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Transcript
Join Stuart Matthewman from IR and Jack Ye from GfK Research to take a deep dive into the UCC Survey Report and understand what the results could mean for your organization.
Download the UCC Survey Report to find out more about how your end users really feel about your collaboration investment.
IR | BrightTALK
Presenters: Jack Ye, Stuart Matthew
Stuart Matthew: Good morning, or good afternoon, or evening depending on where you are joining us from in the world today. My name is Stuart Matthew and I'll be your host for today's session with GFK research, where we look at collaboration or frustration - a recent report that we did some work with on GFK will be sharing some key insights from that report. I'm super excited about this session and really glad that you are able to join us today.
So, just before we get into today's session, I just want to give you a brief overview and some of the housekeeping if this is the first time you've joined us, just to understand how you can drive the webinar embed. So if you hover over the embed, you'll be able to make it full screen. Along the bottom of the embed, you'll see “ask a question.” Now, we do have time set aside at the end of the session for a Q&A, but we want it to be interactive, so please feel free to send any questions as we go through the presentation.
Next to that is UC attachments. This is where you can download attachments, including a copy of today's slides once we finish today's presentation. Votes - we’ll be running a couple of votes during this presentation. So we'd love your input and feedback. When we launch this, you’ll see that pop up at the bottom of the screen. If you are in full screen, you'll have to exit out of that to see the poll, but I'll mention that at the time we get to that.
At the end, we will be asking for your feedback. We do these sessions to provide value to you. And we really value your feedback and input on how we perform today but also on what you'd like to see as we move further and provide further webinars.
So without further ado, let me introduce today's guest. We've got Jack Ye, who is a Senior Research Manager at GFK Research. Jack, thank you so much for joining us today. Really looking forward to you sharing some of your thoughts and insight on this study. So yeah, say hi to the crowd.
Jack Ye: Hi, everyone. I'm Jack, and I'm a Research Manager at GFK ANZ based in Sydney. It's my pleasure today to be here to present some of the findings on UCC, with Stu. Welcome and enjoy the presentation.
Stuart Matthew: Great, thanks, Jack. So what we'll do is we'll start today's session we'll run through it gets into the reason why we did this research. And then Jack will talk a bit about the who, in terms of the sample breakdown, the methodology and some of the take-outs that came out of that. I know we spend a fair bit of time talking about the key insights. As I said, this is an interactive presentation, we'd love for you to ask questions as we've moved throughout. So yeah, let's dive in.
Stuart Matthew: So let's start with the why. So why did we work with GFK to conduct this research in the beginning? I just know most good studies started out of curiosity. There are much talk and hype about the importance of UC and collaboration apps. How they improve productivity, deliver on efficiency promises. And this can be true. But we were curious, “Was the experience of using collaboration tools different depending on where you sat in the organization?”, “Was there a disconnect?”, “Did they deliver on the promise?”, “Ultimately, were these tools causing collaboration or frustration?”
In many organizations, collaboration is delegated to the realm of technology. Success is measured with numbers factors like adoption, efficiency, tickets, scalability, but they're about more than that. More and more factors like user experience and satisfaction are coming into play when evaluating success.
The emphasis should be on putting the customer first, whether that's your external customers or your internal customers. Because more than determining the success of a UC deployment or technology project-based factors can impact organizational success? “Are you wasting your money on efficiency tech that ends up reducing productivity?”, “Are your employees unhappy in their jobs because the tools you provide don't work?” This kind of technology is really about facilitating human connection and interaction.
Stuart Matthew: So this study aims to explore the human relationship with collaboration technology, and ultimately what this means for your business. To get to this point, we engage one of the world's leading research companies - GFK, who took our hunch and well, researched it. Jack will now take us through how the study was taken to market and the key data that uncovered. Jack, I’ll hand it over to you.
Jack Ye: Thanks, Stuart. Now, first off, I will give a bit of an overview of the whole. So the methodology and the sample breakdown of the study.
Jack Ye: So this study was conducted last May. It's a 12-minute online study, the pocket sample is 500 employees in the US organization. And the criteria for the sample are:
- they have to work in an organization with more than 500 employees -- a large organization,
- and also respondents are a varying influence of seniority levels and responsibility in the organization.
Jack Ye: Again, a bit of sample breakdown, we have representatives samples across organizations with different sizes, and also we have samples from IT business decision-makers, in various sizes of organizations, and also different roles in terms of IP decision making. Half of the sample are end-users or don't have any involvement and half of them have various responsibilities in terms of IT decision making.
Now, I'm going to go through some of the key insights from this study.
