How UCaaS Performance Is Shaping the Digital Experience

Unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) technology is ingrained in business operations at enterprises around the world in every industry. Whether Zoom is being used for telemedicine appointments between patients and providers in healthcare or Microsoft Teams is being used internally at a leading financial services institution for project planning, the reliable performance of UCaaS services is vital to maintain business continuity.

When UCaaS performance falters or flourishes, it has a significant impact on employees and customers alike. Productivity, loyalty, morale, and trust are all affected by the quality of digital experiences. The root of UCaaS technology is collaboration and connectedness via communication. Because of this, performance disruptions often feel very personal and concerning. The inability to connect with a contact center agent may shake customers’ faith in the bank as a whole, causing them to consider switching banks altogether.

On the employee side of the house, the inability to collaborate with colleagues using UCaaS services may increase frustration, causing workers to log off for the day altogether and question their employer’s professionalism and investment in the right tools to help them succeed. Significant UCaaS outages may delay payments, break compliance, result in fines, or perpetuate bad press. In all likelihood, this results in lost business for the organization.

7 Critical Considerations

UCaaS technology is so central to business that poor digital experiences with these services can have lasting negative repercussions on customers, employees, and the enterprise as a whole. Here are seven considerations for the modern enterprise regarding how UCaaS performance is shaping the digital experience.

1. Using too many tools can add complexity.

Just as too many choices can make for a more complicated decision, too many performance monitoring tools can make for a complex environment for IT teams to manage. UCaaS vendor-supplied dashboards only provide part of the story—without packet-level information, organizations are not getting the full picture. They are left communicating back and forth with third-party vendors to troubleshoot UCaaS performance issues, making their digital experience frustrating and arduous.

2. Minimizing downtime is critical.

UCaaS performance is crucial for maintaining continuity within every organization. Even brief outages can disrupt operations and potentially be financially devastating. No industry is immune. If a retail company experiences a short UCaaS outage, it could immediately experience lost sales and frustrated customers shopping with competitors for alternatives. Similarly, patient care could be compromised if a UCaaS failure disrupts timely communication between doctors and patients. Minimizing downtime and ensuring rapid recovery from any disruption keeps employees connected and operations running smoothly—top considerations for modern enterprises.

3. Employees need swift support.

Help desk tickets surge when UCaaS systems fail, showing just how crucial those systems are in the workplace. Without reliable communication tools, employees across industries can struggle to do their jobs, which slows down their productivity and the operations that rely on them. For example, prolonged outages in financial services firms could cause delays in transaction processing and client support, putting a strain on IT teams rushing to restore services. Quickly addressing UCaaS issues is key to keeping everyone productive and business running smoothly.

4. Customers seek timely help.

When customers need assistance, especially in critical industries such as healthcare, energy, and financial services, they want to be able to connect with someone right away. Contact centers play a vital role in industries such as these where immediate attention and peak service performance are crucial for retaining business. Contact centers relying on UCaaS technology to communicate with customers cannot afford downtime—in fact, NETSCOUT research shows that only 14 percent of contact centers operated entirely in person in 2022. Poor performance results in frustrated employees and poor digital experience for customers, who can take their business elsewhere.

5. AIOps is A-O-K.

The rise of artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) is reshaping system management and influencing UCaaS tools and their features, which were already popular with users long before generative AI. Embracing AI processes, such as predictive analytics for message prioritization, offers a promising way to maintain UCaaS system reliability and enhance user experiences. Additionally, advancements in AI-driven image processing and real-time video quality optimization are improving virtual meetings and remote collaboration.

6. Remote sites are not so remote.

Modern enterprises rely on many remote offices to conduct daily operations—and their performance is essential to business continuity. From electrical substations to branch banks to research clinics and more, remote site observability is needed to ensure that UCaaS technology is performing properly to keep employees connected and operations smooth. NETSCOUT research supports this notion, revealing that 63 percent of companies with 10 or more UCaaS platforms support more than 51 remote sites.

7. Downtime means loss of revenue.

Communication downtime directly impacts revenue by disrupting critical communication channels that operate continuously. Imagine an ecommerce company dealing with a UCaaS failure during peak hours—its support service could be down for quite a while, resulting in lost revenue, a top concern for today’s businesses. Every minute of UCaaS downtime means missed opportunities and weakens an organization’s competitive edge.

NETSCOUT Solutions Can Help

NETSCOUT’s nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solution provides a unique combination of packet-level insights and the option for synthetic test analysis to assure performance and quality digital experiences.

Check out NETSCOUT’s latest ebook “Optimizing UCaaS Technology in the Modern Enterprise” to see how increased observability can address your business’s unique UCaaS service challenges.