Why Being Business Ready Matters

Being “business ready” is more than a buzzword; it’s a commitment to reliability, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. For businesses handling thousands of customer interactions daily, even minor disruptions can snowball into significant operational and reputational challenges. Consider these critical aspects:

1. Customer Trust: When customers dial your 1-800 number or engage through a chatbot, they expect immediate and effective responses. System downtime, missed callbacks, or poor interaction quality erode trust and loyalty.
2. Operational Efficiency: Ensuring that agents, systems, and workflows are optimized not only improves response times but also reduces operational costs.
3. Competitive Advantage: A ready business is a reliable business. Meeting and exceeding customer expectations is a competitive differentiator in any industry.

 The Benefits of Being Ready for Each Day

When a business is “ready” every day, the effects are both immediate and long-lasting. First and foremost, continuous monitoring and automated testing act as a safety net, catching potential disruptions before they escalate into major problems. Imagine the confidence of knowing you will know of any issues prior to a customer interaction and that your systems are running smoothly, even during peak hours or unexpected traffic spikes.

This directly translates into happier customers. When someone dials your 1-800 number or interacts with your chatbot, they want quick, seamless solutions. Delivering that kind of consistent, frustration-free experience doesn’t just solve their issue—it builds trust and loyalty, keeping them coming back.

Internally, automation becomes a game changer. By eliminating the need for manual testing, your team can shift their focus from tedious tasks to more impactful strategic initiatives. It’s about working smarter, not harder, and letting your resources drive innovation instead of just keeping the lights on.

And then there’s the financial side of things. Resolving issues proactively means fewer costly outages and less downtime, which not only saves money but also protects your reputation. Being business ready is as much about efficiency and cost-effectiveness as it is about delivering exceptional experiences.

Best Practices for Being Business Ready Every Day

To keep your business running smoothly and maintain exceptional customer experiences, adopting these best practices is essential:

1. Automate Testing and Monitoring
   Automation is the backbone of a business-ready operation. Replace time-consuming manual processes with automated functional, regression, and load testing. This ensures your systems are always ready for peak performance, from daily operations to major events like product launches or holiday rushes. By simulating real-world interactions, automated testing catches potential issues early, giving you peace of mind and operational efficiency​.
2. Proactively Address Issues
   Prevention is better than cure. Using real-time alerts and diagnostics, your team can identify and address problems before customers even notice them by enabling quick identification of bottlenecks, ensuring your systems continue to deliver seamless service​. This proactive approach minimizes downtime, enhances reliability, and builds trust with your customers.
3. Optimize Omnichannel Performance
   Today’s customers interact with businesses across multiple channels, including voice, chat, email, and social media. Ensuring these channels are integrated and functioning smoothly is crucial. With comprehensive visibility and testing for omnichannel environments, every customer interaction can be seamless and consistent. Whether a customer reaches out via a chatbot or calls an agent, they should receive the same high-quality service​.
4. Engage in Continuous Improvement
   Business readiness isn’t a one-time achievement; it’s an ongoing commitment. Regularly analyzing data and the infrastructure allows you to uncover inefficiencies and identify opportunities for innovation.  This ensures your business not only meets but exceeds customer expectations and by​ implementing these best practices, your organization can stay ahead of the curve, consistently delivering the reliable, high-quality experiences your customers expect.

How Nectar’s CX Assurance Helps Ensure Business Readiness

Nectar’s CX Assurance solution is a cornerstone for ensuring businesses stay “business ready” every day. Here’s how it addresses the unique challenges of modern contact centers:

1. End-to-End Testing

   • What It Is: Simulates real-world customer interactions across all touchpoints, including voice calls, emails, chatbots, and social media platforms.
   • Why It Matters: Identifies potential issues before they impact operations, ensuring that contact center systems perform flawlessly from start to finish​

2. Proactive Monitoring

   • What It Is: Continuously monitors the health of your contact center infrastructure, from Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems to agent endpoints.
   • Why It Matters: Detects and resolves issues before they affect the customer experience. Real-time alerts and dashboards keep teams informed and ready to act​.

3. Scalability and Load Testing

   • What It Is: Simulates thousands of interactions under various conditions, including traffic spikes and high call volumes.
   • Why It Matters: Ensures systems can handle peak loads during critical times, such as product launches or holiday rushes, without compromising performance​.