Stuart Matthew: Yeah, thanks, Jack. So before we get into those team types, and just to set the scene, for today's session, what we wanted to do is run a quick little poll on how satisfied are you with your UCC applications. And I think the way that we built this study was to get to understand at different lengths of the organization, how those apps are impacting people's satisfaction, and also their productivity. And so, what we're going to ask, we've got with the crowd that we've got on here today are people from all different levels of the organizations. So what we'd love to see is your input on how satisfied you are with how your performance apps or collaboration apps are working. So we’ll just send this poll live, and you'll see that pop up at the bottom of your screen shortly. With your apps are you extremely satisfied, satisfied, neutral, unsatisfied, or extremely unsatisfied?
And we saw quite a difference with the result, depending on where people were based within the organization. So as you vote, you'll see the live results come up. At this stage, about 100% dissatisfied, which is a little bit different to what our survey report showed, so I'll just leave the voting open for a little bit longer. Love to get your feedback.
Right. Well, everyone is satisfied so far. So that's, that's right. So the audience we have is very satisfied with the app. So I'm just going to stop that voting. And I'll just pull the slide and hand it back to you Jack to talk through some of the key insights, the numbers.
Jack Ye: Thanks, Stuart.
Jack Ye: So, it's very interesting to see that a lot of our live audience today are very satisfied with their use of the app. According to our study, though, there's plenty of room for improvement in terms of satisfaction. Though on average, only 62% of users are satisfied with the UCC app. And the level of satisfaction differs significantly based on seniority level. As you can see from the graph 82% of UCC users were satisfied, but only for 54% at a non-management level are satisfied with their UCC app.
Jack Ye: And now handing this to Stuart to talk about the implication behind it.
Stuart Matthew: So this one is really interesting and good support against the hunch that we had around was there a disconnect between the end-users and those higher up in the organization? And some of the reasons that we believe this to be the case is that typically, non-managers within an organization tend to use the app and collaboration apps more frequently than those who are in the organization. And so they didn't have greater exposure to those problems, which can ultimately lead to decline and satisfaction. I think the other thing that's important to note here is that UCC is more likely to receive property support from IT when they do have issues which ultimately leads to their experience.
And I'll share a story from our own organization now. We had a new CEO start with us a few months ago. And the setup, and the focus on making sure that our CEO was online and onboard, and everything working -- was really on point because we all want to see our CEO having the full experience with their UCC apps.
And the other thing that we thought is that other managers and IT decision-makers could have an unconscious bias towards payroll opinion. For example, if they're an advocate for the implementation of those tools, they're going to view those tools in a better light than say someone who is using those tools and struggling to use those tools and ultimately, looking probably to trying to find a workaround.
So the unreported issue, Jack
Jack Ye: Of course, yes. So, in terms of unreported issues, we found that one in four respondents said they do not report 75% or more issues if they encounter one. And that's mainly because, as you can see in this some of the feedback from the survey, mainly because they have little faith in IT departments to solve problems in a timely manner, if at all.
What's the implication behind this?
Stuart Matthew: So this is a big one. And the implications are, we believe are huge. So we've got one in four respondents saying they don't report 75 to 100% of their issues. So as Jack touched on, mainly this is because I don't have faith in IT departments.
So that this means is a couple of things. Number one is, you might think your IT department and your apps are performing well. But there's a huge chunk of issues and problems going unreported. Simply because the end-users are finding that they don't have faith in IT or their teams to fix those issues. So what it means is that either the IT teams are ill-equipped to detect the problem, identify those problems and fix them to the degree that that doesn't happen again, they time poor, so they're pretty far falling rather than being proactive. And your end users really could be suffering in silence. So what this means is that instead of using the tools that the organization is paying for, ultimately what I'll do is I'll find workarounds.
And you can see some of the quotes there.
“Our IT department is overworked and slow to respond.”
“I've complained so many times that there is no resolution that was a waste of time to keep reporting it.”
“It takes at least one to two days to resolve even the most dire emergency when you need a solution right there.”
So I think the importance of this can't go understated. There is a massive chunk of issues happening within organizations around collaboration that are not being reported or not even known. And so, there are further implications in terms of security. So what other apps are they using to get around that? This is really a key finding, I think, from the survey.
Jack Ye: Yeah, that's correct. And next up, we want to look at the performance of the UCC app.
To be honest, we found a lot of issues encountered by UCC users. So the top issues encountered are related to system performance as opposed to the usability of tools. So for example, there’s poor audio and video quality, poor connectivity, insufficient bandwidth, and going down the scale with things like couldn't figure out how to use it. Respondents also indicate that the performance-related issues were more likely to have a moderate to severe impact on their ability to do their jobs. And as a result, many uses resulted in the workarounds, which you mentioned earlier, Stuart.
For example, a lot of them ask everyone to dial back in, use a different device or app, rescheduling the call, and some of them even cancelling the meeting altogether. So I think there's quite a bit of innovative way in terms of the workaround.
Stuart, what do you think?
