Customer Story

How a Fortune 100 Financial Services Company Improved UX

This Fortune 100 financial services and insurance company uses OfficeExpert TrueDEM to increase the number of high-quality voice calls in Microsoft Teams, reduced troubleshooting time to minutes, and improved the user experience and productivity of its 35,000+ users.

Customer
Financial Services Group
Employees
25,400 employees and 10,000 consultants
Region
USA
Topic
Improved Microsoft Teams Call Quality Performance

Challenges

Microsoft CQD was rating 54% of all Teams calls as ‘Poor Quality‘
Average troubleshooting time for Teams call quality issues was over 12 hours, taking place over 3+ days
No visibility on the Digital Experience for remote workers using Microsoft Teams for calls / meetings
Difficult to troubleshoot call quality issues without the telemetry data from endpoint device performance
Dropped calls and garbled conversations during meetings were impacting employee productivity

Results

Digital Experience Microsoft Teams voice calls rated as ‘Poor Quality’ by Microsoft CQD now only account for a total of 13 %
IT support The helpdesk team can now troubleshoot Microsoft Teams call quality issues in 15 minutes
Identified Major problems with network routing were identified that negatively affected a large segment of the organization
Created Minimum baseline requirements for hardware (laptops and workstations) have been established to successfully run Microsoft Teams
Created Best practices for remote worker home office network configuration and preferred ISPs optimize performance

OfficeExpert helped troubleshoot our Microsoft Teams voice rollout. Users were frustrated with inconsistent performance and dropped calls. Over half of our calls were experiencing poor quality.

Using OfficeExpert we were able to spotlight major problems with network routing and hardware limitations. Using new, data driven insights we were able to fix the issues and improve user productivity.

IT Engineering Manager
Corporate IT Services

IT Support Pain Points

The IT operations team of this Fortune 100 financial services U.S. company, which supports more than 35,000 users in 20 different locations across the U.S., switched to Microsoft Teams Enterprise Voice in 2021 and relies on Microsoft Teams to provide collaboration and communication for all employees, whether they are working remotely or at office locations.

With a dedicated IT group supporting the strategic deployment of Microsoft Teams enterprise voice, this engineering support group from Corporate IT understood the value of investing in a full featured, unified monitoring solution for Microsoft Teams. They learned from the early days of analysis and troubleshooting using the basic, off the shelf tools that they were lacking valuable information. They wanted full visibility into the end to end performance metrics to assess the digital experience for employees and identify problems that needed to be addressed and fixed.

Initial reports from Microsoft CQD showed this Fortune 100 financial services company had issues with call quality performance. So, in 2021 they moved forward with the deployment of the OfficeExpert TrueDEM solution to analyze their Microsoft Teams call quality performance and troubleshoot any issues identified.

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IT Support Pain Points

The IT operations team of this Fortune 100 financial services U.S. company, which supports more than 35,000 users in 20 different locations across the U.S., switched to Microsoft Teams Enterprise Voice in 2021 and relies on Microsoft Teams to provide collaboration and communication for all employees, whether they are working remotely or at office locations.

With a dedicated IT group supporting the strategic deployment of Microsoft Teams enterprise voice, this engineering support group from Corporate IT understood the value of investing in a full featured, unified monitoring solution for Microsoft Teams. They learned from the early days of analysis and troubleshooting using the basic, off the shelf tools that they were lacking valuable information. They wanted full visibility into the end to end performance metrics to assess the digital experience for employees and identify problems that needed to be addressed and fixed.

Initial reports from Microsoft CQD showed this Fortune 100 financial services company had issues with call quality performance. So, in 2021 they moved forward with the deployment of the OfficeExpert TrueDEM solution to analyze their Microsoft Teams call quality performance and troubleshoot any issues identified.

panagenda customer success story map image
panagenda customer success story Microsoft Call Quality Dashboard CQD image
Image: Microsoft CQD Dashboard © panagenda

OfficeExpert suddenly provided us with full visibility of our current Microsoft Teams call quality problems and highlighted the specific issues that we needed to fix for our employees.

Corporate IT Services

Finding Focus, Creating Value

Two senior IT support engineers identified OfficeExpert as the most comprehensive monitoring and troubleshooting solution for Microsoft Teams call quality performance. Involving the IT Director responsible for Microsoft Teams voice, the IT operations group started a detailed assessment of the product and compared it against other digital experience monitoring solutions available. OfficeExpert proved that it provided the most detailed and accurate information for Microsoft Teams call quality performance from the end user perspective.

The IT Director responsible for Unified Communications stated, “Without OfficeExpert we had to involve three different IT department engineers to investigate a Microsoft Teams call quality problem. It would take an average of 12-hours for these groups to gather data and search for a root-cause, and they might never find a fix.