4. Workflow Validation

   • What It Is: Tests call flows, routing strategies, and agent workflows to ensure they function as intended.
   • Why It Matters: Prevents disruptions that can lead to lost revenue and diminished customer satisfaction.

How Nectar Can Help

Every day is not just about maintaining systems but about delivering exceptional customer experiences. With Nectar’s CX Assurance, businesses can confidently manage their contact center environments, ensuring reliability, efficiency, and satisfaction at every touchpoint. Whether it’s minimizing downtime, optimizing workflows, or scaling to meet demand, CX Assurance empowers businesses to rise to the challenge and set new standards for excellence. Interested in learning more about how we help businesses ensure that each day they are “business ready”? Contact us today and we can show you in action!

The human impact of these events is undeniable: employees may be directly affected by the storm, customers reach out in moments of distress, and businesses are stretched thin as they try to keep operations running. In these moments, the ability to maintain connection and offer support can make all the difference.

Overwhelmed Contact Centers

When a natural disaster occurs, certain industries—such as insurance, travel, logistics, and utilities—experience a dramatic surge in call volume. Customers are seeking assistance and timely responses and resolutions during one of the most stressful times in their lives, whether they are filing insurance claims, canceling travel plans, or making emergency arrangements. Contact centers become a critical lifeline, and the pressure on these businesses is intense. Phones ring off the hook, websites and chat are inundated with traffic and wait times can skyrocket.

Stressed Employees

Behind every call answered in a contact center is a human being. Your employees are the unsung heroes during a crisis, often dealing with upset or panicked customers while simultaneously managing their own concerns about the storm. Long hours emotionally charged conversations, and system challenges can leave even the most seasoned agents feeling overwhelmed.

Displaced Workforce

In disaster-prone areas, it’s not uncommon for employees themselves to be displaced by the storm. Whether evacuated from their homes or cut off from their usual work locations, employees might find themselves working from unfamiliar environments. This often means using unvetted or unreliable Wi-Fi networks at hotels, relatives’ homes, or other temporary shelters. These situations can severely disrupt communication systems and introduce new vulnerabilities.

Variable Preparedness

While some businesses in the southern U.S. are well-prepared for hurricane season, and those in tornado alley know it’s inevitable at certain times of the year and test regularly, others might not have the same level of readiness. The degree of preparation can vary widely, from robust disaster recovery plans to businesses that are caught off guard when the storm makes landfall.

At Nectar, we’ve long understood the critical importance of maintaining business continuity during such crises. Our solutions are built to provide resilience and support in exactly these situations, ensuring that businesses not only survive but maintain exceptional service levels.

Testing and Monitoring:

• Load, Stress, and Performance Testing with CX Assurance: Ensuring that contact centers are prepared for the increased load, before a storm hits, is critical. By simulating high call volumes and stress scenarios, our testing solutions help businesses assess whether their systems can handle the surge. We monitor for potential points of failure, flagging issues that could lead to dropped calls or slow response times.
• Web Interaction Manager: It’s not just phones that are ringing. Customers are also flocking to websites to check claim statuses, flight cancellations, and hotel availabilities. Our Web Interaction Manager tests your web-based customer touchpoints, helping you verify that websites and mobile applications perform efficiently under stress. This can be critical when trying to balance call and digital interactions effectively during an emergency.

These proactive steps mean that businesses don’t have to scramble to address technical failures mid-crisis. Testing ahead of the storm ensures systems are resilient when they are most needed.

Enhanced Ear-to-Ear Monitoring (via our Jabra partnership):

Our partnership with Jabra provides businesses with powerful tools to monitor and support agents during intense situations. With enhanced ear-to-ear monitoring, Jabra headsets offer a way to monitor the interactions more closely and provide insights that can help identify stress points:

• Sentiment Analysis: By analyzing the tone and emotion of both the agent and the customer, managers can identify when agents are struggling or when customers are upset, allowing for immediate intervention.
• Cross-talking and Noise Level Analysis: High levels of noise or interruptions can indicate both a stressful call environment and the need for improved support.
• Support and Coaching: With real-time insights, managers can provide targeted coaching, help with workload distribution, or even suggest a brief reprieve for overstressed agents.

With these insights, businesses can support their employees as they navigate the challenges of high-pressure, high-emotion interactions, maintaining not just business continuity, but a high-quality customer experience throughout.