Stuart Matthew: Yes, spot on Jack. And I think this sort of compounds the issue on the previous slide is that people are using workarounds because they are not reporting the issue, or the issues are not getting fixed in time. So the impacts sort of compound in terms that they’re using apps that aren't supported or there aren’t necessarily approved. So there's a security issue.
The time wastage associated with asking everyone to dial back in, rescheduling the call, canceling the meeting all together. And we think about some of the key resources that are dialing into these meetings will try to use these tools, that over time, that five to ten minutes at the start of every meeting adds up to a lot of wastage of resource and a big cost impact.
So you can see why this becomes such an issue. And particularly if it's an external meeting, and you're trying to meet with a key customer or key account, and people can't dial in, or if you're trying to, for example, give a demonstration of your product and there's a poor experience. You could miss sales, you can miss revenue. So I think trying to find a workaround on issues with the poor quality audio, and it's as you pointed out Jack, largely with the performance of the network and the system being able to cope with the audio and the video, not so much the usability of the apps. And so this leads itself to, I guess, an underlying problem is in how these workplaces tool up to handle this increased collaboration tools to make sure that extracting maximum value.
Jack Ye: That’s spot on, Stuart.
We also found that the poor performing UCC is impacting ROI and the bottom line. So, yes, that’s the truth about people but ultimately the dollar value impact is very real. The biggest impact of poor performing UCC app to identify or to reduce productivity and the utilization of using UCC tools and also the workflow problems. And, you know, some of these impacts are really sort of hurting businesses.
Stuart, what do you think?
Stuart Matthew: Yeah, thanks. Generally, this comes back to the point we made previously in terms of the impact, how it affects the organization's bottom line. Now, whether that's through wasted resources on tools that aren't being used or being avoided. And people spinning up other tools, or even paying for tools that aren’t approved, wasting resources on fixing or repairing problems and issues within the existing suite of tools, lost employee productivity, damaging customer partner relationships, or poor employee satisfaction which ultimately can contribute to staff turnover.
So we shouldn't underestimate the importance of getting these tools right from an ROI perspective for an organization.
Stuart Matthew: So having gone through the key findings and the key outcomes of the study, what does this actually mean for you and for the organizations that we're talking to today? So before we delve into this, I just want to put up another poll and just to understand with the people that have joined us today, what performance management tools do you currently use to monitor your UCC applications?
Stuart Matthew: So I'll just push this poll live and interested to get your results. So at the moment, I am using performance management tools to monitor the UCC app. So using inbuilt tools from the app vendors themselves, third party tools like prognosis performance management tools - which we obviously developed in house, tools that you developed yourself, no tools - which is not a bad thing, we'll talk about that a little bit later. Or you're not entirely sure what's being used.
So we'll just leave this vote open for a little bit. So we’ll just get your feedback. We'd really appreciate that. We've got someone using inbuilt tools from the app vendors.
Just leaving these polls open for a little bit longer. Can we get your input as to see what you're using within your environment? So it looks like inbuilt tools from the app vendors are at the moment.
That ultimately can lead to is your IT teams or the teams responsible for managing the collaboration tools are flicking from vendor, to vendor, to vendor to try and understand where those issues might occur, which I guess ties back into what we were saying previously around the lost productivity.
So as we move into what this means for you, really organizations demanding increased efficiency and productivity, employees are demanding faster communication, easier collaboration, and more flexible working arrangements. And these apps are supposed to help solve these problems. But what we're saying earlier today, the evidence suggests that this isn't necessarily always the case. And these poor performance tools can lead to a poor user experience with ultimately impacts the bottom line and various ways, which we touched on.
Now, fortunately, there are things you can do to address this issue. Which is why we just conducted that poll. As I mentioned, most people using inbuilt tools from the app vendors.
Stuart Matthew: What we uncovered was that performance management tools do improve satisfaction levels. So if you think back to the earlier slide where the average satisfaction with a collaboration tool across the spectrum was 62%. When we delved a little bit deeper into the data, what we found was that for those organizations, and this is across the board using performance management tools, the average satisfaction was at 78% versus those organizations not using performance management tools at 53%.
So what this means, and I'll go back to that earlier point, is that people aren’t flicking from app to app to try to understand what these issues are. Performance management tools - which give a holistic view of your environment, allow your teams to be a bit more proactive in terms of identifying where issues may occur, and fixing those, and getting those right for your end-users.
Another key point was there are many organizations that are not taking advantage of performance management tools. So what we found within the study was that 40% of organizations don't use performance management tools at all, which is I guess why we had up there ‘None - please help us’. The main reasons for what they provided was that they didn't know enough about the tools and the benefit they could provide. And also a little bit about security. So if you've got a tool that's looking over all my collaboration apps, “How does that tie with my security policy?” But I think if you look at it, the evidence is clear from this research of the satisfaction of those organizations using performance measures tools versus those that are not. The benefits really start to reveal themselves.
