It’s safe to say that the world of UC is becoming more complex.

You don’t just have phone calls to keep track of these days. Communication is happening on a much wider scale, covering everything from instant messaging to video.

A more complicated communication stack means that businesses can connect with their clients on more of the platforms they use. This often leads to better conversations, more meaningful buyer journeys, and bigger conversions. The only downside? There’s a lot more technology to keep track of.

Service management solutions in the UC landscape can help to reduce some of the stress that today’s businesses are under to keep their communication stack running smoothly. With a service management strategy, business leaders can provision new technology faster, track call quality, and prevent future issues.

We spoke to some of the market leaders from the UC service management market to learn more about where the industry is heading. Here are the highlights from our conversations with Nectar, Unify Square, Unimax, Virsae, and VOSS.

Concerning Service Management, what are the major challenges faced by business today?

Companies in the current communication landscape are struggling with a rising demand for complete visibility and control. As the workplace continues to evolve, and new technology appears on the cloud, the demand for service management solutions is growing.

Service management tools offer an insight into how employees work, and which business operations need to change to support the growth of the organisation. According to Frost and Sullivan, today’s companies are increasingly searching for a single pane-of-glass environment where they can keep track of all their technology.

We asked our experts what the major challenges companies are facing today look like in the context of Service Management.

Mike Frayne, CEO of VOSS:

CEO of Voss, Mike Frayne says that many organisations usually deploy separate UC point solutions, which makes it harder to get a holistic view of the complete UC environment. Without a suite of tools for UC management, administrative tasks need to be managed manually. This is an exhausting and error-prone experience.

“Additionally, if your UC administration tools aren’t interconnected to your UC analytics and assurance tools – or indeed if there are no tools in place at all! – it will be even more difficult to analyse and troubleshoot faults, and impossible to apply corrective rules in the provisioning workflows to automatically correct those faults.”

Companies should be looking for ways to automatically respond when call quality falls, or a device stops working correctly, according to VOSS.

How can Service Management address those challenges?

The challenges of the unified communications space are constantly growing, particularly as conversations become more complex. As we move into the cloud and experiment more with things like work-from-home landscapes, companies are turning to service management for help with visibility and quality control.

Service Management solutions also play an important role in improving security and reliability within the communication stack – two of the biggest concerns for today’s businesses. We asked our Service Management experts for an insight into how the SM landscape can help companies to overcome some common challenges today.

VOSS CEO, Mike Frayne said that VOSS is taking a unique approach to serving companies in the current landscape. The business offers a highly integrated UC suite, complete with everything businesses need. This includes fulfillment, assurance, reporting, analytics, accounting, and migration in the same single pane of glass.

VOSS UC service management solutions automate technologies from different vendors, using a secure and flexible web portal. The self-healing capacity of the technology is particularly groundbreaking. It helps organisations to pull data from findings, analyse faults, and overcome issues fast. “This enables identified issues to be automatically corrected (e.g. re-configuration of IP-PBX, UC applications, SIP trunk, or gateways, etc.).”

Frayne said that the key feature of the self-healing solution is the zero-touch fault-rectification in the UC platform. “It significantly reduces downtime, increases overall service availability, and improves overall business continuity for critical business operations that involve communications”

What role can/does AI play in Service Management – now or in the future?

As we head into a new era of communication, companies are increasingly unlocking new opportunities with innovative technology. Tools like artificial intelligence can make it easier to collect data and transform it into actionable insights. Machine learning systems can predict and prevent problems in a call queue before they ever arise.

With all parts of the communication space now looking towards intelligent systems for help, we asked our experts about the implications of AI in service management.

According to CEO of Voss, Mike Frayne, the UC industry’s AI has focused on areas like Net Bot technology for setting up and managing meetings, as well as improving contact centre call handling. Self-healing is a crucial step forward for the UC industry, as it brings the communication space in line with the tools that exist for software-defined networks.

“Historically, the complexity of UC and the traditional single-thread specialisation of UC management tools has meant that UC self-healing has not been possible. With VOSS’ full multi-function UC management suite (assurance, fulfilment, and analytics), the ability to design and create a self-healing AI solution for the UC Industry is now possible.”

The significant shift towards business transformation, where UC plays a crucial role and where AI is becoming a more critical component, according to Frayne. VOSS’s approach to self-healing capabilities mean that companies can significantly improve the robustness of their UC platform, and improve the transformation process.

What do you think about our UC Service Management round table? Do you agree with our experts? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below or join the conversation on social media.

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