Outside-In Testing:

When employees are displaced, ensuring they can remain productive is critical to the overall success of the business during the storm. Nectar’s Endpoint Client offers a way to assess endpoint availability across various locations. By monitoring whether remote employees have reliable access to the network and communication tools, businesses can quickly adapt to new working conditions and provide support as needed.

• Real-Time Testing: Monitor and verify the availability and performance of endpoints, especially those connecting through non-traditional or temporary networks.
• Routing Validation: Ensure that calls and communications are being routed correctly even as employees move from one location to another, possibly working from unfamiliar Wi-Fi networks.

With these tools, businesses can ensure their remote and displaced teams remain functional, regardless of their physical location.

Diagnostics:

For those contact centers that may need to be taken offline—whether preemptively or due to unforeseen circumstances—UCD (Unified Communications Diagnostics) Monitoring ensures that traffic is rerouted seamlessly. Nectar’s UCD Monitoring allows businesses to:

• Validate Traffic Routing: Ensure that, if a contact center must be taken offline temporarily, communications are routed to other sites, locations, or backup teams without disruption.
• Ensure Continuity: Real-time monitoring confirms that all communication channels remain functional, even if a particular site or office is temporarily unavailable.

This capability is critical for businesses that may need to proactively shut down parts of their operations to ensure the safety of their employees or their infrastructure. By testing and monitoring these systems in advance, businesses can act swiftly when the need arises.

Providing Value in Times of Crisis

Businesses don’t have to face these challenges unprepared. We can help ensure that systems remain robust, employees supported, and customers well-served, even during the most disruptive events.

From load testing that simulates call surges to real-time endpoint monitoring that ensures displaced workers remain connected, our focus is on ensuring business continuity, high-quality customer interactions, and effective team support.

In times of crisis, preparedness isn’t just an advantage—it’s a necessity, and it’s never too late plan. We’re here to help at whatever point you need, so you can get ahead of the next disaster. Let us know how we can help.

Since 2020, video communication has seen a monumental shift from an on-premises luxury to an essential cloud-based service. Since then, companies have embraced the future of hybrid work. However, as more employees are asked to return to the office, the demand for reliable video conferencing systems has surged, highlighting the need for enhanced monitoring strategies. This requires integrating cloud services and internet-based user devices with a renewed emphasis on on-premises hardware. At Nectar, we recognize the crucial need for comprehensive visibility across these hybrid environments, ensuring that businesses maximize their investments and maintain seamless communication.

The Evolution of Video Conferencing and the Return to the Office

Video communication has been a staple in corporate environments for years, initially dominated by on-premises solutions from various vendors. With the advent of cloud technologies, platforms like Cisco WebEx transitioned to the cloud, offering greater flexibility and scalability. 2020 further accelerated this shift as organizations moved to remote work, relying heavily on additional desktop video solutions such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom.

Now, there is a noticeable trend of employees returning to the office. This transition has sparked a renewed interest in sophisticated video conference systems. Companies are now investing in comprehensive video room setups, including Microsoft Teams Rooms, Cisco WebEx Rooms, and Zoom Rooms. Additionally, third-party vendors like Poly, Mersive Solstice, and Crestron are providing a range of video room components, including monitors, microphones, and control systems.

The Hybrid Monitoring Challenge

The integration of advanced video conference equipment and solutions presents new challenges for IT departments. The modern video conferencing environment is more complex, requiring monitoring of both cloud-based services and on-premises hardware; possibly all from different vendors and different eras.  This hybrid approach demands a robust monitoring solution that provides end-to-end visibility across all components of the video conferencing ecosystem as well as all employees no matter where they are working.

Comprehensive Visibility

At Nectar, we understand the importance of having a single pane of glass to monitor both cloud and on-premises video conference systems. Our solution offers comprehensive visibility, ensuring that IT teams can monitor the performance and health of every component, from cloud services to room hardware. This unified approach helps in identifying issues quickly, optimizing performance, and ensuring that investments in on-premises video systems deliver their intended ROI.

Ensuring ROI and Utilization

With significant investments being made in on-premises video systems, organizations need to ensure these resources are utilized effectively. Monitoring tools must provide insights into usage patterns, identifying underutilized assets and optimizing resource allocation. This data-driven approach helps businesses maximize their investments, ensuring that video conference systems contribute to productivity and collaboration.