Now the workplace is changing and has been for some time. Globalization means workforces are geographically spread. Employees, customers and partners are based all over the world. And today's audience is no different. We've got people from 15 different countries online today. The workplace is changing. And at the same time user expectations are increasing. Video can’t be blurry or lagged, voice can’t have jitter, the availability must be there and the quality must be high. Otherwise, employees, customers, and partners have a bad experience. It impacts on the job satisfaction and your organization's reputation.
Now there's a strong correlation between using performance management tools like prognosis, and overall satisfaction with UCC applications. Tools like prognosis can help address performance issues and better equip IT teams to fix those issues fast. Or better yet, stop them from even happening.
This is ultimately going to improve business outcomes by increasing satisfaction and providing a better user experience to people and their interactions with each other, their partners and your customers. So I think it can’t be underestimated, the impact that not only a bad experience with UCC apps can have on ROI and the employee experience, but the impact of using a tool that can have a holistic view that can have.
So that's really the key highlights of our session today. I hope you've enjoyed what we've presented to you.
Stuart Matthew: We've got some time for Q&A, we've got Jack on the line, we’d love to hear some of the questions you've got. Anything further you'd like to hear about the survey, if you've actually read the report. For those of you who haven't accessed the report we will be sharing that report with everyone who's attended today we’ll be following up with an email to send that out to all of you.
Okay, so we have had a couple of questions come through. So feel free just to click on the “Ask a question” tab. Fine. So I'll just get off the first one.
So the first one that came through is, “How can we make an argument for our organization to invest in performance management tools?”
Good question. Dealing with our customers, it’s something that we hear often. It can sometimes be seen as a bit of a luxury, particularly when tools are provided by vendors that sometimes bundled in with the application itself. So I think it really comes down to the data that we've shown today that really supports this. It is critical to have tools that can ensure that your return on investment is backed, that your organization is spending millions on collaboration apps and are being used. How can you improve that? How can you improve that satisfaction? How can you get visibility into that? I mean, there’s long been, you know around collaboration tools, saving money on travel, costs, improving project completion rates, streamlining sales cycles.
If we can get these tools working properly and performance management tools are shown can help do that, then I think that that's something that organizations should really focus on. So I guess, it's how can you not afford to invest in performance management tools?
Another question, “How can I get a copy of the full report?”
So yep, just mentioned, we'll be sending the report out to everyone who's attended this call today. For those who watched this on demand following today's presentation, you can access the report from the Attachments tab. You just go down, just go to a download page.
Another question, “Other than using performance management tools, what are some other ways to boost user satisfaction?”
Fantastic question. Success really relies on three pillars:
- People - Involve your people in the process, get their buy in, provide a way to gather feedback and act on that feedback.
- Processes - have a robust deployment plan in place, provide adequate and ongoing training, ensure you have a plan to follow up with optimizing your systems.
- Technology - to make sure your network can handle your tech. As we've seen earlier, and the findings show that a lot of issues with collaboration tools are around the case with the ability of the network and the infrastructure to handle the increased lives. Whether that's causing issues with video or voice, key components. And it is around that human interaction that people want to be able to connect to collaborate.
So if you have a good relationship with your vendors, and you know, we believe it's essential to have monitoring and troubleshooting in place to be able to normally troubleshoot reactively but to proactively look at “What is the load lock on our network?” “How is it performing?” “Are we having bandwidth issues in certain situations?” We might have all five nines, and everything looks green, but is there a certain office within our environment that's having issues, but because it's just one particular office that gets blended out across the entire organization.
So look, we're getting close to time. For those people whose questions we didn't get to, we apologize. We’ll reach out to you post this session. Really, would love for you, if you do have questions to send them through as I said, we will get to we will reach out to you directly chance those questions.
But that's all the time we have for today, unfortunately. But as I said, don't see any questions that we didn't get to will reach out to you directly.
I would ask before we wrap up that you do leave feedback on the right of this tab, under the presentation. If you can click on there and leave us your feedback. We hold these sessions to add value to you, so we really appreciate any feedback you do have, and we really appreciate it. If there is a challenge you're facing in your own environment you'd like to see covered in a third session. Please also leave this in the feedback.
Don't forget to download the slides and the other attachments by clicking on the Attachments tab. And finally, thanks for your time today, we understand that everyone is busy. It is a busy, hectic flight we laid and we truly appreciate the fact that you have taken half an hour out of your day to come and listen to the findings of this report to learn with us, and we hope to see you again at one of our future sessions. So Jack, thank you very much for your time today.
Jack Ye: Thank you, it's my pleasure.
Stuart Matthew: And thank you everyone for joining. We’ll follow up if you have any questions following today's session. Thanks for joining us and have a great rest of your day. Bye.
