The Future of Collaboration Analytics

Remote and flexible working is now an integral part of most organisations and it isn’t going away any time soon. A recent Gartner survey confirmed the situation, reporting that 82% of business leaders intend to let employees work at home some of the time and 47% saying that they would let them work at home 100% of the time in future.

We’re seeing a lot of focus on managing the wellbeing and performance of remote employees, and while this is critical, equally important is customer retention and customer experience. We predict that the key to solving all of these issues, as well as contributing to the bottom line, is what we call collaboration analytics.

Current requirements, and opportunities

This is a huge opportunity for the channel. All the newly adopted collaboration tools have propelled organisations into new ways of working in a very short space of time, without the insight and feedback necessary to ensure that they’re on the right track.

Collaboration analytics delivers on this vital need, going beyond just call analytics for sales and support teams, capturing and presenting information and insights from across a whole organisation. It is all about breaking down an organisation’s natural silos to look holistically across every area of business performance, from individuals, to teams, to departments, and then relating the information to business objectives.

Managing employees remotely, whether at individual or department level, requires greater transparency and clear objectives. This can help to clarify how the very nature of their ‘management’ has changed and how the new hybrid and remote working environment is performing. In addition, these analytics can be used to help these organisations to determine how their collaboration tools are working, identify trends, and gain an accurate insight into employee experiences.

Wellness has become key to operational performance. A workforce that is balanced and healthy will have a positive impact on customer experience and the analytics can be used to help assist in the areas of company culture, mental health, and isolation issues.

By extending analytics into this internal collaboration space, we can also gain an insight into the impact that change has on workforces. For example, the last year has seen many organisations forced to adjust their business model, or reduce headcount, which has a large impact on the day to day role of the employees that remain. Analytics allow managers the data they need to manage this change effectively.

In an increasingly collaborative world, collaboration analytics delivers value far beyond internal efficiencies. Metrics that relate to externally-facing activities provide a new perspective that complements traditional measures and, combining internal and external metrics delivers a stronger view of an organisation’s ability to deliver a good customer experience than ever before.

How can the channel factor collaboration analytics into their own portfolios?

As a key enabler for the market shift from UC to collaboration, much of the channel already understands the value of delivering analytics in collaborative environments. Those familiar with monitoring calls have further advantage and are now moving to this new generation of analytics to help their customers to achieve relevant insights across all areas of their organisations.

It’s a relatively easy approach to position, too, because delivering collaboration analytics in the cloud removes technical overheads, making it a straightforward upsell or bundle opportunity. The only complexity comes from the depth of information that can be delivered, so we’re helping the channel to leverage the opportunities, providing educational resources, and demonstrating the business benefits that they can deliver to their customers, with sensitivity to the compliance and privacy requirements that increases in transparency of data can bring.

The channel can expect to see future advances around tools like Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex Teams and so on, which will be at the heart of these developments. Collaboration analytics will be extended to include enhanced management capabilities for meeting recordings, through to greater integration with CRM systems and calling platforms for an even more complete view.

More communications tools will be integrated into the business ecosystem, such as Teams, with the aim of achieving a more fluid working environment, where organisations can become far more effective, regardless of whether their workers are in the office, at home or in a café.