Picture yourself in a digital-first enterprise where employees on Teams, Zoom, or Cisco endpoints juggle calls, chats, and contact center queues. Now, imagine having no single view into how those connections are performing. That’s probably not a difficult task – it’s something countless companies are struggling with right now.
The trouble is that a lack of clarity leads to slow support, unhappy users, and wasted money. It’s why finding an intelligent way to unify the digital experience in UC is so important. It’s also why platforms like Nectar DXP (the winner of our UC Awards 2024 Best service management platform award) are earning so much attention.
A unified service management and DXP solution like Nectar’s platform gathers live data from endpoints all the way to core systems, spots issues early, and feeds insights into helpdesk and contact center tools. Here’s why that’s so valuable for enterprise teams.
The Business Challenges Facing UC Environments
Honestly, unified communications (UC) platforms aren’t always as great at “unifying” the tech stack as we would typically like. They might combine communication channels, but modern tech stacks are made up of multiple vendors, cloud services, hardware endpoints, and remote networks that don’t really mesh.
IT leaders are expected to deliver a seamless experience across Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Avaya, Cisco, and a mix of contact center and workforce management tools.
Employees might work from a crowded office one day and from their kitchen table the next. Some use managed endpoints, and others bring their own devices. In the middle of all this complexity, someone has to make sure the voice and video quality hold up, users stay productive, and support teams aren’t overwhelmed by escalations.
The problem isn’t just technical, it’s operational. Without the right visibility and insight, even small hiccups ripple out fast. That’s where the need for a comprehensive Digital Experience in UC becomes so clear. Without the right solution, you end up with:
Visibility Gaps in Multivendor Environments
Most large organizations end up using a mix of UC tools. You might have Microsoft Teams, Zoom, an Avaya contact center, Cisco phones, and Jabra headsets, all running independently. Unfortunately, that means your view is fragmented. When something fails, you often spend precious time pulling logs from different systems before pinpointing the actual issue.
Hybrid Work Headaches
Hybrid work isn’t going anywhere. Around 53 percent of jobs are hybrid, and 27 percent fully remote. While flexibility is great, it also means employees connect from home networks, VPNs, Wi-Fi, and a variety of devices. That leads to inconsistent call quality, audio issues, and frustrated users who escalate tickets every other day.
Siloed Support and Fragmented Data
Support is often broken into silos: network teams, UC admins, help desk staff, and contact center operations run separately. Each team owns pieces of the puzzle but lacks the full image. When issues pop up, blame-shifting ensues. Meanwhile, your ticket times slow, costs go up, and users feel like they’re shouting into the void.
The Rise of DXP Platforms for UC Management
The best way to align digital experience in UC is with a platform that allows companies to handle everything in a single pane of glass. Call it a UC service management platform or a Digital Experience Platform (like Nectar does) – either way, the overall focus is the same.
These tools are designed to be the central nervous system for communication tools, linking everything from headset quality and network stability to conversational sentiment and ticketing systems.
At its core, a platform for aligning Digital Experience in UC needs to:
- Gather endpoint-to-core telemetry from multivendor environments, Teams, Zoom, Cisco, Avaya, headsets, networks, and SIP trunks
- Surface insights in real time, so you catch a jittery video feed or VPN blip before it becomes a crisis
- Tie that data back into ITSM systems and contact center dashboards, so teams see what’s happening and act fast
- Use AI and conversational analytics to uncover patterns, like sentiment shifts, recurrent quality drops, or agent coaching needs
These tools are all about bridging gaps and improving visibility. It’s not about investing in more tools anymore; it’s about making the most of what you already have.
The Nectar DXP: Digital Experience Platform
Here’s what made Nectar’s Digital Experience Platform stand out to our award panel in 2024. It’s designed for multi-CCaaS, UCaaS, cloud, and on-premises ecosystems and built to reduce fragmentation. Unlike generic tools, theirs was designed around use cases like hybrid work, contact center quality, and conversational intelligence.
The platform supports:
- Endpoint-to-Core monitoring: Nectar goes deep. From network hops and VPN health to SIP session stats and headset audio quality, it gives you a full picture. It aggregates data from Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft, Zoom, Genesys and more into one dashboard.
- Unified Dashboards + ITSM Connection: Through its integrations, incident data and user experience insights flow right into IT ticketing tools or contact center dashboards. That integration shrinks triage time and surfaces real user pain points, fast.