Proactive Issue Resolution

Hybrid environments can be prone to a range of issues, from network disruptions affecting cloud services to hardware failures in on-premises setups. Proactive monitoring is essential to detect and resolve issues before they impact users. Nectar’s monitoring solutions offer real-time alerts and diagnostics, empowering IT teams to address problems swiftly and maintain a seamless video conferencing experience.

Supporting a Diverse Ecosystem

The video conferencing landscape is populated with a variety of vendors and technologies. From Microsoft Teams Rooms and Cisco WebEx devices to third-party components like Poly and Crestron, IT departments must manage a diverse ecosystem. Nectar’s flexible monitoring platform supports a wide range of devices and systems, providing consistent and reliable monitoring across the entire video conferencing infrastructure.

Looking Ahead: Trends in Video Conference Monitoring

As the hybrid work model becomes the norm, several trends are emerging in the monitoring space:

Integration of AI and Machine Learning

AI and machine learning are playing an increasingly important role in monitoring solutions. These technologies can predict potential issues, automate routine tasks, and provide actionable insights to optimize performance. AI-driven analytics can help IT teams understand usage patterns and make data-driven decisions to improve the video conferencing experience.

Enhanced Security and Compliance

With the growing reliance on video conferencing, security and compliance are critical. Monitoring solutions must ensure that video communications are secure and comply with industry regulations. This includes monitoring for unauthorized access, ensuring data encryption, and maintaining audit trails for compliance purposes.

User Experience Focus

Ultimately, the success of video conferencing systems hinges on the user experience. Monitoring solutions must prioritize metrics that impact user satisfaction, such as video and audio quality, latency, and connection stability. By focusing on the user experience, organizations can ensure that their video conferencing systems support effective collaboration and communication.

Conclusion

The return to the office and the integration of advanced video conference systems marks a new era in corporate communication. The hybrid environment, combining cloud-based services with on-premises hardware, presents unique challenges and opportunities for IT departments. We are committed to providing comprehensive monitoring solutions that offer the visibility, insights, and proactive capabilities needed to navigate this complex landscape. As businesses continue to invest in video conferencing technology, our goal is to ensure these systems deliver exceptional performance, enabling seamless and productive communication. Reach out if you’d like to see more!

Cloud migration is a strategic move that many companies undertake to enhance their technological agility and improve customer communications. However, the transition from traditional Contact Center platforms to a cloud-based environment can be fraught with challenges. To prevent issues, use these 5 steps to ensure a successful cloud migration, focusing on maintaining, optimizing and ultimately improving customer and agent experiences.

 Baseline of the Customer Journeys Before Migration

When initiating any migration project, it’s crucial to establish a comprehensive baseline of customer journeys and communication channels. Over time, customer journeys often evolve and rely on outdated legacy systems, especially complex IVRs that have undergone numerous consolidations and updates. Without a baseline, distinguishing existing issues from new ones introduced during migration becomes challenging. 

Creating a baseline manually is labor-intensive and time-consuming. For IVRs, this involves making manual calls, navigating through each path, and documenting every customer journey, which can be daunting given the complexity of most IVR systems. Manual documentation efforts may require extensive resources over weeks or months and are prone to errors. 

 A more efficient and accurate approach involves leveraging discovery mapping capabilities within an automated testing solution. This method significantly accelerates the baseline creation process, allowing IVRs to be documented within days instead of weeks or months. The resulting documentation can also be used to automatically generate test scripts, enabling companies to establish baseline documentation and conduct functional and regression testing simultaneously. 

Update and Optimize Customer Journeys  

According to a survey from Salesforce in 2023, 80% of customers consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products, so an essential advantage of transitioning to the cloud is the ability to enhance and refine customer journeys and thus customer experience. Form cross-functional teams dedicated to redesigning journeys with a customer-centric approach. These journeys often begin with self-service interactions and may transition to agent-assisted service. Develop these omnichannel journeys based on valuable customer feedback and insights gained from customer experiences. 

Create Functional Tests to QA Customer Journeys 

Simultaneously develop new or updated functional tests while designing customer journeys. Establish an automated regression test suite to conduct continuous testing during the migration process. Utilize a design-driven testing solution that dynamically generates and maintains tests alongside the design phase. 

