(bright music) >> Hey, welcome to this "CUBE Conversation." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two guests from NETSCOUT here with me today. Eileen Haggerty joins us, the AVP of Product and Solutions Marketing and Jason Chaffee, Senior Product Manager. We're going to be talking about the importance of quality end user experience with UC&C, Unified Communications and Collaborations services for something that will be near and dear to all of our hearts, employee productivity. Eileen, let's go ahead and start with you and the impact of COVID on UC&C, what has it been? >> Oh, Lisa, great question, because we really have seen an evolution in the importance and reliance on UCC. COVID would not have allowed us to go to work, do business continuity, any of those things had it not been for strong communications platforms to help us do that. And in fact, really the hero of all of this has been what's called Unified Communications as a Service or UCaaS. Enterprise businesses really depended entirely on the communications between the home office and the employees remotely. This is also known to be the way we all went to work. It was no longer a car. We picked up the phone basically or the computer. So Zoom, WebEx, Teams, Google Meets, they've all become household names really over the last two years. That's kind of exciting for them. And businesses during that period of time expanded their tools to keep business running and employees in communication using these very platforms, and we'll refer to this a couple of times during this conversation too, Lisa. We did a survey at the end of 2021, IT leaders, about their use of UCaaS and UCC during this period of time. We found that almost of them had used collaboration tools, and in fact, added to their arsenal of tools during this period of time to such an extent that they're now ranging, the majority of them, between three and nine different platforms that their corporate employees use. This became unwieldy, of course, during that time, and so their strategy going forward is going to be to reduce some of that number, but pretty interesting details. >> Yeah, between three and nine is a lot, and certainly, UC&C became a lifeline for all of us, professionally and personally. Even my mom learned how to use Zoom during this time. I was pretty proud of helping her with that. But, Jason, talk to us about all these new communication services. We're completely dependent on them, but overall what have you found out in terms of how they worked out? >> Well, to be honest with you, I think from the IT organization, it's been a challenge. It's been difficult. I think every IT organization is really motivated to ensure the quality of the services throughout the whole company, but as you can imagine, the increase of these communications Eileen just talked about during the pandemic is just significantly increasing the number of IT help desk tickets that have come through. And in that survey that Eileen just talked about, in fact, a third of those that responded said that 50 to 75% of their help desk tickets right now are related to UC&C or UCaaS services, and in fact, they say that over half of them have said that they get those tickets at least once a day, if not multiple times a day. And I think another big aspect of this that's been a challenge is everybody working from home now and the whole hybrid environment, and IT teams are really trying to understand and make sure that they get the same delivery of services if they were in the corporate headquarters, and I think they felt a loss of control and visibility in the services that are being delivered. I think the other thing that came out of this survey was about 25% of those said that they could get these issues if and when they happen, resolved in just a matter of minutes, but most said that it can take hours or even days to get through those, and that's obviously a really bad look for the company and really hinders productivity. So overall, I'd say it's been a challenge. I think as this onslaught of services that have come through and hampered and that everyone's trying to manage and get through, along with the lack of visibility when everybody's working from home. Of course, it's been fantastic for those of us that are working from home and made everything easier, but I think it's just made it that much more difficult for the IT teams that are trying to manage this new environment. >> Right, definitely difficulty behind the scenes there. You talked about the 25% of IT organizations being able to resolve quickly, but that leaves 75% of organizations where it takes more than a few minutes, and I can imagine individually, that might not be a big impact, but, Eileen, overall if it's taking more than a few minutes to resolve UC&C IT help desk issues, what's the overall impact to a business? >> It can be significant, and we hear a lot of little stories sadly sometimes on Lester Holt's evening news, but really what you are looking at here are longer periods of time where employees can't talk to each other. We've got email. We can probably compensate a different manner, but when it happens to be your customers not being able to talk to customer service reps in the contact center, couple of hours, that can be a big issue. Partners and suppliers who might be trying to get you important information very quickly. Maybe it's a supply chain issue item that they want to alert you to that you need to act on. That's a long period of time. And I think it's kind of important here to call out one special group, and that would be corporate executives. I think we've all heard about these big town hall meetings that corporate executives may be holding with employees or investors and all of a sudden their UCaaS support freezes, or it doesn't connect the voice in the video, and all of a sudden, you've got a very embarrassing situation. It really gets the attention of the public. Losing communication for a couple of hours, bottom line, it is going to impact productivity, customer service, and it