371. That’s the average number of SaaS applications an organization has deployed today, and has increased by 32% since just 2021. With an average spend of ~$10k in SaaS applications per employee, organizations are pouring millions into these applications to grow revenue, collect data, and stay connected with their customers. Some of the growing use cases of importance: Unified Communications as a Service (UCaas) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) for remote contact, support, or call centers.
Why are these notable? CCaaS and UCaaS applications relatively speaking consume significantly more bandwidth than average SaaS applications with real-time video and audio support, making monitoring critical and downtime painful. Increasingly these applications are accessed beyond an organization’s traditional network walls.
And this all speaks to a truth about the changing state of network performance monitoring – while monitoring your corporate networks, applications, and services is essential, visibility into SaaS applications like UCaaS or CCaaS and remote employee intangibles like Wi-Fi and ISP performance through digital experience monitoring is becoming essential. It’s no wonder Gartner predicts 60% of organizations will deploy digital experience monitoring by 2026.
Why Digital Experience Monitoring for Contact Centers?
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) is the term for monitoring performance of services and applications from the end-user’s perspective – going beyond traditional network performance monitoring. Comprehensive DEM solutions should collect, in real-time, a variety of network and application performance metrics to gather insights and ensure a positive experience for customers and internal users alike.
The meeting point of your customers and employees – contact centers and the UCaaS or CCaaS applications they use. This critical connection point is now vulnerable to ISP hiccups, employee’s at-home Wi-Fi, and other variables not experienced by on-site employees. Thankfully, monitoring and ensuring uptime for contact centers is not unattainable, wherever your employees are working.
It’s as easy as installing a remote worker agent for employees on their Windows, Mac, or IGEL system. Proactive tests that can be set up in DEM will give organizations better end-to-end visibility into network and application/service performance, making it significantly easier to pinpoint and fix any issues along the way.
The Impact of Changing Networks and Work-from-Anywhere
This trend is larger than just contact centers though. One of the first impacts teams will notice as they deploy more SaaS apps to more remote employees, is the new reality of how IT or networking teams diagnose and fix issues. Previously when users had problems accessing applications or services on corporate networks, diagnosing and fixing issues involved less steps, and there was less to chance. The new reality involves a lot more potential problems – is it the application? The ISP? Just a poor Wi-Fi signal?
Organizations should expect certain groups of users that require heavy bandwidth, like remote call center and support employees, to experience more issues collectively, and to submit significantly more help desk tickets as issues arise. Even brief outages, regardless of the source, will impact their productivity, and lead to scrambles by networking teams to get issues fixed and employees back online.
These outages are costly and increasing in frequency. A recent survey by Opengear of CIOs and network engineers found that 91% of organizations experienced outages at least once a quarter, and these outages cost organizations over $4,300 per minute.
As more businesses invest more dollars into cloud software and offer employees the flexibility of remote or hybrid setups, they should be closely monitoring how these changes impact the day-to-day experience of their employees and customers, as well as operational impacts like help desk tickets and escalations of their teams.
The best way to do this is with digital experience monitoring that ties into network performance monitoring capabilities, providing teams end-to-end visibility of the entire work-from-anywhere enterprise. Successful implementations can reduce help desk tickets by more than 80%, and reduce the operational impact of outages on your teams, especially for high-bandwidth users like support and contact centers.
See if NetBeez DEM is right for your organization by requesting a demo or trying it for free.
