Understand Your Company’s Zoom Usage with the VOSS Assurance Suite

September 14, 2020

Jamie Litherland, Solution Owner and Derek Smith, Product Marketing, VOSS Solutions

At VOSS, we have first hand experience of the impact of Coronavirus on home and remote working. During the pandemic, VOSS staff have been in the same boat as our customers, having to adapt our business model to enable staff to work securely and efficiently from home.

The global uptake of tools such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom have gone through the roof. In the early stages of lockdown, many organizations found that their staff were adopting new tools that weren’t under the umbrella of their corporate communications strategy, and needed to quickly extend their UC management over these new collaboration tools, to ensure that they were being used efficiently and effectively.

So, it was no surprise when one of our enterprise customers approached us with a requirement to help them extend their UC management capability to centrally monitor and manage their staff’s Zoom usage.

The retailer, who is a dynamic user of VOSS-4-UC and the VOSS Assurance suite, requested that VOSS help them to build some dashboards to give them a deeper level of understanding around their employee’s use of Zoom and associated costs. Specifically, the customer wanted to see the rate of Zoom adoption as they transitioned from other conferencing tools. They also wanted to see usage of other Zoom capabilities they were trialing (like video and calling), to see if they could save money compared to existing technologies. Going forward, the VOSS Assurance Suite helps them see usage patterns and confirm their assumptions about cost savings. They will now have insight into whether they are paying for the proper licensing and will have a clear picture of their variable costs with enough detail to actively reduce those costs.

Here are a few of the reports the customer wished to see:

• Zoom meeting and webinar details – Total number by timeframe and location, most active organizers, number of participants, meeting costs, types of devices used to connect, and more.
• Insight into meeting participants – How they connect, most active participants, audio duration, location detail, reason for leaving, recordings, whiteboards, and other Zoom features
• Zoom Administration – Track changes to users, quickly validate authorized administrators.
• User feedback – Users were polled at regular intervals for their meeting experience feedback

The VOSS Assurance suite is already integrated into the retailer’s existing IT operations applications to enrich their UC data and provide actionable intelligence. With VOSS, advanced, proactive monitoring, fault detection, reporting and analytics improves the retailer’s productivity and saves them money.

VOSS was able to extend VOSS Assurance to overarch Zoom, quickly spinning up these required dashboards, providing real-time insight into the company’s Zoom usage. In addition the customer has a more flexible reporting platform compared to the native Zoom reporting interface. This includes the same self-service capabilities across the VOSS Assurance suite to create and edit dashboards and reports. And the option to join Zoom data with other UC solution data for better correlation and deeper insights.

This data has been hugely valuable, empowering the company to analyze their employee’s Zoom activity, and take appropriate action to save costs where possible, improve processes where necessary, and flag any concerns should they arise.

As a result, the retailer has a much better understanding of the productivity of their staff who use Zoom, and the costs associated with Zoom.

For more information about VOSS Assurance, please contact us.