What is Digital Transformation?
In a nutshell, Digital transformation and new technology adoption are competitive differentiators for today’s businesses which in turn accelerates the pace of growth.
By leveraging communications in everything they do, businesses can make decisions faster and improve operational efficiency.
An omni-channel communications approach sits at the heart of Digital Transformation — this simply means, putting the choice of communicating by voice, SMS, chat or social media squarely in the hands of the user. All of this depends heavily on the performance of the cloud-hosted unified communications (UC) networks that create the foundation for digital transformation. Even the best technology won’t be successful if delivered on an unreliable network.
Evoke offer five tips to get your business ready for stellar digital transformation performance:
Tip No. 1: Consolidate your supply chain
Typically, when there’s a network or telephony problem, finding its source is the most time-consuming part of the IT professional’s challenge in resolving it. That’s especially true for UC networks. Voice quality is very sensitive to network problems, and pinpointing the cause of poor voice quality is often like finding a needle in a haystack. To get the most from your UC investment, it’s important to take a holistic performance management approach. We advise customers where possible to trust Evoke with their network and telephony services which enables Evoke to take responsibility for the headache of finding the route cause of a problem without having to enter a potentially conflicting environment where a multitude of suppliers try to blame each other. This results in an elongated triage process that can cause knock on customer service issues for our customers. Evoke have had first hand examples of what would usually be a simple fix taking several days because of multiple suppliers used by the customer.
Tip No. 2: Test your network before deploying new services
Onboarding is a critical success factor in a UC deployment’s performance over time. Yet, in most cases there are a lot of unknowns on the network when we layer on new UC capabilities. Pre-deployment network assessment offers visibility into what we can expect. However, since voice traffic places different demands on a network than data, most available bandwidth and speed testing tools won’t tell you what you need to know most: what will happen to voice quality.
The Evoke team have extensive experience in supporting customers with their journey to a successful Unified Communications deployment and can arm you with the knowledge needed to effectively plan the right bandwidth and capacity to prevent any voice quality performance issues.
Tip No. 3: Change your support game from reactive to proactive
The cloud has changed user expectations for both reliability and easy access. Your support model must keep pace. Break and fix is yesterday’s news — digital transformation depends on the ability to be proactive when it comes to the performance of critical applications on your network like telephony and contact centre services. Evoke can pro-actively monitor your UC network and know before you do when there’s a problem with your UC solution. Your IT resources can therefore be used more efficiently which allows adoption of new services and increased productivity as well as a shorter time to fix issues as Evoke can either remotely dial to further diagnose or fix a problem or in the case where a physical part has failed, arrive at site fully prepared with a replacement part to fix a problem. We have had several instances where we have fixed a UC problem before our customers have even noticed.
Tip No. 4: Plan your Digital Transformation strategy with a trusted partner
As devices are increasingly interconnected, UC solutions have become more complex, with many moving parts — and that means the traditional telephony environment has blurred lines with data solutions and network connectivity. Evoke work with customers at many different stages of the Digital Transformation journey to map current and future business requirements.
With where technology and systems are heading over the next few years. Some examples of this would-be customers looking to implement a BYOD strategy (Bring your own device). This is a popular requirement across several verticals now and whilst technology is supportive of any personal device being used on a corporate network, there are much wider implications to data and system security to consider when planning this type of programme. Wherever you are on your journey, the Evoke team can offer their expertise and advise to help you plan and execute against your business goals.
Tip No. 5: Understand your user’s experience
User experience is at the center of digital transformation. Users want to access information, services and collaboration tools when and how they choose. So, how do we know that the user’s experience is a good one? UC and Contact Centre performance data can provide valuable insights on the user’s experience. For example, when do users typically drop out or abandon their session when accessing information and can their experience be improved? network health KPIs like bandwidth utilization, ping time and latency can point you toward overcapacity that will result in a slow or interrupted user experience. On a UC network, SIP trunks that are over capacity can cause a busy signal when your user picks up the phone, so staying on top of trunk usage is important.
In summary, achieving return on the digital transformation investment requires a strong network foundation and Unified Communications and Contact Centre solution that is supported by a trusted partner that works with your organisation to realise and maximise your Digital Transformation goals. Please don’t hesitate to speak to a member of the Evoke sales team to discuss this topic in more detail.
