By Gary Audin, as published in Telecom Reseller
Many organizations who use collaboration tools and services encounter poor session experiences and do not have the expertise, staff, or resources to monitor collaboration sessions effectively. If your customer’s employees and contractors are using collaboration tools for remote and hybrid workers, then you know that the cloud based collaboration services are accessed through multiple network technologies.
I wanted to learn more about what MSPs can do for their customers to assist in monitoring collaboration sessions so I contacted Ross Williams, Chief Product Officer at Virsae. Virsae’s cloud-native platform, Virsae Service Management (VSM) marries big data with AI-based analytics, automation, workflows, reporting, and notifications to keep the collaboration technology and networks running successfully. The following are his comments. This blog is a continuation of “Hybrid Worker Landscape Today”.
Monitoring Collaboration Sessions
The complexity of monitoring and improving the collaboration experience may be beyond the capabilities of the MSPs customers. They don’t have the staff or training. The MSP can provide 24 hour coverage to monitor the collaboration sessions that produces a revenue stream for the MSP. The MSP can capture the large number of data points and distill them down to actionable responses without the customers intervention. The MSP can also locate problems and recommend changes to the collaboration technologies and networks. This improves the value of the customer’s collaboration while reducing the customer costs for using the collaboration technologies.
What do MSPs have to do for the permanent WFH/hybrid workforce?
Using a collaboration monitoring tool is not enough. There are more data points (10,000+) collected for each meeting than the average human can absorb in a reasonable amount of time. A good user experience monitoring tool will reduce the time to troubleshoot a problem and accurately diagnose the issues early enough so that the problem solution can be acted upon rapidly. The tool should also be proactive rather than reactive to avoid disruptions in the future.
The analytics portion of the monitoring tool should deliver alerts and alarms about issues and in many cases be able to solve those issues automatically. With proper monitoring, the collaboration meetings will be adopted more frequently and user experience will be improved as well with good analytics. This all goes to improving the MSPs return on investment for the monitoring function acquisition.
How do MSPS get a positive ROI?
A good tool focuses on problem resolution. A good tool can reduce the problem resolution time by as much as 35%. This reduces the staff time to resolution and increases customer loyalty. This is delivered by being proactive, identifying root causes, and producing remediation steps. Delivering a single pane of glass for those monitoring the collaboration meetings ensures that the complexity is simplified.
Since the major goal of collaboration is productivity, providing an easy to use and high quality connection goes a long way to increasing adoption. As the quality of the collaboration meetings improves, so will the desire to use the collaboration tools increase. This is especially true for executives whose collaboration issues can quickly add up to millions in lost time and productivity.
What does the right tool look like?
There are many collaboration user experience monitoring tools on the market today. The right tool has several attributes which make it more attractive than others. Getting the tool up and running means it should be easy to implement and easy to use. Also, you don’t want to have a lot of training necessary for using the tool so your current MSP staff should be able to use it with a single dashboard that presents all the information they need.
While using the tool, you need to maintain it as well. The good tool uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to continually improve its ability to provide the technology, workspace, and user insights. What you may forget is that is a lot of information reported can be noise. A good tool filters out the false positives and negatives so that you don’t overburden your MSP staff with distracting alarms and alerts.