Assure New Functionality Performs under stress  

Another crucial aspect of ensuring a successful migration is conducting load testing to verify the performance of your new contact center platform, the associated applications, and your network under various load conditions. Performing a single load test is insufficient; it’s essential to incorporate ongoing load testing into your quality assurance practices. Regular load tests assess continuous system and network performance and evaluate any changes made since the last test.  

Production Proactive and Realtime Monitoring of CX and AX Agents 

 It’s essential to proactively identify any issues with the customer experience before customers encounter them. Implement production monitoring during and after migration to continuously monitor system performance. Given the complexity of modern systems, which involve multiple interconnected components, it’s crucial to ensure monitoring covers all customer journeys, channels, backend system connections, business rules, agent routing, and other critical components. Evaluate attributes such as availability, transaction completion, performance, and other metrics vital to enhancing the overall customer experience. 

Pre-Assessment & Continuous Monitoring – Identifying Connectivity Challenges 

• • Home Users: Identify remote workers with poor internet bandwidth or connectivity. 
  • Testing Cloud Services: Rigorously test bandwidth and performance to cloud services (e.g., AWS, Azure) and corporate data centers. 
  • Eliminate Blind Spots: Ensure complete coverage across all remote workers. 

Post-Deployment Monitoring – Continuous Evaluation 

• • Agent Health: Summarize overall performance using live calls and test results. 
  • Global View: Localize issues to specific users, data centers, regions, or ISPs. 
  • Geolocation Mapping: Understand remote worker locations and ISPs. 

Supported Platforms 

Ensure the solution integrates seamlessly with various platforms, including Genesys, Five9s, Amazon Connect, and more. Make sure the company you work with ensure the product set is futureproof. 

Health Index-Intelligent Routing – Optimizing Agent Availability 

• • User Health Index: Intelligently manage agent availability based on network performance. 
  • Automatic Queue Placement: Place agents in chat queues during performance degradation, switching back to voice queues when network conditions improve. 
  • Manual Adjustments: Allow agents to adapt during voice quality issues. 

How Nectar can Help 

According to Forrester research, customers are 2.7 times more likely to spend more when companies communicate clearly. Therefore, it’s important to assure a successful cloud migration with a well-planned strategy that prioritizes customer needs and ensures that their experience is not negatively impacted. By leveraging advanced technologies and methodologies, businesses can enhance operational efficiency and improve customer satisfaction through a seamless migration. Each of these steps are aligned with Nectar’s solutions.  Contact Us!  We’d love the opportunity to discuss your project and concerns with you.

To BYOC or Not to BYOC

One of the key decisions when moving to a cloud contact center is whether to bring your own carrier (BYOC) or rely on the carrier provided by the cloud service provider. BYOC allows organizations to maintain control over their existing carrier relationships, contracts, and pricing. However, it comes with the responsibility of managing connectivity and ensuring seamless integration between the carrier and the cloud platform.

Organizations should carefully evaluate their requirements, existing carrier relationships, and the level of control they desire before making a decision. Some reasons in favor of BYOC:

1. Cost Savings – If you have an existing contract with a carrier, it may be more cost-effective to continue using their services rather than switching to a new provider.
2. Integration – Your existing carrier is already integrated with your On-Prem systems and processes. One needs to carefully evaluate how your existing Carrier will integrate with Cloud Platform vis-à-vis how the Cloud platform’s carrier would integrate with your delivery center. It could be easier and more efficient to continue using them rather than switching to a new provider.
3. Flexibility – Bringing your own carrier gives you more flexibility to customize your telephony services V/S fixed plans being offered by your Cloud provider.
4. Ongoing Support / Troubleshooting requirements – Is your Cloud provider taking responsibility of their Carrier issues and providing you full visibility?
5. Familiarity – If your team is already familiar with your existing carrier, it may be easier for them to adapt to the new contact center platform if they can continue using the same telephony service.

No matter which direction you choose, it’s important to have full visibility and be able to monitor the quality of the service you are receiving to be able to hold your carrier accountable.

Visibility & Control

Cloud Contact center vendors often offer a certain level of monitoring and reporting that provide analytics into call quality, network performance, and other key metrics. By leveraging these tools and establishing service level agreements (SLAs) with the cloud provider, organizations can maintain visibility and ensure optimal voice communication quality.

Organizations need to review the visibility being offered by the Cloud providers V/S what they can get with their own carrier. Using something like Nectar DXP provides insight into the quality of your carrier and SIP sessions all the way to a in office or remote contact center agents (even to how their headset is performing).