The IT operations group decided to implement OfficeExpert in October of 2021. During the first 3-months of the engagement the detailed information provided by the solution proved so invaluable that they made five major modifications to their network routing and desktop computer standards to improve Teams voice performance.

The subsequent improvements to Microsoft Teams voice call quality were astounding. In the following 3-months after the device hardware enhancements and network routing changes the Microsoft Teams call quality performance improved dramatically. The overall number of helpdesk calls were decreased and the ratings for “Poor Quality” calls was down to just 13% overall.

Finding Focus, Creating Value

Two senior IT support engineers identified OfficeExpert as the most comprehensive monitoring and troubleshooting solution for Microsoft Teams call quality performance. Involving the IT Director responsible for Microsoft Teams voice, the IT operations group started a detailed assessment of the product and compared it against other digital experience monitoring solutions available. OfficeExpert proved that it provided the most detailed and accurate information for Microsoft Teams call quality performance from the end user perspective.

The IT Director responsible for Unified Communications stated, “Without OfficeExpert we had to involve three different IT department engineers to investigate a Microsoft Teams call quality problem. It would take an average of 12-hours for these groups to gather data and search for a root-cause, and they might never find a fix.

The IT operations group decided to implement OfficeExpert in October of 2021. During the first 3-months of the engagement the detailed information provided by the solution proved so invaluable that they made five major modifications to their network routing and desktop computer standards to improve Teams voice performance.

The subsequent improvements to Microsoft Teams voice call quality were astounding. In the following 3-months after the device hardware enhancements and network routing changes the Microsoft Teams call quality performance improved dramatically. The overall number of helpdesk calls were decreased and the ratings for “Poor Quality” calls was down to just 13% overall.

Business Value Benefits

These metrics are combined with information from Microsoft CQD to provide complete, end to end visibility into the digital experience for Microsoft Teams from the end user perspective, no matter where they are working. The data is aggregated and indexed within a single repository with visualization dashboards and reports that empower IT operation s groups with fast analysis and troubleshooting for any issues. IT operations can also use this information for proactive analysis and policies to drive optimized configurations throughout the organization.

Specific improvements for the Microsoft Teams deployment helped the Fortune 100 financial services tackle the following:

Business Value Benefits

These metrics are combined with information from Microsoft CQD to provide complete, end to end visibility into the digital experience for Microsoft Teams from the end user perspective, no matter where they are working. The data is aggregated and indexed within a single repository with visualization dashboards and reports that empower IT operation s groups with fast analysis and troubleshooting for any issues. IT operations can also use this information for proactive analysis and policies to drive optimized configurations throughout the organization.

Specific improvements for the Microsoft Teams deployment helped the Fortune 100 financial services tackle the following:

Improved User Productivity

OfficeExpert TrueDEM has empowered the IT operations group to effectively spotlight the root causes of Microsoft Teams call quality issues so they could be remediated quickly. The Microsoft classifications for Poor Quality calls were reduced from 54 % to 13% during the first 6 months after the implementation.

The estimated time savings by improving the quality of Teams calls / meetings across the entire organization is just over 3,800 hours per month.

Reduced IT Troubleshooting Time

IT operations groups tasked with investigating and troubleshooting Microsoft Teams call quality issues were spending an average of 12 hours per helpdesk trouble ticket. This encapsulates time spent by three different support groups, including Desktop Support, Network Engineering, and the Microsoft 365 / Teams Support group to run tools and gather data for analysis.

By leveraging OfficeExpert TrueDEM the average amount of time spent by IT operations groups has dropped considerably. And that time is now spent by a single IT support person, instead of three.

Proactive Spotlight on Known Problem Areas

All telemetry data for Microsoft Teams calls and meetings is gathered regularly and transmitted back to the central performance monitoring database which powers a Digital Experience tracking dashboard.

This accurate information allows the IT operations group to be more proactive in analyzing the problems for all degraded calls, identify the users impacted, and rectify the issues before they get escalated to the helpdesk.

Future Plans

The IT operations group tasked with the deployment and adoption of Microsoft Teams enterprise voice has been focused on delivering the best digital experience for their workforce. To assist the Corporate IT group with this effort a new feature from OfficeExpert TrueDEM will be implemented over the Summer of 2022.

Real Time Analytics and Troubleshooting will be enabled to allow IT support engineers to have immediate access to performance data on end user devices during Microsoft Teams calls and meetings. This will empower IT administrators and support groups to assess issues in real time and determine the root cause problems for remediation immediately.

This Fortune 100 financial services and insurance company is one of the largest and most diversified insurance and financial services companies in the United States.

The company provides a full range of insurance and financial services products including life insurance, public and private sector retirement plans, annuities, and mutual funds.

Their approach is to make simplicity a priority by providing financial professionals with straightforward, customer-facing materials, user-friendly tools, and transparent products and services so they can spend less time on time-consuming tasks and more time serving customers.

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