UCC Platforms Are Leading To An Increase In Helpdesk Tickets

Use of popular unified communication and collaboration (UCC) platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, Google Meet, Slack and a host of others skyrocketed during the pandemic due to remote work migration, and these tools will continue to play an important role in the workplace as organizations adopt hybrid work models.

However, the additional usage of these tools has caused a lot of extra work for the IT helpdesk, according to a new report from cybersecurity firm NETSCOUT that found UCC-related helpdesk tickets make up more than half of all helpdesk tickets for a large amount of organizations. In addition, half of companies surveyed get at least one UCC ticket per day.

Specifically, 43% of organizations surveyed say over half of all helpdesk tickets relate to UCC issues.

The company found that 72% of enterprises currently support between three and nine UCC tools, which is up 9% from 2020. The overwhelming majority (98%) said collaboration software is essential to their organizations’ hybrid work policies.

Most UCC tickets take just a few hours to resolve, and one-in-four organizations troubleshoot multiple such tickets each day. Device configuration, screen sharing issues and updates are the most common IT tickets. About one-third of organizations also routinely field tickets about poor audio and video quality, poor delays, and inability to log into UCaaS services.

Michael Szabados, chief operating officer at NETSCOUT, says these apps remain critical for organizations, but still present some challenges to end users and IT.

“Employees remain plagued with technical challenges that limit their productivity even as IT teams are under additional strain to diagnose and resolve these issues in a timely fashion,” Szabados says.
“Organizations need intelligent, packet-based monitoring solutions that allows IT teams to see performance problems across complex hybrid work environments to better triage, support and quickly extinguish root causes.”

When asked which platform IT leaders prefer, Microsoft Teams took 42% of the vote, following by Zoom at 25% and Webex by 17%.

Organizations also suggest that they plan to reduce the number of UCC platforms used by employees, as most typically use more than one. However, nearly 90% plan to consolidate their UCC platforms in 2022 now that the pandemic is waning and organization’s won’t have to rely on them so much.

Other notable findings from the survey include:

Large companies have a preference for Zoom. At companies with more than $10 billion in revenue, Zoom was the preferred platform with 38% of the vote. At organizations with between $1 billion and $9 billion in revenue, Microsoft Teams was the top choice with 45% preferring that platform.
Companies want more information from UCC providers. When asked to rank what would help them manage UCC-related challenges, 64% said more information from vendors would be very helpful.
Zoom had the biggest drop-off between users and people who would recommend the platform, 72% to 60%. The only platform with a net-positive score was Google Meet, which was used by 49% of respondents and recommended by 52%.

Simultaneous to the results of the survey, the company announced new UCCaaS features for its Smart Edge Monitoring solution designed to help organizations ensure a quality employee experience for remote and hybrid workers using those solutions.

The new capabilities leverage technologies that can detect performance slow-downs with analysis throughout the UCC ecosystem, including home-user networks, data centers, the cloud and application data from UCC providers.

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