As part of Nexthink’s launch of the new Nexthink Infinity Platform we also launched Collaboration Experience – adding detailed Microsoft Teams and Zoom call telemetry and insights to the comprehensive “See, Diagnose & Fix” capabilities of the platform.
After 4 months, we are ingesting telemetry from almost 2 million employee calls and sessions a day – great testimony to the power and scalability of the Nexthink Infinity platform. We now have an “Experience Base” of over 100 million calls and sessions and have gleaned some powerful, and in some cases, myth-busting insights into what causes potential experience issues and how best to solve them.
Let’s take a look at 5 common myths in collaboration tool troubleshooting and explain how data from Collaboration Experience busts those myths and offers new approaches to solving collaboration issues—so you can stay ahead of ticket storms and save money.
1. Myth Busted: It isn’t always the employee’s WiFi – even if it often looks that way
We’re all familiar with this myth: if an employee says their Teams or Zoom is slow, it’s almost always a WiFi problem. Or is it?
As with all myths, there is a kernel of truth behind this one. After all, if an employee’s WiFi is weak or glitchy, they will naturally have a poor experience, especially if video is on. In fact, this is so well “understood” that most times when an employee is having an issue with their session as part of a call, others will suggest they try turning off their video to see it improves the audio. And it sometimes works (feeding the Myth). But not always, not even close. Here are some of the other common causes for glitchy collaboration issues:
1. We have seen corrupted library/executables associated with specific hardware cause a device networking slow-down, ultimately resulting in poor calls.
2. Customers have reported issues related to certain VPN providers and individual Microsoft Teams or Zoom datacenter tenants (working for some combinations, but not others).
3. Others have seen issues ranging from out of version browsers (or desktop clients), to low disk space, high CPU, and other configuration-related issues.
4. Finally, many have seen issues associated with certain, specific types of collaboration hardware (microphones/headsets/cameras).
The reality is, the technology stack underpinning these employee calls is arguably the most complex and demanding of that supporting any other type application. Every aspect of the employee device, configuration, local, private and public network, and vendor backend adds complexity – and opacity.
2. Myth Busted: Experience Problems with Teams and Zoom aren’t THAT prevalent
Collaboration Experience uses vendor definitions as to what constitutes a poor call (or session) experience when using Teams or Zoom.
In the case of Teams, for example, there is a quite specific list of 13 criteria spanning all relevant audio and video categories that defines what exactly is, and is not, a “poor experience”.
Across the over 100 million calls and sessions measured to-date, spanning 50+ customers, we have seen a range of 3-6% of all calls are of “Poor Quality” with the average currently standing at 5%. That’s 500,000 poor calls! Several customers have between 150,000 and 461,000 calls a week, meaning they are experiencing between 1,800 and 5,500 bad calls a day – per company. That’s a lot of potential tickets, impacted employees, and lost productivity every day!
3. Myth Busted: You CAN find and fix complex call/session degradation before more employees report a bad experience
Let’s face it, isolating employee experience issues with Teams and Zoom can be a very reactive process for IT teams. But it doesn’t have to be. By tracking call and session telemetry over time and combining that data with complete employee context, IT teams can discover degrading situations before they directly impact call/session quality. And, when an employee does have a bad call/session, IT teams can rapidly conduct “cohort-based analysis” to find exactly which employees share the root cause characteristics. Then, it’s easy to immediately and remotely deploy the fix to all impacted employees, before they have a bad experience.
4. Myth Busted: It’s NOT impossible to prove it’s the vendor!
Several customers have shared interesting stories about multi-week “arguments” with their vendors insisting that the problem MUST be on the company’s side of the technology stack. But, with the full-context, comprehensive, and highly detailed (every call, every session) telemetry of Collaboration Experience, they were immediately able to get the vendors to act.
In one instance, only employees participating in calls from certain geographies were having issues with their sessions in a global call. Other employees elsewhere (on the same call) were not having issues. The European Pharmaceutical company was able to isolate data based on which vendor datacenter/tenant was underpinning the “bad calls” and shared that cohort-based analysis of all employee call data with the vendor to convince them of the source of the issue.
In another case, the customers used the telemetry from Collaboration Experience to isolate a highly confusing situation where, in some geographies, a combination of desktop hibernation, their specific VPN provider, and a specific Microsoft datacenter/tenancy led to a huge increase in poor call quality. In this case they had two vendors to try and convince, and the data from Nexthink Collaboration Experience was indispensable for bringing the vendors into the conversation to help solve the problems
5. Myth Busted: There IS a lot of time and money to be saved
Let’s look at that stat from Myth #2 again: 5% of calls are poor quality.
That may not sound like a lot, but let’s do some math. If your company has 20,000 employees, you could have around 400,000 calls a week (or more). If 5% of those are poor, that’s 8,000 poor calls a week, or 1,600 poor calls a day.
Now, let’s say a quarter of those calls result in IT tickets. That’s 2000 tickets a week! How much would that cost you in troubleshooting and remediation?
Layer in Experience to Manage Collaboration Tool Issues Effortlessly, Every Time
In these short examples, you can see that often times, issues with collaboration experience are less about infrastructure performance and more about the context of a user’s experience at a point in time. Nexthink’s unique ability to cut through complexity consistently delivers value.
So, if you are going to be held accountable for your company’s Digital Employee Experience across all types of desktops and tools; don’t worry, with Nexthink, you’ll welcome the challenge.
Learn more about Collaboration Experience and Contact us today!
