As featured in UC Today, November 5 2021
With more people working from home than ever before and many poised to engage in a new era of hybrid working, it has become increasingly important for organisations to gain greater visibility into both their employees’ and their customers’ experiences. Microsoft Teams has seen huge uptake during the pandemic with adoption now exceeding 250 million users. However, enterprises have not been able to perform the same level of workplace performance analytics in Teams environments as they have across traditional UC systems and, to operate at optimal efficiency, this needs to change.
The concept of performance analytics is nothing new but enabling workplace analytics for Teams adds new visibility and functionality for organisations. This is what Tollring has developed and brought to market with its newly launched Tollring Analytics 365 offering that delivers workplace analytics to the Microsoft Teams ecosystem.
“We’re now in a world of remote and hybrid working and organisations need tools to enable them to conduct business as usual and enable them to understand employees’ and customers’ experiences,” explains Tony Martino, the Chief Executive Officer of Tollring.
“Enterprises are focused on ensuring customer engagement is as strong as it can be and they are maximising all the opportunities offered by this new way of working, so we’re seeing a high level of interest in how analytics can empower their businesses. Existing partners want to extend analytics drivers into Teams because that’s where customers have moved to.”
To develop the offering, Tollring has spent time assessing what is of benefit to end user customers and what the insights presented need to look like. The company has drawn on its experience in General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance which it is also extending to analytics.
“We’ve worked with business owners to understand what they need from our insights and how they will evolve over time,” he adds.
“Issues such as video fatigue and employee wellbeing are growing considerations so increasing understanding of overall performance compared to collaboration and time spent on screens is an important business tool. It’s about understanding what’s happening at that moment and turning sentiment data into something meaningful that offers attractive ROI”
Enterprises are increasingly ready to engage in sentiment analytics and harness technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), says Martino who sees workplace analytics sitting alongside existing call analytics. However, some concerns exist about security and data protection, which Martino thinks can be overcome.
“In all aspects of analytics and insights there’s a fear of intruding because to get sentiment you gather low-level information,” he says. “We’ve therefore been very careful about where and how we enable analytics so we don’t intrude on privacy. Everything is encrypted and we don’t store individual messages, we only process the data in order to look at the sentiment.
“Sentiment is still a new area but it is becoming much more important in our real lives,” he adds. “AI in this area is growing because of the capability it enables to be predictive and understand what sentiment is and how it impacts revenue and business performance. We’re excited to offer Tollring Analytics 365 to our customer base because it’s certainly going to bring them more value.”
