Unified communications as a service (UCaaS) platforms provide valuable analytics and reporting on unified communications usage and performance. These insights help organizations optimize UCaaS investments by revealing how tools are used.
Let’s explore why UCaaS analytics is important for organizations committed to maximizing the value of their communication solutions.
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Improvement and impact tracking
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What Is UCaaS?
UCaaS platforms combine multiple communication channels—voice calls, video calls, messages, chat, and file sharing—into one cloud-based platform.
This streamlined approach enables seamless collaboration between employees, customers, partners, and other stakeholders, allowing them to connect and interact through their preferred communication method. UCaaS’s cloud-based infrastructure allows organizations to flexibly scale up or down.
By consolidating the communication infrastructure into a single interface, UCaaS eliminates information silos and reduces operating costs compared to traditional on-premises systems.
Core UCaaS Analytics Functionality
UCaaS analytics show companies how their employees are using unified communication tools such as voice, video, chat, and meetings. With UCaaS analytics, companies can identify areas of improvement.
For example, usage tracking shows which features employees use the least. Companies can then provide more training or redesign the tool to improve usage.
Performance monitoring reveals problems such as low call quality, network delays, or tool errors that affect customer experience. By identifying these technical problems, IT teams can fix and optimize the UCaaS platform.
Segmentation and reporting unpack insights by location, department, job roles, and more. This helps spotlight different usage behaviors across the organization, so companies can personalize training and support.
Companies use UCaaS analytics to maximize their investment in cloud-based productivity platforms, minimizing costs, prioritizing enhancements, and driving employee adoption where needed.
Use Insights to Optimize Operations
UCaaS analytics helps organizations optimize operations through data-driven insights. Usage and performance data analytics enable smarter call routing configurations that resolve quality issues and overflow bottlenecks. Data on video versus audio meetings, chat usage, and tool adoption provides clarity on actual service impact and identifies where to prioritize enhancements.
Analysis of how employees communicate and collaborate allows organizations to customize and target training for maximum effect. Usage analytics by department and job function facilitate targeted spending based on real utilization patterns. As usage and headcount grow, metrics-driven capacity planning eliminates guesswork from budgeting for essential upgrades.
Some use case examples include the following:
- Call quality data for specific locations can drive prioritization of device performance improvements to address issues.
- Service impact can be quantified by configuring alerts to trigger surveys when the number of video sessions or video session participants from a specific region shows an abnormal drop compared to historical trends.
- Low tool adoption among certain job roles indicates the need to target training on those roles to maximize UCaaS benefits .
- Data showing declining video conferencing usage in the finance department enables subscriptions to be appropriately resized.
Embedded UCaaS analytics offers continuous visibility to enhance cost optimization, quality of service, user experience, and workforce productivity.
Reporting Best Practices
Effective reporting unlocks transformational business insights from UCaaS data. Best practices focus on tailored monitoring and flexible data accessibility options.
Custom Views
Role-based reporting interfaces serve the unique requirements of every UCaaS monitoring persona. An executive dashboard shows high-level usage metrics and adoption trends for strategic planning. IT administrator views provide granular infrastructure analyses like traffic patterns, network health alerts, and help desk ticket trends.
Facilities staff need visibility into building-specific AV device quality data and room utilization rates for better resource allocation. Custom views align with each user’s specialty.
Visual Dashboards
Graphical dashboards allow rapid consumption of volumes of data into intuitive color-coded metrics, usage bars, and trend charts. Dashboards can display adoption rates across voice, meetings, and messaging tools; prompt network performance warnings for jitter, packet loss, and latency; and track usage percentages of conference room gear.
Stress indicators spotlight where enhancements will have maximum impact.
Data Accessibility and Advanced Analytics
While UCaaS reporting provides broad visibility, raw usage files can be exported via APIs to unlock external number-crunching capabilities beyond the native platform. Datasets can be connected to business intelligence apps to facilitate filtering, segmentation, benchmarking, forecast modeling, visualization, and more granular queries without proprietary limitations.
