The advent of hybrid working and the increase in the number of communications channels has resulted in companies needing new KPIs and analytics to enable them to manage and optimise the performance of their system. These analytics are not reserved for system administrators; they also contain information that is very useful for managers.
The advances in analytics and reporting offered by UCaaS solutions bring specific advantages for companies. They allow organisations to respond more rapidly to the evolutions in their business and to manage their system at the speed of the company. This is also a criterion that makes it possible to distinguish between the many different systems on the market.
In this new episode in our series “How to optimise your business communications”, Natalie McGathan, Senior Customer Success Manager, explains which KPIs need to be evaluated to enable companies to manage their communications systems more effectively, and which capabilities are available across the solutions on the market.
Which analytics for which purposes?
Traditionally, analytics of UCaaS solutions have focused on the needs of IT teams. These dashboards make it possible to obtain a complete picture of the status of the entire platform, to monitor the quality of service and the performance of the network and to obtain analytics for each channel, site, user and device.
Because businesses are changing so rapidly, it is important for them to have this type of real-time IT analytics available and to be able to define the alerts, so that they can respond more quickly if an incident is detected and therefore provide a good user experience.
Line of business analytics for management purposes
On top of IT analytics, line of business analytics have become increasingly valuable as a tool for managing the communications system. The number of channels has increased significantly and new forms of usage have emerged. Managers would be well advised to become familiar with these types of usage so that they can adapt their strategies accordingly, share good practices and encourage the use of specific channels.
These line of business analytics are also useful to ensure that resources are assigned efficiently. For example, if you discover that large numbers of calls are received between 1.00 and 2.00 pm, you can change the working hours of employees over the lunch break or redirect the calls to another site to ensure that none of them are missed.
Customised reports for greater efficiency
To obtain the best possible benefits from these analytics, you must also be able to adapt them to meet your specific needs.
In RingCentral MVP, creating a personalised dashboard is easy. This allows line of business managers to define their own dashboards that are relevant for their area of business. They can also have a customised report sent out by email at specified times or define alerts if certain thresholds are reached by the KPIs they have created.
These reports also make it possible to
- Respond to the specific requirements of each department in the company
- Provide various recipients with the information they need easily and automatically
- Respond by optimising the performance of the service – analytics capabilities that make the difference
According to experts, businesses often forget to evaluate the analytics capabilities of UCaaS solutions when they are choosing a new provider for their unified communications in the cloud. Furthermore, 64% of companies believe that obtaining more information about their communications system would be very useful to them (source: Study: UC & IT Growing Pains & IT Strains December, 2021)
Evaluating the analytics capabilities of the solutions is particularly important because they are by no means all the same. A study by the Tolly Group shows that RingCentral provides more sophisticated capabilities and more advanced analytics as standard than its main competitors, in particular in the field of line of business analytics. In addition, the analytics reports are directly accessible from the interface of the MVP application, which makes them more easily available to users and to anyone without specific training.
Don’t miss the other episodes!
Five videos, five questions and two minutes to understand everything and take your business communications to the next level:
Episode 1: How unified communications and AI can facilitate new working models
Episode 2: How to guarantee a high-quality customer experience
Episode 3: How to integrate your phone system with Microsoft Teams
Episode 5: How to ensure that your business communications system is reliable
Originally published Nov 15, 2023, updated Nov 29, 2023