Managing a Hybrid Approach

Many organizations adopt a hybrid approach when migrating to the cloud, where they maintain certain on-prem systems while leveraging cloud-based solutions for specific functions or channels. This hybrid environment can introduce complexity in managing, monitoring and maintaining multiple platforms and ensuring seamless integration.

Nectar can help providing a Single Pane of Glass across your On-prem and Cloud platform, thus proving a seamless experience across the environment and simply the migration journey.

Disruptions to Customer Experience (CX) during the process

While the benefits of moving to the cloud are plentiful, getting there can be just as concerning.  During this transition, it is crucial to prioritize the customer experience and ensure a seamless migration to the cloud without compromising customer satisfaction.

Continuous monitoring and testing (before – during – and after) helps ensure that your customer experience stays at the level you expect. It’s often not just the contact center platform being migrated but other platforms as well and the ability to test all throughout the omnichannel journey (such as chatbot interactions, email exchanges, IVR systems, SMS messaging, web interactions, web chat, and of course voice interactions.) is important to proactively identify issues before they impact your
customers.

So, now what?

Whether you decide to migrate one or all of your communications platforms, we’d be happy to talk you through your decision and help you with your strategy.  We have helped so many of our clients decide how best to make the move and what’s great is that it doesn’t matter what platform(s) you are using.  We are able to take the data from any of your UC or Contact Center tools no matter the vendor or if they are in the cloud or in your office and make that data visible to you and your teams.  It allows you to see the big picture of what is going on before, during, or after a migration.  Let us know when you’re ready to chat, we’d be happy to show you Nectar DXP in action.

JERICHO, N.Y. March 22, 2023 — Nectar Services Corp., a global market leader in delivering actionable digital experience insights for the cloud collaboration and contact center markets, and Jabra, a world leading brand in audio, video, and collaboration solutions, today announced a development partnership and solution that integrates telemetry from the latest, advanced Jabra headsets into Nectar’s Digital Experience Platform (DXP).

Together, the companies deliver an unprecedented, experience making communication consistently more pleasant.

Nectar and Jabra provide the visibility needed to fully understand every user’s experience ear-to-ear and troubleshoot performance issues as they arise.

“Workplace communications have changed dramatically in the last few years,” said Joseph Fuccillo, CTO at Nectar. “The ability to work from anywhere is a great benefit but it has also introduced new challenges in ensuring that user and customer experience remains high. This partnership between Nectar and Jabra, helps tackle them by incorporating data from Jabra’s most advanced headsets into our platform.”

Nectar DXP monitors premise and cloud Unified Communication (UC) and Contact Center (CC) platforms (Avaya, Teams, Zoom, Genesys, etc.), providing insight into user experience including call quality, endpoint health and network performance. It tests remote worker voice and video performance, including device health, local ISP, and network analysis for the last mile. This new Nectar for Jabra integration extends user experience monitoring all the way down to the last 3 feet.

Jabra metrics are presented in Nectar’s easy to use dashboard, along with details from the call itself (Avaya, Teams, Zoom etc.), allowing managed service help desk technicians or enterprise IT teams responsible for assuring quality of service to see exactly what is going on and solve issues fast. Data from all platforms (and Jabra headsets), is then compiled into a user’s personal ‘Jabra score’ of call quality, and enriched by Nectar’s proprietary User Health Index, which summarizes their overall experience.

Nectar and Jabra’s innovation improves the visibility of the conversation experience by enabling troubleshooting continually. IT support and contact center supervisors can be instantly alerted to issues like high levels of ambient noise, excessive crosstalk and silence, and network and headset issues, for example, a misplaced microphone that impacts call quality, for those in the office, and those working from home.

“Nectar and Jabra make an excellent team, improving the visibility of the conversation experience by enabling troubleshooting as issues arise,” said Vern Fernandez, Senior Manager – Strategic Business ad Alliance Development – Contact Center, Jabra. “This powerful integration brings next-level conversation insights to the table, feeding directly into the Nectar monitoring dashboards to simplify and speed up troubleshooting. We look forward to demonstrating this at Enterprise Connect next week.”

Both Nectar and Jabra will be exhibiting at Enterprise Connect in Orlando Florida, and will be demonstrating this joint solution. Nectar is in booth 736 and Jabra is in booth 912. Click here to schedule a meeting.