Drive Better Customer Experiences
UCaaS analytics optimize customer-facing interactions and enhance service quality. For customer service teams, performance metrics expose shaky call quality, network delays, and tool errors impeding seamless conversations.
Sentiment tracking also quantifies customer satisfaction scores from conferencing sessions, video meetings, and screen shares. This highlights opportunities to fine-tune processes that disappoint clients. Granular hold time reports analyze queues to minimize waiting, while service level achievement metrics encourage optimal staffing.
For sales teams, analytics inform smarter lead routing to align prospects with the right representative skills. Inefficiencies can be spotted and streamlined by tracking sales cycles against industry benchmarks. Customer communication patterns can be monitored across tools such as chat, meetings, and calls, allowing organizations to tailor outreach strategies.
Continual Improvement and Impact Tracking
UCaaS analytics empower organizations to continually refine and optimize their communications for maximum impact. By closely monitoring key performance indicators (user adoption, tool utilization, network health, and customer sentiment), IT teams can benchmark progress. Granular historical views showcase periodic improvement. Return on investment data quantifies UCaaS influence and advocates for sustained investment.
For example, contact center platforms can survey video session participants for satisfaction ratings. If ratings decline, analytics identifies improvement opportunities.
Executive dashboards track the percentage of employees actively using unified messaging month-over-month. Usage growth demonstrates a steady growth in internal collaboration, justifying further platform expansion. Detailed device reliability reports assure overall network quality and availability, minimizing disturbances.
How to Choose the Right Analytics Platform?
The analytics platform should be seamlessly embedded in day-to-day operations and decision-making.
Consider the following key factors when evaluating options:
- Breadth and depth of insights. Assess capabilities such as usage tracking, performance monitoring, bottleneck detection, infrastructure health alerts, and customer sentiment.
- Intuitive accessibility. Evaluate dashboard designs, user-specific views, self-service report building, and multi-dimensional data exploration without complex queries. The platform should visualize insights easily for technical and non-technical audiences alike.
- Integration and data accessibility. Evaluate the platform’s capability to export raw unified communications usage data in formats like CSV and JSON via open APIs, to integrate with business intelligence visualization tools including Tableau and Power BI for custom analysis.
- Scalability and cost. Factor in supported user scale, data storage requirements, and pricing model. Confirm the platform’s ability to handle projected organizational expansion without prohibitive charges. Consider the total cost against current productivity loss due to the lack of analytics.
- Ease of use. Complex platforms lead to fragmented adoption. Measure deployment timelines, administrator training requirements, and intuitive functionality.
About Symplicity
At Symplicity, we understand how unified communications can transform your company. We are experts in the latest communication technologies, service providers, and platforms. When we work with you, we do so as an extension of your team, looking out for your bottom line.
If you’re interested in exploring how a unified communications solution can work for you, let’s talk about it.
Not only can we help you with your UCaaS adoption, but we can also give your invoices a once-over to identify savings. Our technology expense management experts are extremely good at finding redundancy, waste, and (in many cases) money owed to you.
From contact center solutions to networks and mobile device management, we can modernize every aspect of your communications infrastructure.
UCaaS FAQ
Why is UCaaS so popular?
UCaaS is popular because it allows organizations to access advanced collaboration tools without large upfront investments. The cloud delivery model is affordable, scalable, and flexible. It also unites communication channels like voice, video, messaging, and contact centers into one easy-to-use platform. This simplifies management and provides a seamless employee experience.
What is the difference between UCaaS and CCaaS?
UCaaS takes a big-picture approach, combining all major communications such as voice, meetings, messaging, video, and contact center. It empowers collaboration organization-wide. The contact center as service (CCaaS) focuses on the contact center technology and agents handling customer service interactions. Some UCaaS platforms embed contact center capabilities while standalone CCaaS tools have more advanced functionality.
Are predictive analytics important for UCaaS reporting?
Yes, predictive analytics enabled by AI are very important for UCaaS reporting. By analyzing historical usage and call drivers, predictive analytics can forecast future trends, proactively identify issues, provide recommendations to optimize workflows, ensure proper resourcing, and enhance customer and employee experiences. This leads to greater efficiency.