could impact reputation, especially with those social media influencers that we all both favor and fear. So, when we were talking about our survey results, that is actually a top concern of IT executives, that productivity will get hit if communications problems do exist. So I think really ultimately for all of us in the business, disruptions and communication, it's going to be bad for business, any length. >> It is bad for business at any length, and that's a huge risk for businesses in any industry. I've been on those executive town halls where video wouldn't connect, and you just think, as much as we wanted that human connection during this time, and you couldn't get it, it made the the interaction not as ideal and obviously a risk for the organization. So, Jason, how can IT then jump in and resolve these disruptions faster, because time is of the essence here? >> Well, yeah, exactly. As we've discussed and Eileen just talked about, I think resolving issues quickly is really the key. I think we all know issues are going to happen, they just will, but it's really the IT team that can solve those the fastest is the team that's going to win, and so I think that's really the key to all of that. And one of the things that comes out of that is, again, from this survey is that only about 54% of the respondents said that they felt confident that they could understand root cause and be able to get to those issues quickly, which leaves about 43%, almost as many, that said they were less than confident or somewhat confident in finding that root cause, and so I think that's really the key there is really having the confidence to be able to find that, and to get that confidence, you need to be able to understand root cause quickly. And in order to get that, I think you need a combination of two things, which is passive, packet-based monitoring as well as continuous active testing or monitoring of those solutions. So, what I mean by that is being able to automatically and continuously test these services, even if nobody's on the system and nobody's on trying to make a phone call. So you have somebody who's trying to host, an active agent that's trying to host a meeting and others that are trying to join the meeting and sending an audio and sending and receiving video and looking at the measurements and trying to take all of that data in to really proactively understand what's going on and doing this every 15 minutes or every once an hour to really, again, get ahead of things before they become a problem. But I think beyond that, it's really about being able to take that data and the packets from those transactions that you were just testing and be able to trend that data and define problems and diagnose issues proactively. Again, as Eileen just said, before the CEO gets on there and tries to make his town hall call, so that that's really important to be able to solve those things more quickly. I think it's really a combination of a passive, scalable monitoring solution along with scheduled automatic testing of those, and along with the packets that go with that, that's really a combination of both. It's kind of a best of both worlds in order to get those things solved quickly. >> To get them solved quickly, I want to go back to something that Eileen said. You mentioned the word 'confidence,' and that I think it's important to point out that you're not saying that trivially, that IT needs to have the confidence that it has the right solutions in place to discover these faster. Eileen, from your perspective, talk to me about what that confidence means to IT and how it can shift up the stack to the C-suite. >> You know, honestly, processes and policies in these organizations are critical. They need to be able to notice when the trouble ticket comes in, and there's a lot of 'em, let's face it, and they're coming from all kinds of locations. Now, it's some of the remote offices. Some of 'em are still people at home. You've got to be able to know where to turn, what screen to use, what tool to adjust, what workflow to process, and that does come with practice, but it also comes with a solid set of tools and visibility strategies, and then you follow that process through, you work together. Maybe the voice, people in the network, people have to work together, maybe the cloud people, 'cause it's a contract with UCaaS, work together, gather the evidence and pinpoint the solution that's going to fix the problem with those locations. And it is, it becomes then a confidence builder, proof points. >> Right, proof points are critical. So, the solution that you both talked about, Jason, you elaborated on this, I'd love to get some real world examples. Tell me how you've seen this in practice. Jason, we'll start with you and then, Eileen, we'll go to you. >> Okay, yeah, great, I was just thinking of one that we had that really was one of the largest insurance companies in the country, if not the world, and when the pandemic hit, they suddenly had to send everybody home, and this is the lifeblood of their company, the contact centers that are answering these calls and the ones that were processing these claims. And as everybody went home, their strategy really was to actually go buy new laptops for everyone and implement VPNs that had a little bit of, but not fully and then implement SD-WAN, and so they had all of this traffic going over VPNs and through SD-WANs and new UCaaS solutions and all of this and what they quickly learned and found out was they just didn't have the visibility to be able to fuel, again, that word confidence that they were serving their their customers very well. So, they actually implemented one of our solutions and put these agents out at all their different desktops and started watching and doing these proactive calls and making going through the meeting life cycle and actually testing the bandwidths of their SD-WAN and ensuring all of those services. And what they found was they were able to solve some of the solutions that are even harder to solve