March 14, 2023

Derek Smith, Product Marketing Manager, VOSS Solutions

I had an experience the other day that got me thinking. I called a company to get clarification on a product offering and was connected with a friendly salesperson. However, I quickly noticed there was a big delay between when I spoke and when they heard me, and vice versa. We spoke over each other the entire conversation. It was difficult to communicate and I ended the call sooner than I wanted to. I’d had several successful phone conversations that day, so I’m convinced the issue was on their side and, I would guess they didn’t know they had an issue.

I wondered how that might impact their business. Poor customer satisfaction? Frustrated employees? Loss of sales? If I were running their IT systems, I would want to know about this issue. But how to go about identifying and resolving the problem?

Bill Dellara, Head of Product at VOSS, and I spoke about this topic during our recent Product Innovation Update. Below, I highlight some of that conversation:

Customer Experience: The Full Picture

When it comes to UC performance management, it’s important to monitor user experience across the entire interaction with their communication system. Things like: Are people engaged? Are they able to connect and communicate effectively with their peers or with customers? Is there any service degradation during the interaction?

With more variables than ever being introduced into the mix – multiple UC and collaboration tools alongside cloud services like Cisco Webex Teams, Microsoft Teams, Zoom – and taking into account the nature of hybrid and remote workers, being able to understand the service quality and the end users actual experience is really challenging.

To understand the user’s entire experience of the service you must correlate disparate network data sources with UC. This is tricky and therefore it is often, unfortunately, a big visibility gap for enterprises.

UC Observability: Get the Insight You Need

At VOSS, our experience is that this just isn’t something you’ll get from the individual vendor tools. Often, call quality is reported as “great, no problem with the call”. However, the reality is very different. In fact, the limited view of the call leg leads to a misrepresentation of the actual experience.

Today’s environments include a range of collaboration tools operating across a wide range of devices and the network is key to these tools working effectively. Increasingly, this also utilizes uncontrolled networks and breaks out of the traditional voice network controlled environment. So, we require a new perspective for performance management tools. Being able to dive into the end-to-end experience of the call – the bigger picture view – requires innovation. You need to approach the problem differently, taking into account new variables like the internet, the user’s home Wi-Fi, devices like headsets or microphones being used, and the location of the user.

This is an area that VOSS has been investing in. It’s something we call UC observability: The ability to collect, generate, and correlate the myriad metrics to provide deeper insight. This capability to analyze everything from the user to the devices they’re using, to the connectivity between them; and doing that in any environment.

With UC observability, you can answer the following questions:

• Is there a network problem?
• What applications are running on the network?
• How much load are applications putting on the network ?
• What is the network performance by device?
• Why are certain apps slow?
• Are apps being prioritized correctly?
• What path are my calls taking?
• What is the gateway and eSBC capacity?
• Is there latency reaching cloud apps?

Get Involved

Market research and discussions with providers and enterprises tell us that UC observability is going to be key for a lot of organizations. We are looking for some early adopters to participate in beta implementations of our network observability functionality. If this is something that’s of interest to you, be sure to get in touch. Your real world feedback will be extremely valuable as we make this new offering widely available to the market.

Don’t wait for your customers or employees to tell you about your issues, or worse NOT tell you and just quietly go away. Reach out to participate in our early adopter program.