Why Maintaining the Quality and Availability of Collaboration Tools is Key

Over the past two years, the use of unified communication and collaboration (UC&C) and unified communications as a service (UCaaS) have enabled business continuity. As organizations establish their hybrid workforce models in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, these communications services continue to play a vibrant role in maintaining the personal relationships and professional collaboration necessary for success.

In fact, our recent survey on UC&C, revealed the vast majority of respondents (93%) say collaboration tools are important to their hybrid work policy. This has put enormous pressure on IT professionals to ensure the quality and availability of these vital services. 

Lower employee productivity adds to cost of downtime  

These platforms are more complex than ever and have, at times, led to increased performance assurance challenges. According to our survey, 56% of UC&C helpdesk tickets are resolved within a few hours. However, that length of time can feel like an eternity to an employee or customer.

Losing communications for two hours could be a crushing blow to employee productivity, which potentially causes further issues impacting customer service, revenue, and ultimately the corporate bottom line. This all becomes part of the equation when evaluating the cost of downtime for UC&C and UCaaS platforms. In fact, approximately one-third of the survey’s respondents indicated they are extremely concerned about the impact of UC&C-related challenges on productivity. Clearly, any breakdown in communications is bad for business. 

The best ways to reduce UC&C/UCaaS disruptions and outages, and the resulting impact on productivity, is to reduce the number of occurrences and/or shorten their length of impact. The IT organization is key in this endeavor. However, when we asked survey respondents whether they were confident in their ability to identify root causes of UC&C issues, up to 43% were only “somewhat confident.”

Visibility is key to reducing downtime costs

IT must determine the root cause of an issue in order to respond quickly to the problem and restore service before it has time impact more users and the business. Netscout offers industry-leading solutions that provide detailed insights into critical applications and services essential to remote communications and collaboration. These help organizations gain visibility into the performance of UC&C and UCaaS platforms.

With deep visibility into network, voice, and application services showing the causes of interruptions or degradations of service, issues can be quickly identified, and troubleshooting can proceed, reducing mean time to knowledge (MTTK) and mean time to restore (MTTR). 

Learn more about how an IT team at one government agency fully leveraged Netscout’s service edge visibility to achieve quick IT troubleshooting and high-quality remote employee experience with Microsoft Teams services.