About Nectar

Nectar is a global market leader in delivering actionable digital experience insights for the cloud collaboration and contact center markets. Nectar’s software enables enterprises to collect, correlate and surface their most important customer, agent and user experience data to increase operational efficiency, reduce costs, optimize the customer experience and improve brand strength. Nectar’s best-in-class solutions support many voice and video technology vendors, including the industry’s most strategic and popular platforms from Avaya, Cisco, Five9, Genesys, Microsoft and Zoom. Nectar currently supports millions of enterprise endpoints across thousands of organizations around the world —including many Fortune 500 customers across global banking, insurance, healthcare and professional services industries. Learn more at www.nectarcorp.com and LinkedIn

About Jabra

Jabra is a world leading brand in audio, video, and collaboration solutions – engineered to empower consumers and businesses. Part of the GN Group, they are committed to letting people hear more, do more, and be more than they ever thought possible. Jabra engineering excellence leads the way, building on 150 years of pioneering work within GN. This allows Jabra to create integrated tools for contact centers, offices, and collaboration that help professionals work more productively from anywhere; and true wireless headphones and earbuds that let consumers better enjoy calls, music, and media.  Learn more at www.jabra.com and LinkedIn.

As a sales leader in the telecom industry for 20 years, I have had the opportunity to talk to many CIO’s, CTO’s, VPs, Directors, and Support Analysts of Telecom/Telephony Networks about migration projects and how to best manage them and reduce the risk involved.

Migration: every company is doing it

At some point companies using communications tools:

• Migrate from one platform to another
• Move their platform(s) from on-premises to the cloud
• Use multiple vendors of each at the same time and throughout the organization
• Consolidate tools due to a merger or acquisition

With these migration projects executives must evaluate current usage, deal with aging infrastructure, button up their cloud strategies, and keep visibility of user adoption and customer experience. The concern of the risk of downtime can often keep them up at night.

Goals and roles within a business

When talking with these business leaders, I’ve learned there are really three categories of business KPIs and goals that help drive any project, including a migration:

Strategy/Policy – this encompasses the overall direction of a company and the highest level of management of the business.

Tactical/Procedural – this involves breaking down the overall goals of the company into departmental plans and other actionable plans and often involve creating KPIs.

Operations/Execution – this involves breaking down the plans into specific actions, carrying out those actions, and measuring the outcomes on a regular frequency.

Concerns typically fall under these general levels of the business during a migration project:

Executive level – asks for reporting on the number/percentage of users still on the legacy platform and the number of users on both platforms to ensure they are on target for completing the migration on time and within budget.

Middle Management – needs to know which end users are not using the approved headsets or network connections so they can proactively reach out to supervisors for assistance in policy oversight. Is it adoption and the ability to not interrupt day to day activity or customer experience?

Support – must know end users are following guidance for when the end user calls in or submits a support ticket for help with a poor audio issue.

Questions to ask when kicking off migration

No matter your role, you can find reasons and benefits to migrate. It could be to reduce costs, to improve scalability and efficiency, to increase security or to consolidate tools. But, as with any project, there can be challenges and the need for visibility along the way is imperative. During this process stakeholders need access to data to ensure they are on target to achieve their goals. They need their partners and tools to be easy to work with, be multi-platform, forward thinking, agile, and nimble.

Ultimately, those involved in the migration process tend to ask:

1. How do I stay proactive and not reactive during a migration?
2. How do I know the migration is going well for the end users if they don’t provide feedback? If they provide feedback, is it accurate?
3. How can I migrate quietly and quickly?
4. How can I give guidance to users and know if they are following policy?

Let Nectar help

Having been with Nectar for about 6 months, I’ve had the opportunity to talk through this with customers and share where Nectar fits in and can assist in making this easier. We can:

• Help move your contact center call flows from on-prem to cloud, or from one platform to another, quickly and confidently with functional, regression and load testing.
• Ensure agent effectiveness in the contact center infrastructure to avoid ineffective customer interactions.
• Ensure all work-from-home employees are properly managed, visible and are able to communicate effectively with their peers, leadership and customer base regardless of location
• And much more!

I am happy to talk to anyone that may be thinking about migrating platforms or from on-prem to cloud.  Nectar can walk along side and help through the process.  Feel free to drop me a note at cstyers@nectarcorp.com.