioning software, you have to make sure it can administer and manage several technologies and stay open enough to connect to other solutions or third-party applications. Flexibility and scalability are key factors in choosing provisioning software.

4. Ensure adoption and boost user experience

Whatever quality of technology you choose, a Unified Communications project can only succeed if your employees adopt it and if you’re on hand to answer user questions effectively during deployment.

By ‘on hand,’ we mean able to delegate the deployment of Unified Communications & Collaboration solutions to local administrators. With provisioning software, you’ll have advanced functions known as  delegation of rights, with the principle of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) . Advanced RBAC features let you manage administrator profiles and related rights, so you can delegate without compromising security. By delegating a certain number of actions to local administrators, you make sure local teams are really involved in your project. They’ll also be more responsive to their colleagues’ requests, thereby strengthening their support. To facilitate user creation, local administrators can rely on service packages, the purpose of which is to create service profiles easily.

Certain operations can be left up to users, if they’re given the authorization and, more importantly, the option, with a simple, user-friendly portal they can use to activate a given function (call forwarding, ability to activate a specific communications service such as a softphone, Instant Messaging, and so on).

Software that’s dedicated to user provisioning means quick, error-free deployment of Unified Communications & Collaboration solutions.  So it makes perfect sense that this is one of the best practices for easy, future-proof deployment: it organizes and assigns numbers by company department, chooses terminals, authorizes calls to special numbers (surcharged) or numbers abroad, and more. This software will be all the more effective if it’s based on a user-friendly interface that can be customized to the company’s services – even to its style guide.

In the face of expectations from customers and employees, as well as regulatory pressure, how can a Unified Communications provisioning solution give financial institutions the competitive edge while ensuring its processes are compliant?

1. What is at stake for the banks?

When it comes to their money, customers expect the best from their local banks. Online transactions and mobile banking are becoming the norm, so any customer walking into a bank branch deserves an exceptional experience. In-person customers want their problems solved quickly, correctly, and easily. So it’s more important than ever that banks have state-of-the-art Unified Communications services.

The right phone system will preserve your valuable customer relationships. And, just as critically, it will empower your branch employees to deliver the best service possible.

The time is certainly right for omni-channel and cross-channel, but it’s also time to put these building blocks (telephony, video telephony, messaging, etc.) in order. Doing that will also simplify how they’re used. Simplification is the whole point of Unified Communications, and it’s what companies in the sector are prioritizing.

At the same time, financial institutions are highly regulated. Directives such as MIFID II require that all communications relating to financial transaction are recorded. The cost of compliance is a significant burden for banks, but so is the cost of non-compliance. Regulators are increasingly vigilant and fines increasingly punitive – potentially in the tens of millions of dollars. No bank wants to make headlines for running afoul of the regulators as reputational damage compounds the financial cost. At the same time, banks need to be particularly alive to the need to keep customer data safe. Communications that don’t need to be recorded, shouldn’t be.

In addition to what are clearly the many advantages of Unified Communications & Collaboration solutions (time savings, efficiency, improved collaboration, and cost savings), there are other benefits that financial institutions can rely on, to effectively meet the regulatory challenges leveled at them and avoid the risk of sanctions.

But how can all of these challenges be reconciled when they must fit into complex processes and workflows, with tens of thousands of employees to be managed across multiple sites, sometimes operating under different sets of rules?

2. Ensuring compliance in the automation age

Managing and administrating call-recording solutions can be quite a chore, especially requirements to produce compliance reporting.

However, workflows can be set up to simplify provisioning. Handling these configurations manually not only consumes considerable man-hours, it also carries the risk of human error.

Data retention for call recording also varies by jurisdiction and can to a large extent be automated.

So, there must be a reference database to identify who must record their calls. And that’s where provisioning software comes in, streamlining not only the admin on Unified Communications (user creation, associated services, etc.), but also all third-party apps for call recording and call transfer.

Centralizing both admin and processes quickly becomes a strategic issue for banks, which need to optimize their resources effectively.