Is Zoom a UCaaS platform?
Zoom is not considered a complete UCaaS platform. Rather, it is a leading video and web conferencing tool. While video meetings are a component of UCaaS, a full unified communications platform also includes other integral communication channels like cloud telephony, team messaging, contact center capabilities, screen sharing, file collaboration, mobility features, APIs for custom integration, security, compliance, and more.
How do I choose a UCaaS provider?
When you are choosing the right UCaaS provider do the following:
- Assess features to ensure they align with business needs and priorities.
- Evaluate technical infrastructure, uptime, and reliability.
- Understand implementation, training, and support services offered.
- Review customer service responsiveness and channels.
- Consider any required network adaptations or integrations.
- Compare overall affordability and value including any BYOD cost savings.
What is an example of UCaaS?
An example of UCaaS would be a company transitioning its outdated on-premises phone system over to a cloud-based RingCentral platform. On this modern UCaaS solution, they now have
- Voice services—cloud-based phone lines utilizing voice over IP (VoIP) technology.
- Video meeting capabilities—virtual video conferencing with screen sharing.
- Team messaging functionalities—chat applications for internal employee collaboration.
- Contact center features—ticketing, call routing, agent management.
- Integrated mobility—mobile and desktop apps to enable working remotely.
- Workflow applications—auto receptionists, call handling, IVR menus, etc.
- Performance analytics—dashboards to visualize usage metrics and track KPIs.
Document sharing and collaboration tools are also typically included.
What is the future of UCaaS?
The future of UCaaS points to continued rapid adoption as organizations migrate away from outdated on-premises communications infrastructure. Advancements around flexibility, mobility, device integrations, actionable analytics and reporting, AI, customer experience improvements, and omnichannel delivery will drive product innovation.
UCaaS solutions will likely expand in scope while maintaining ease of use. As remote and hybrid work persists, UCaaS remains vital for enabling transformation.
Are traditional communication systems better than UCaaS?
In most cases, UCaaS delivers significant advantages over traditional telephony, such as lower costs, easier scalability, reduced IT burden, tighter feature integration, robust analytics, flexibility for remote work, and a better overall user experience.
For these reasons, legacy systems are declining as forward-thinking organizations shift to cloud-based UCaaS and complete digital transformation of communication processes. In some niche cases maintaining legacy infrastructure may have advantages, but for most, the question is simply when, not if, they will adopt UCaaS.
How can UCaaS analytics improve customer experiences?
UCaaS analytics empower companies to optimize customer-facing interactions and enhance service quality. Features like sentiment analysis quantify customer satisfaction scores from conferencing sessions, video meetings, and screen shares. This highlights opportunities to fine-tune processes disappointing clients. Detailed reports analyze queues to minimize waiting times, while service level achievement metrics encourage optimal contact center staffing.
What types of insights can UCaaS analytics provide?
UCaaS analytics offer robust communication features such as usage analytics to reveal the most and least used tools, performance monitoring to identify technical problems affecting experiences, and segmentation by location or department for tailored training. Companies also gain visibility into network health, conference room utilization rates, collaboration tool adoption, sales cycle benchmarks, and more through easy-to-interpret dashboards.
How do UCaaS analytics enable operational improvements?
By closely monitoring key performance indicators around adoption, utilization, infrastructure health, and customer sentiment, IT teams can benchmark progress against targets. Historical views then showcase improvement across months and quarters. UCaaS analytics help optimize costs through right-sized spending based on actual usage patterns rather than estimates, improving operational efficiency.
Why are customizable dashboards important for UCaaS analytics?
Customizable dashboards allow rapid consumption of data through intuitive metrics, usage bars, and trend charts tailored to each user’s needs. For example, facilities staff need visibility into building-specific device quality and room utilization rates via user-friendly interfaces. Executive views provide high-level adoption trends and return on investment tracking through business intelligence tools. Customization aligns insights to each user’s specialty.
