Zoom recently introduced Huddles, a virtual co-working space designed to bring in-office, ad-hoc engagement experiences to virtual employees. In this episode of the Metrigy MetriSight we’ll chat with Zoom’s David Ball to learn more about Huddles and how virtual co-working spaces can contribute to employee experience, culture building, and team engagement.

Metrigy’s Employee Experience: 2023-24 research study of ~500 companies examines the technologies and strategies companies have in place to understand employee behavior and optimize engagement. In this webinar, discover characteristics of the most successful companies, including data-driven decision making. In addition, find out employee experience platforms, intranets, voice-of-the-employee software, and other technologies correlate with success, in terms of key employee experience metrics such as employee productivity, retention, and satisfaction.

Cornerstones of Employee Experience Success

Presented by: Beth Schultz, Vice President of Research and Principal Analyst, Metrigy

Date: November 7, 2023
Time: 11:00 am ET

VIEW REPLAY

Steve Hamrick, VP of product management at Slack, likes to say that app utilization, an oft-sought-after goal, is not a surrogate for business value. In this episode, he shares his thoughts on how to fully incorporate Slack into a digital workplace initiative and deliver on key business success metrics.

Metrigy’s Irwin Lazar takes us inside the MetriStar program and shares which providers have earned Top Provider Awards, based on customer sentiment scores and customer business success.

Even as companies settle into the workplace decisions they’ve made for today’s post-pandemic realities, IT leaders must continue assessing whether they’ve got the optimal mix of communications and collaboration tools for users—i.e., the right features at the right price, in the packaging that works best for them.

As Metrigy consistently finds in its global buyer-side MetriCast market forecast studies, cost is typically the top reason companies cite for changing up their tool vendors. Obtaining new features is a top driver as well. This could be a mismatch between desired advanced features and a vendor’s roadmap, or perhaps a change in strategy from point solutions to integrated services, for example.

Whether an IT buyer looking to make a technology change or a provider needing to understand shifting tides, Metrigy delivers necessary insight in its MetriCast Service. This service comprises our MetriCast market forecast (as noted above), our MetriRank vendor ratings, and our MetriStar vendor awards.

We’ll be publishing our Workplace Collaboration MetriCast:2023 market forecast report shortly, and MetriRank reports for Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and SIP trunking will follow this quarter and next. But today the big news that we’re sharing is the vendors that have earned recognition as a Workplace Collaboration MetriStar 2023 Top Provider Award winner.

In determining MetriStar Award winners, we use customer ratings of providers along with quantitative metrics correlating the use of a vendor’s products and services with measurable business success, as provided by their customers. The MetriStar Top Provider Award goes to those companies that get at or above-average customer sentiment ratings and whose customers have achieved high business success. In the case of the Workplace Collaboration MetriStar, these ratings and success metrics come from the 1,418 companies that participated in our Workplace Collaboration MetriCast: 2023 study on workplace collaboration.

This year, we awarded MetriStar Top Provider Awards in seven technology areas. (Note that our WC MetriCast 2023 study included an eighth category, UC performance management, but no top providers surfaced.) Those technologies, and award winners in each, are:

These 18 winners rose to the top in ratings of more than 50 providers from MetriCast study participants. In addition, we’ll recognize a number of vendors that achieved either high customer ratings, or whose customers achieved high business success.

Irwin Lazar, head of our workplace collaboration practice, provides a ton more detail on this award program, the customer sentiment scores and business metrics for each category, and which providers came up as winners of Top Business Success and Top Customer Sentiment awards, during his Workplace Collaboration MetriStar webinar. Listen on demand and get all you need to know for scoping out providers.

Metrigy Announces 2023 Workplace Collaboration MetriStar Award Winners
Customer Sentiment and Business Success Define Award Program

August 15, 2023 – Research and advisory firm Metrigy announced winners of its 2023 Workplace Collaboration MetriStar program in eight key technology areas driving successful employee interactions. Communications and collaboration business leaders provided vendor performance ratings and business success data across eight categories of Workplace Collaboration technologies, resulting in 18 MetriStar Top Provider Awards.

Metrigy determines these results solely on insights from 1,418 IT leaders with operational and/or procurement responsibilities for key Workplace Collaboration technology categories in Metrigy’s Workplace Collaboration MetriCast 2023 global research study. The value of the MetriStar Award is that it is based on customer ratings of providers, as well as quantitative metrics correlating the use of a vendor’s products and services with measurable business success.

“This year’s MetriStar awards reflect vendor success in delivering high-quality, easy-to-use products and services that deliver measurable business value,” says Irwin Lazar, Metrigy president and principal analyst. “In this new age of hybrid work, MetriStar results provide IT buyers and operators with a clear assessment of vendor performance to enable informed purchasing decisions.”

Metrigy’s MetriStar reports cover the following workplace collaboration technology areas:

Each report features three recognitions, as follows:

Customer Sentiment analysis: Using a 1-to-4 scale, research participants rate providers on a variety of key performance indicators, including technical features, response time to problems or questions, reliability, security, voice and video quality, value, innovation, and more. Those with a higher-than-average overall mean score have achieved “Top Customer Sentiment.”

Business Success analysis: Study participants provide data on before-and-after changes in business metrics (such as revenue, cost, employee turnover, and employee productivity) resulting from the specified technology initiatives. Metrigy places companies whose success metrics are greater than or equal to the mean in at least 50% of their categories into the “Top Business Success” group.

Those providers that are top in both of the metrics are awarded a MetriStar Top Provider Award. For more details, please see our webinar announcing the results.

This year’s MetriStar Top Provider winners (in alphabetical order) are the following:

These reports help companies choose the best provider for each respective category and they are available for purchase on our website at www.metrigy.com.