Provisioning software will certainly simplify the administration and deployment of Unified Communications tools. But it can go much further if it also has multiple connectors to manage the different workflows, avoiding any risk of errors.  By relying on provisioning software, financial institutions can manage their data securely while also following regulations. Because the provisioning software sits in the middle, connected to the company’s directories, its UC platforms and its call recording systems it can perform two key functions for a financial institution.

1. It can audit the systems and apply a set of business rules to ensure that those users who need to be recorded are and that everyone else is not
2. It can produce a set of compliance reports to validate system settings for recorded users

To best ensure compliance with the security rules laid down by European and other directives, financial institutions can also use provisioning software to optimize their process as much as possible, thanks to advanced integrations with ITSM. This avoids the risk of errors since there is less manual entry, and all transactions are then tracked and logged in the software.

On top of these admin capabilities, Unified Communications & Collaborative management can also be delegated to local administrators. And because it offers advanced delegation, rights management, and log-tracking features, provisioning software gives financial institutions the choice to decentralize on-site admin while staying in control, to avoid any risk of errors.

And the customer relationship center must also be managed. Here, too, a provisioning solution plays a central role, providing a reliable and consistent experience on whatever channel the customers choose. This also makes deployment simpler, easier, and more responsive, to meet customer expectations effectively. An agent can be created in the contact center by assigning them rights. For example, an agent known for their English language skills will be identified in the provisioning solution, and then be responsible for handling any calls in English. This cuts processing times and improves customer satisfaction, thanks to better call flow and queuing strategies.

3. In conclusion

Combining customer satisfaction, a competitive edge, and regulatory compliance is a challenge that banks face every day. Provisioning software dedicated to managing Unified Communications & Collaboration tools plays a key role in meeting that challenge, delivering both cost saving and risk reduction.

It also handles the technical issues that banks must address. Provisioning software can actually be installed and hosted on site to enhance data security. Likewise, it can offer high availability, setting up actions and technical configurations so that the infrastructure is always ready to respond, specifically by copying output onto another server.

It’s also a real lever for optimizing the digital transformation that banks have already begun, to make them more agile and flexible.

We now have so many different admin platforms for managing Unified Communications solutions that it can be hard to use one without specialized technical knowledge. But delegating certain settings to less expert people, even end users, can simplify the process and reduce costs. With advanced RBAC features, you can manage administrator profiles and rights, to delegate without compromising security.

Some problems can even be solved by users if they have the permission and, above all, the option, with simple, user-friendly access to certain features. This is where the second functional layer – the “self-serve” portals offered by some user management solutions – comes in to play.

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

The great advantage of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is that it grants some access to local managers, even those without a technical background, so they can create services for their organization using packages developed upstream by central admins. And HR has read-only access to all workstations deployed with their features, but is not authorized to change them. These options are available only through a portal that clearly displays the information. And it’s important to be able to fine-tune RBAC, especially for sensitive functions like account deletion, where one false move can spell disaster. Fortunately, with a good user-management solution, you can install safeguards.

“For example,” says Kurmi’s Bruno Guirardel, “the local admins of a large French bank had access to all systems and their features. Once Kurmi’s solution was in place, these local admins couldn’t perform bulk user management – so they couldn’t accidentally apply an operator error to all employees at once. When admins objected to making  changes one by one, the bank reauthorized bulk management but set a maximum of 50 users.” This compromise was possible thanks to the granularity of the solution’s configuration. IT teams can work with confidence, and local admins retain some autonomy – all in a completely secure environment.

Any highly-decentralized organization needs  a solution with advanced delegation features. With the service-pack feature in Kurmi, one company was able to deploy a lower-cost communications system for several thousand employees, backed by a network of just over 200 trained admins based at two or three regional centers of expertise. The experts led two-day training courses focusing on how to set up a phone terminal and create a user profile. Working from the templates (service packs) developed by the center of expertise, administrators learned how to assign the different services to users.

