Gone are the days of homogenous communications platforms within an enterprise. Even when the environment is built on standardized platforms, the new norm is multi-vendor and, as a result, very likely a hybrid of on-premise and cloud.

It took much longer than its proponents would have liked, but video has finally become a major collaboration modality used in conference rooms, on desktops and in huddle spaces.

As a backdrop to all of this, the macro business trends of remote workers, mobility and globalization are also shaping the modern era of collaboration and communication. For remote workers especially, connectivity issues can severely impact that customer experience and cause a big headache for the IT team. Remote users primarily use voice and video connections to communicate with other team members and customers, and they experience a wide range of challenges that we are all familiar with: “I can hear you. Can you hear me?” “I’m unable to share my screen.” “I’m going to try to sign out and sign back in.” Meanwhile, you are wasting time and resources—and potentially a customer’s patience.

To make matters more difficult for IT support teams, trying to narrow down what is causing the problems can be a huge challenge. Tools today are very centric to either collaboration or networks. Do I have a collaboration issue or a network issue? What if none of my devices are having issues and throwing alarms and it’s a utilization or capacity issue? Being able to correlate across multiple domains is critical to support organizations to narrow in on issues and improve the overall user experience and adoption of communication platforms. Many companies may have network monitoring tools and different tools to show what’s happening in collaboration. It takes a long time to manually piece together the information to pinpoint how one is affecting the other.

What’s in your tool kit?

As enterprise networks become more sophisticated and complex, it becomes increasingly important to detect faults before they negatively influence customer satisfaction. Manually diagnosing or using complex tools to piece together information on where a fault is occurring simply isn’t efficient. Having a solution that offers visibility of platforms, networks and endpoints allows teams to quickly detect issues and anticipate future problems. The ultimate goal is to address them before users ever experience poor quality.

Before joining the digital transformation journey, enterprises need to consider the benefits of the following to ensure ROI on their collaboration platforms and a seamless customer experience:

• Auto discovery: automated reverse-engineering of call flows to provide more accurate and timely customer experience insight through monitoring of programmed flows without intervention.

• Real-time alerting: automatic notifications via email and/or SMS text message when issues are identified to allow for a prompt response.

• Voice automation: text-to-speech and speech recognition that, in combination with call recording, enables a high level of quality control and monitoring.

• Voice quality scoring: advanced voice quality monitoring, identifying clicks and noises on the line, artifacts generated by packet loss, intermittent gaps in audio during playback and stutter or jitter due to packet loss.

It is vital that enterprises continue to look for affordable and effective solutions to ensure the health and functionality of their network environment in general, so that they can support and optimize customer experience. Enabling organizations to focus on issues and improve the overall user experience and adoption of collaboration platforms will be key to success.

For the contact center specifically, gaining overall visibility into the health of the entire network will play a key role in customer satisfaction and retention, allowing both the customer and the enterprise to win. Enterprises need to be aggressively outlining strategies and investing in a toolkit of solutions that enables visibility and self-healing capabilities to ensure a high level of customer experience, maintain market share, capitalize on investments in modern collaboration tools, and stay afloat in this wave of digital transformation.