For most large organizations, there is no single unified communications solution. Rather, companies manage a variety of platforms for calling, meetings, and messaging, both on-premises and in the cloud. In the absence of a unified approach, management is disjointed, resulting in high operating costs and poor user experience.

VOSS has recently published an eBook discussing this important topic.

Why Multi-vendor UC Management is Critical!

Today’s collaboration infrastructure is complex, especially for larger organizations. Metrigy’s Workplace Collaboration: 2023-24 global study of 440 companies found that a significant number of participants currently operate more than one unified communications platform. Specifically, almost 18% manage at least two calling platforms while just over 38% support more than one meeting app provider. Often these consist of a mix of both on-premises and cloud platforms during transition to cloud or are the result of acquisition and merger that creates a heterogeneous environment. For those who still predominantly rely on on-premises platforms, almost half (47.2%) are moving toward, or evaluating a move to cloud-based Unified communications as a Service (UCaaS). Even for companies who may have unified on a single UC platform, it’s likely that they are relying on components, such as phones, headsets, and gateways, provided by third-party providers.

Managing multi-vendor environments is also complex. Without a unified management platform, those with day-to-day operational responsibility are often switching between isolated vendor-provided tools for administration and on-going performance management. IT’s ability to respond to problems is constrained by the need to first discover the user’s application, and then to move to the appropriate management interface. Tasks such as license and endpoint management, phone number provisioning, and supporting moves/adds/changes/deletions are complex and aren’t easily automated or distributed.

The need for integrated UC management in multi-vendor environments is increasingly critical in the age of hybrid work, where employees move between home and office, relying on applications such as video conferencing to do their jobs. Among Metrigy’s research participants, 82.8% see video conferencing as an important or business critical service, essentially to support day-to-day activities.

Requirements for Multi-vendor UC Management Success

Continue reading at voss-solutions.com.

After years of promise, enterprise-grade FMC solutions are increasingly available.

Despite the growth and maturation of the unified communications market over the last several years one truth remains: employees still prefer the native app on their mobile phone for calling, across all use cases, compared to using mobile and desktop apps from their UC vendors.

Metrigy’s global Workplace Collaboration: 2023-24 study of 440 organizations, published in March of 2023, found that almost 12% of companies, mostly small businesses, had switched from a traditional business calling platform to simply allowing employees to use their own mobile phones, or the provisioning of company-owned mobile phones for calling.

The problem with this approach is that companies may lack control over phone numbers, the ability to integrate mobile calls with apps for customer relationship management, and the ability to enforce security and compliance controls on calls and messages. Last year, the SEC levied multibillion dollar fines financial services companies in the US for allowing customer communications without compliance controls, and the lack of employer ability to ensure industry compliance on employees’ private devices shows the “BYOD” approach to mobile calling simply isn’t supportable.

Earlier research we conducted in 2021 found that only around 5% of companies who had provisioned mobile UC apps found that employees were using them for calling. Instead, mobile UC apps were primarily being used for messaging and for the joining of meetings when away from a desk. Clearly, there is a gap in user preferences when it comes to the available tools for business communications (such as a business calling platform) and the tools employees prefer (their own phones).

Our research also shows that demand for FMC is high, with almost 24% of our 440 research participants planning to deploy FMC solutions this year, and another 45.6% either planning a future deployment, or evaluating FMC for possible use.

Continue reading on nojitter.com.

Workplace strategies continue to evolve as companies grapple with how to achieve the right balance between home and office work for their employees. The policies and technologies they put in place must help build company culture in a hybrid workplace while also boosting employee productivity, retention, well-being, and other key business metrics. Increasingly, how employees use and interact within collaboration apps such as team chat and video meetings is helping guide decisions aimed at improving employee experience.

In this webinar:

Collaboration Behavior Data: Where it Fits in for Enhancing Employee Experience

Presented by: Beth Schultz, Vice President of Research and Principal Analyst, Metrigy

Date: July 12, 2023
Time: 4:00 pm CT

VIEW REPLAY

Meeting frontline workers where they are and with the right employee experience

In this webinar produced in partnership with Metrigy, Unisys digital workplace experts Bobby Arbuthnot, Stacy Harder and Stephen Tong share data-driven strategies for enhancing the frontline worker employee experience. They explore Metrigy’s latest research with Beth Schultz, the firm’s vice president of research and principal analyst, and discuss ways that successful organizations are applying their own data to tackle the challenges faced by frontline workers. Let’s dive into the highlights of their discussion.

Persona-based experience management is essential for retaining your frontline workforce

As a whole, frontline workers comprise a substantial portion of the global workforce. These employees are most often the face of a company, providing services directly to customers and influencing brand perception. Whether engaging with customers in person or via digital channels, they are critical in achieving the positive customer experience and satisfaction ratings much sought after by most companies.

Nonetheless, frontline workers don’t always receive a commensurate level of attention in programs aimed at optimizing employee experience. That is, companies often apply employee experience initiatives and make technology decisions universally, with no differentiation between frontline and knowledge workers. This approach can prove detrimental to achieving employee experience goals.

Employee experience goals: The information disparity

Consider the top two employee experience goals designated by the 250 companies Metrigy studied in its global Employee Experience & Workplace Engagement: 2022-23 research. The first goal (for 61.4%) is keeping employees informed about company news and activities. And how do companies disseminate this information? Most–nearly 79%–use email, while at least 47.6% use some form of messaging (text or video), 45.8% use a desktop news portal and 35.5% use a mobile news portal.

Any of these methods assume employees have access to a company desktop or mobile device from which they can check email, receive text messages, or visit a portal. Frontline workers, however, often don’t have dedicated devices…

Continue reading at unisys.com.