Call Accounting Featured Article

UC Management Solutions Ensure Quality for Remote Workers

  By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor

While newer communications technologies such as voice over IP (VoIP) and unified communications (UC) are helping companies communicate more broadly and globally for less money, telecom technology is raising the challenge for IT departments everywhere. Companies today are more distributed than ever, and they expect workers to be able to communicate using the enterprise phone system from anywhere, including remote offices and wireless devices. Constant vigilance is required to ensure that communications remain up and running.

Unified communications is not a unified product. Some systems are more robust than others, and have better safeguards to ensure quality. Putting quality control protocols and solutions in place is vital to avoid the lost productivity that can come from bad communications systems, according to a recent article by Magnus Kristell, a Microsoft platform management lead for EMEA at Quest (formerly Dell (News - Alert) Software) writing for The Record.

“With 83 percent of organizations expecting their remote workforce to grow this year, the stakes are high for IT teams to provide reliable access to communication and collaboration tools,” he wrote. “A recent study from SIS International Research showed poor unified communications (UC) can cost in excess of US $500,000 for lost productivity for organizations of 100 employees.”

When UC systems fail, workers may resort to using consumer communications apps to get through, which ultimately could cost the company more money (not to mention expose them to security risk). Bad calls can also cause some companies to lose customers, and make the job of employees so much harder.

Third-party integrations in UC solutions can help IT departments monitor quality in an enterprise’s telecom environment. Unified communications reporting, which is often a feature of call accounting solutions, can help companies monitor the quality of service (QoS) or quality of experience (QoE) they are offering at endpoints.

“It’s imperative to understand how your remote workforce is using certain communication features,” wrote Kristell. “From audio to desktop sharing, tracking feature usage gives organizations the necessary insight into how the UC investment is serving the remote worker. It’s critical to have insight into how your organization is using UC to effectively monitor for performance, compliance and data loss issues proactively – saving time and resources.”

UC management solutions such as those offered by ISI Telemanagement Inc. measure the quality of voice, video and IM/presence on the UC platform by enabling UC reporting, traffic analytics, collaboration recording, speech analytics, workforce management, telecom audit and telecom expense management (TEM). Using these tools, companies can ensure their UC solution is providing quality and is being used in an effective way, both for in-house workers and remote workers.