A Fresh Take on the End User Experience with our Partner Arkadin

The concept of the QoE (Quality of Experience) has been around for many years now in the UC (Unified Communications) industry, however never has it perhaps been more relevant or important than today.  As more and more companies begin to at least pilot, if not fully migrate to UCaaS environments, and as the large majority of UC users take control of their environment by running UC on a mobile phone or from a small Bluetooth UC headset, the end users’ ability to both aggressively influence and be influenced by QoE continues to increase.

It was with this QoE Focus in mind that we delivered a new webinar with our strategic partner Arkadin last month, entitled “Can you hear me now? — Why UC Quality of Experience is Critical.” Arkadin is one of five of our strategic UC partners and in conjunction with the Arkadin Cloud Transformation Services, we are seeing great success in our overall software + services laser focus on QoE.

The webinar is archived for ‘on-demand’ viewing and we highly encourage you to circle back and spend just 30 minutes viewing Arkadin and Unify Square experts talking about the importance of QoE and how robust Skype for Business monitoring can be a game changer. Perhaps the most important factor, when thinking about QoE, is focusing in on the concept of being ‘proactive.’ IT Pro’s who can be ahead of the game and working ahead of end-user issues are going to save money and increase end-user happiness — win and win!

Two other sub-topics relating to QoE which are quite relevant in today’s world, but which were NOT explicitly addressed in the webinar:

1. The Increased Importance of QoE in a cloud world

A quick glance at this pie-chart, created by Microsoft, helps to signal how/why QoE continues to grow in importance. With the UC server infrastructure increasingly moving not just to the cloud, but to the nearly total direction of the UC service provider, one-third of the IT focus is removed from control.  Further, although much of the network experience remains the focus of enterprise IT, network issues are increasingly being correctly managed/understood by enterprise IT experts who have a mandate to create a broad pipe for all enterprise workloads.  What’s left…Users and Endpoints…and of course the platform and network ‘downstream’ issues relating to those users and endpoints. These users and endpoints are the new ‘domain’ of the IT personnel focused on UC.

2. The short-term QoE ‘de-focus’ created by the Teams/Slack phenomenon

The new set of team-chat apps (such as Teams and Slack) which support (or at least claim to support) increased collaboration often try to impose a new working agenda of their own. This new work style might include more visual interaction, more chatting, more Microsoft Teams integrations, more Teams notifications, or more Teams screen sharing. But in many cases the focus is more on the features and purported ‘unification’ rather than their use.  Unfortunately, the net result (at least in the short term) from a QoE perspective, signals something more akin to an attempt at unified plumbing, rather than improved unified communications.

To request a demo or learn more about our unique UC technology and PowerSuite features, connect with one of our consultants today!

To view other Unify Square demo videos and informational videos please consult our UC Library HERE.

The post QoE Starts and Ends at the Desktop appeared first on Unify Square.