Two types of packs were created: a standard pack, assigned to everyone, and a more advanced pack including single-number service and Jabber mobile.

By drastically streamlining the add, modify and delete operations, provisioning software makes it easier to delegate these tasks. This helps enterprises optimize the resources they put toward operations. And that improves TCO. What’s more, teams will have a single interface for managing all the hardware they need to provide voice, video, and instant messaging services.

Autonomy on user access management

A portal designed for end users brings its own challenges: freeing up IT and helpdesk services and getting more users on board with Unified Communications & Collaboration. Some operations, like generating a new password, can be managed directly by employees. Yet however simple, these can end up costing the company. First, the employee trying work finds they’re blocked. So they have to open a ticket in the company’s internal system. The helpdesk team analyzes the ticket and escalates it to Level-2 support. This wastes time and money – and that adds up. But employees can easily manage this kind of operation, and referral management, on a portal. And this portal has been designed to meet their expectations, with better ergonomics for a better user experience.

The upshot of all of this? High quality of service and faster incident resolution for a superior user experience.

By Irwin Lazar, VP and Service Director, Nemertes Research

UCaaS has garnered a great deal of attention in the marketplace over the last few years thanks to its ability to offer low cost, flexible, calling and unified communications services.  Moving to the cloud enables organizations to shift responsibility for provisioning, operations, and management to a cloud provider, while also enabling them to take advantage billing models that only requires paying for what you use, rather than large up-front capital outlays.

Nemertes Research has tracked UCaaS adoption for the last several years.  Our latest “Workplace Collaboration: 2019-20 Research Study”, based on data gathered from more than 600 end-user organizations operating in Western Europe, North America, Southeast Asia, and Australia shows that 19.1% of participants are now using UCaaS for their calling needs, while another 12.2% operate hybrid environments containing a mix of UCaaS and on-premises or hosted options.  For comparison, a year ago just 11.9% of participants used UCaaS, meaning that adoption has nearly doubled in the last year.

UCaaS adoption continues to be highest among small companies who often lack in-house IT expertise to operate their own platforms, however among large enterprises with more than 2,500 employees, 15.1% are using UCaaS.

The current adoption numbers are only part of the story.  Of the 35.7% of participants who still operate on-premises platforms, nearly half (43.2%) are evaluating or planning to adopt UCaaS in the next two years.  Meanwhile, of the 17.8% using hosted platforms operated and managed by a third-party provider, 62.6% are considering or planning to shift to UCaaS.  Taking all these data points together, it’s clear that the UCaaS market is in the middle of a rapid growth phase entering 2020 and beyond!

The primary drivers for UCaaS adoption continues to be cost and scale.  IT buyers like the predictability of subscription-based cost models, and the ability to only pay for what they need.  In many cases the elimination of staffing, licensing for on-premises servers and maintenance, and PSTN access contracts results in lower costs though our overall research shows that for most companies, UCaaS results in higher first year costs before buyers realize savings in years 2 and beyond.  From a scale perspective, UCaaS enables customers to easily add, or subtract licenses as needed, and to provide services in remote areas where the buyer may not have a physical presence.  For example, some UCaaS customers take advantage of features that allow provisioning of local phone numbers in remote markets, or they use UCaaS to support home, remote, or contract workers outside of their normal operating region.

Adopting UCaaS does not absolve buyers of the need to manage voice services.  Even as UCaaS customers shift operational responsibility to the cloud provider, they must still ensure that their own data networks deliver reliable connectivity and acceptable latency and jitter to support voice.  And they must integrate their HR systems with their UCaaS providers to support automated provisioning of phone numbers as well as moves/adds/changes. UCaaS providers, at the same time, must deliver customer interfaces that are easy to use, and that enable automated provisioning, reporting, and feature management.

The market momentum for UCaaS is clear.  IT buyers should consider UCaaS if they aren’t already, meanwhile service providers should focus on delivering simple to use, feature rich offerings that enable easy customer provisioning and on-going feature management.