One of the biggest challenges for support teams is to implement focused and cost-effective ways of monitoring and troubleshooting the performance and quality of their unified communications (UC) systems. Proactive Teams call quality support therefor often doesn’t happen and even reactive support when users call the helpdesk can be a struggle. Not because of lack of intention, but of lack of insight into what is really happening.
What troubleshooting experts need is granular, near real-time as well as historical data about the network, devices, ISPs and users involved in problematic Microsoft Teams calls. What they most times have to work with is a mismatch of data from different admin portals, the device logs, other monitoring tooling and a big headache to get it all together into one cohesive overview.
Not only that, but some of the requested data is not available at all or only in aggregated form. And teaming up with other groups of subject matter experts to collect and align different data types from various, mostly siloed working solutions, has a significant impact on cost per ticket, MTTR (Mean Time To Resolution) and increases the workload of all teams involved.
This automatically leads to most support teams predominantly working reactively when supporting users in Microsoft Teams. Responding to complaints and support tickets as they come in.
The challenge of support – getting the right data to help the user
There is an obvious need for an expert solution that provides the right level and type of data from all involved layers (endpoint, home/company network, ISP, Microsoft) for both proactive and reactive support. A solution that brings the data together for all participants of a call – automatically and designed for fast troubleshooting.
Not just to address tickets and incidents but also to proactively monitor what’s going on and to see where actions might be required. Even before users start calling their service desk. As reports have shown many users don’t even call for support if and when issues arise and up to 60% have some form of long running IT issues the service desk can’t help them fix. Team call quality can be an excellent ‘canary in the coal mine’ for problems with a user’s device and/or network connectivity as any degradation in those will often have an immediate and noticeable effect on sound and video quality. So timely and even proactive Teams call quality support measures like early identification of problems can reduce user frustration as well as relieve the often already stretched support process. Not just for Teams call problems but other issues as well.
That is where OfficeExpert TrueDEM Advanced provides help. As it offers not only direct insight into the situation of an individual user, but also allows you to step back and take an helicopter view across all ongoing calls in your tenant and networks. So that you can quickly identify problems with your local networks and issues your users might be having while in Teams calls.
Looking from above – Seeing the active calls in your tenant
Let´s start at tenant level where you can see all the calls that are currently running across the entire organization and identify the networks that have ongoing calls with problems, such as poor audio or video quality, dropped calls, etc. This immediately tells you where to focus and which groups of users might be impacted.
Identifying developing problems – Drilldown on Network
Once you select a network for more thorough analysis, you will have immediate insight into the types of problems that are occurring in the selected network. Showing you the distribution of distinct types of issues (such as jitter, packet loss, latency, etc.) and further insight about the users who are experiencing them.
What is happening on this desktop? – Drilldown to ongoing call metrics
Next, you drill down into the current situation of a single user in an active call and show the relevant metrics and indicators of their call quality. This provides you with the information you might need to identify problems and causes. While the call is ongoing and even before users themselves might report them. From what is currently happening on the user’s device, their network connectivity and ISP quality as well as specific metrics around audio, video and screen sharing.
The data in this dashboard, is near real time with only a few minutes delay due to the natural delays that occur during collection from every endpoint and network involved plus processing.
Seeing it as it happens – Streaming metrics
However, should you really want to see the unprocessed real-time data directly from the endpoint and the Microsoft Teams client of a selected user while they are in a call, then OfficeExpert TrueDEM Advanced provides Live Streaming details that are updated in a 30-second interval as well.
In short, we just went from the high-level helicopter view across the organization all the way down to a network and individual user as they are experiencing the call quality at that moment, in just a view clicks. . Showing you all the information needed that would otherwise take you hours to collect and collate without having to disturb the user or pull together data from multiple sources. In time and with ease.
But what if I need to look back? – Retrospective inspection
Having live insight doesn’t replace the need to also be able to do retrospective anaylsis. As we all know, Microsoft CQD data offers you only aggregated (averaged) information after the fact, which will not help you if you need to support a user that complains about a string of bad calls. Here too, OfficeExpert TrueDEM Advanced jumps out ahead as it does not just give you these insights as calls are ongoing, but, for post-mortem analysis, keeps the data at maximum granularity and without any aggregation for up to 30 days per call and user. So that even when a user calls later, you can still analyze and cross check the user experience and call quality across multiple calls and multiple days. Allowing you to identify the specific conditions and situations that might be causing the problem and advise the user about the solution.
Ready for lift off – True Teams call quality support
All the above as well as all the other insights OfficeExpert TrueDEM Advanced provides will help your team improve both your proactive Teams call quality support as well as the MTTR for reported incidents. It helps your team diagnose the root cause of problems and provide more accurate and timely support thanks to the availability of granular and pre-processed data for all calls. The built-in automatic pattern identification will help you perform very targeted and preventive infrastructure optimization that will result in fast and proactive remediation thus reducing your Microsoft Teams UC support cost and efforts by up to 70-90%.
Interested in learning more? Get your personal Trial of OfficeExpert TrueDEM Advanced and let data speak for itself! Our experienced consultants will guide and help you unveil critical data points to make sure you have true proof of value.
Please feel free to contact us for further information.