normally, because it was affecting some users, but not all of them, and that's often harder to try and get their arms around. And so as they continued to do this, and just got their arms more around it and got more visibility, they really feel like everything's under control. And as of now, they're actually planning on leaving all those users working from home now, because they can actually ensure the same type of experience for both the users and for their customers as if those people were working from their corporate headquarters. >> Jason, that sort of sounds like a bit of a COVID silver lining. >> (laughs) Yeah, I think so. I think a lot of us actually started working from home and so there was kind of the silver lining of flexibility for the employee, but for the customer and the company itself, they learned this new visibility and this new way to ensure that across everywhere, wherever they may be, and I don't know that that would've come out without the COVID silver lining, as you just said. So I think it was something that really came out of it that might've been a good thing. >> And there are a few of those, which is nice. Eileen, talk to me about some of the experiences that you've had. What have you seen out in the field? >> Yeah, we have one really terrific energy company that was talking with us the other day, and their employees use Microsoft Office 365 which has the teams collaboration and communications system with it. And, what they've been doing for those at-home employees was configuring tests on their works stations, much like Jason explained, but it mimics exactly how an employee might be making their call and joining the sessions from video to audio, to going through login and log out. What's interesting is, and this is a compelling differentiator, a lot of tools may just watch traffic as it's happening, and certainly that's a value, but these tests even run when our agents are asleep. And what that does is these are all 24 hour a day businesses, and so maybe they have followed-the-sun contact centers or whatnot and something's happening in one part of the world, but then it's rolling to others, and we have all heard those disaster stories online when we wake up and we're hearing it on the morning news. So, if an organization can find the problem and detect it early enough and then get it when it's a few people that are involved, they can actually resolve it with our tools, find the root cause, implement a corrective action before the majority of their agents are even logging in in the morning. Nobody even knew that there was a problem overnight, because they were able to get to it and resolve it faster, and when you can do that, you're being proactive. And this, again, builds on the confidence that you get doing this kind of activity over and over and over again. But at the same time, it's also enormously beneficial from a business productivity perspective for the employees and certainly reputationally in revenue-based customer service, making sure that things are available whenever they're necessary. So, making sure they can perform their jobs, I know it sounds trite, but it's really the most critical thing we can help 'em with. >> Absolutely, 'cause I think, Eileen, one of the things that I've always thought for years is that employee productivity and employee satisfaction is directly tied to customer satisfaction, customer delight, and as you talked about, there's plenty of social media influencers who are happy to share news, good or bad, so that employee productivity is a direct relation on the customer satisfaction, the brand reputation. Jason, what are your thoughts there? >> Well, I think that's exactly right. I think it's, again, being able to continuously have your arms around that and make sure, because if you can't make phone calls or customers can't call in or things aren't working then it is, it's really a revenue impact, but it's also reputation impact, and you're going to remember that company that just didn't have their act together if you will, so I think it's important to, again, invest in this and make sure that no matter what, wherever your end users are or wherever your employees are, you're providing that experience just as if they were in the corporate office, and even when they're in the corporate office, being able to, as Eileen talked about, know ahead of time and proactively when issues happen in these very complex UCaaS and UC&C solutions that are out there now. >> And last question, Eileen for you, I imagine that these solutions are horizontal across every industry, every type of business, every size of business? >> Yeah, it's one of those phenomenon that's really critical is the ability to be ubiquitous in any environment, not being vendor-specific or dependent because now look at it, we shot that stat, three to nine different platforms in one company. If you had to buy three or nine different platforms to resolve problems, that reduces your ability to build workflows, consistent ones and know what you're doing every single time. You'd have to learn nine different platforms. That's not productive and that's certainly not realistic. So yeah, I think that this is really key. You have to be able to look at all of the traffic and be able to resolve the problems, regardless of what they happen to be running on. >> And the great thing is hearing the tools and the capabilities and solutions that NETSCOUT has to help businesses in any industry, at any size be able to identify these issues, resolve them faster and then create some silver linings. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today. Always a pleasure talking to you. This was really interesting to talk about the importance of quality end user experience with communication services for the employee productivity and of course, ultimately consumer customer satisfaction. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> For Eileen Haggerty and Jason Chaffee, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching a "CUBE Conversation." (bright music)