UC Analytics: the Next FrontierUC Analytics: the Next Frontier

Whether from UCaaS providers or premised-based UC management vendors, good analytics tools can fuel a well-informed UC strategy.

In the past few years, the world has gone crazy over analytics -- so much so that it's become part of popular culture.

If you watched the Masters golf tournament this weekend, then you know what I mean. Every third commercial featured IBM Watson telling different icons -- author Stephen King, tennis great Serena Williams, and golfer Tom Watson, for example -- something about themselves it figured out from analyzing historical data. And let's not forget the 2011 movie "Moneyball," which was almost entirely dedicated to the topic of analytics... with an occasional baseball thrown in to interest the sports fans.

In IT, analytics is part of the Internet of Things (IoT), WiFi deployments, software-defined networks, call centers -- and is rapidly becoming part of unified communications. By capturing and analyzing data, organizations can make more informed decisions faster than ever, which is key to competing in the digital business era.

Dialing Into Analytics
Last week, Dialpad (formerly Switch.co) announced Dialpad Analytics, a tool that provides users and administrators actionable insight into the utilization of calls and messages. The data is viewable through almost any lens, including at user, department, location, and organizational levels. The dashboard provides a way to look at communications patterns in an easy-to-understand, graphical way that can help organizations determine how to tweak or even change processes to improve productivity.

Dialpad Analytics can provide insight into general productivity metrics such as time on call and time between calls as well as international calling patterns. Also, businesses can access customer service-related information such as missed calls and number of voicemails received. They can then use this information to improve quality of service or sales efficiency.

For example, in correlating the number of sales calls to productivity, an inside sales manager might uncover that salespeople who make 20 calls per day are 50% more productive than those who fall below that threshold. The manager could then set a minimum goal of 20 calls per day for the sales team. It's like in workplace cult classic "Office Space," where Chotchkie's restaurant found that waiters and waitresses who had 37 "pieces of flair" were better than those on the waitstaff who didn't. I'm sure Chotchkie's managers collected mountains of data and performed extensive analytics to discover that.

Dialpad Analytics provides a variety of other features, too. They include:

Dialpad offers the cloud-based Dialpad Analytics service as part of it UC portfolio.

Getting Granular
Another approach to UC analytics comes from Voss, which offers a multivendor, premises-based solution in the form of an analytics module for the VOSS-4-UC management platform. The analytics module provides in-depth information regarding service usage, adoption, user trends, and license consumption.

Similar to the Dialpad dashboard, the Voss portal gives administrators the ability to view information regarding how workers are using the UC applications. However, the Voss platform also provides the ability to drill down for more detailed information and to export the data for external use, such as billing purposes.

IT managers also can use UC analytics to help their organizations better understand licensing and make decision regarding purchasing or eliminating licenses. Typically companies give each worker a UC application, which conceptually might make some sense. However, no worker uses all UC applications, so the goal should be to give workers the UC applications they use and no more. The exception reporting capabilities will help determine where UC licenses are underutilized and where they'll be required now or in the future.

Today's workers, particularly millennials, are constantly on the move and using multiple devices, different messaging applications, and a wide variety of communications modes. As UC evolves, analytics can help businesses stay out in front of user trends, tweak businesses processes, and deploy the right UC applications to users without overspending.

In a recent No Jitter post, my fellow UC watcher Dave Michels, of TalkingPointz, called bimodal IT a fallacy. I agree bimodal IT is a pipe dream -- if we continue to manage UC per usual. However, I also believe that with the right data and, obviously, the analytics to understand the data we can fulfill the bimodal IT vision.

With the right data, businesses can indeed have their cake and eat it too -- and that's why I believe UC analytics will see significant evolution in the near future.

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