- AI‑Driven Conversational Intelligence: Nectar goes beyond technical telemetry. They apply AI to capture call performance, detect quality drift over time, and flag agents who might benefit from coaching or support.
Nectar even offers a CX Assurance tool that helps companies automate the testing of any AI tools they’re using for customer service, employee productivity, or content creation.
Deploying Nectar DXP: The Benefits
Getting Nectar’s Digital Experience Platform up and running feels less like a clunky IT project and more like rinsing away the complexity caked onto your UC stack.
Once installed, Nectar continuously pulls performance data from endpoints, headsets, networks, SIP trunks, and core UC infrastructure. That means you can literally follow the journey of every call, from a remote agent’s Jabra headset, through their VPN, into a Zoom meeting or Cisco core, and all the way to ticket creation. With this data, you catch jitter, packet loss, or VPN issues before they slow down an executive’s all-hands meeting.
With greater visibility and connected insights, businesses benefit from:
- Faster Issue Resolution (MTTR Cuts): Correlated logs and alerts lead to much faster mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to repair (MTTR). Enterprises report MTTR improvements of around 65 percent after adopting observability-style platforms.
- Better Agent Experience and Voice/Video Quality: When agents have consistently clear, lag-free connections, frustration drops and productivity increases. AI-driven alerts help identify and fix headset or network issues before they impact calls. Cleaner calls shape better CX, fewer escalations, and happier front-line staff.
- Improved CX Metrics (CSAT, NPS, FCR): Conversational analytics tie directly to improvement in key contact center metrics. First-call resolution (FCR), a key driver of CSAT, improves dramatically with better visibility and coaching tools.
- Proactive Support and Efficiency Gains: By spotting issues early, whether it’s an unstable VPN connection, a silent agent, or recurring sentiment drop, you free teams to focus on prevention, not firefighting.
Nectar DXP vs the Competitors
As digital transformation accelerates and hybrid work becomes a default, several enterprise vendors have expanded their solutions into DXP and UC service management tools.
A few examples:
- Cisco ThousandEyes: This platform provides deep path analytics and end-to-end network visibility, especially for cloud-based application delivery. It is powerful for diagnosing latency, DNS issues, or traffic bottlenecks between endpoints and cloud services, but it has limitations on end-to-end tool monitoring.
- Microsoft Viva: Targets employee experience from a wellness and productivity lens. It focuses on collaboration analytics, work patterns, and engagement metrics. These are valuable, especially for HR and leadership, but not particularly useful for IT or contact center operations trying to diagnose why a support agent is dropping calls or why Teams meetings are stalling.
- Zoom IQ: built into the Zoom ecosystem, offers conversation analytics, post-call summaries, and basic sentiment analysis. It’s effective within its own walls, but Zoom IQ can’t extend to Microsoft Teams or Cisco Webex, and lacks the granular telemetry Nectar provides.
What all these tools have in common is depth in their respective domains. But for enterprises trying to build a seamless Digital Experience in UC, they often fall short on three critical points:
- Multivendor UC stack visibility
- Real-time voice/video telemetry tied to user experience
- Seamless integration into ITSM and contact center workflows
That’s where Nectar DXP stands out—offering a flexible solution that can connect the complicated ecosystems of insights businesses need today.
How DXP and UCSM Platforms Will Evolve
The landscape of unified communications is skyrocketing, expected to reach a value of $595.1 billion by 2032. Companies are investing in more tech, driven by hybrid work, BYOD policies, and the rising need for cloud-native solutions. Everyone needs performance assurance, and that spells opportunity for platforms that deliver clarity across the stack.
Another big shift involves AI and conversational analytics. Communication platform providers are continuing to invest in conversational, generative, and agentic AI for countless internal communication and collaboration use cases.
Meanwhile, contact centers are embracing conversational AI in full force. Ninety percent now see AI tools freeing agents to focus on higher-value conversations, with agent productivity jumping by nearly 30 percent or more in some deployments. Companies need to be able to gather data from those solutions too, and even track their performance (something Nectar’s CX Assurance solution supports).
If you’re managing a hybrid, multivendor environment, you’re hearing the same things: business leaders care about uptime, CX, agent effectiveness, and they know traditional siloed tools don’t cut it. That’s where truly unified management solutions make a real difference.
Buyer’s Guide Checklist
We’ve talked a lot about the Nectar DXP platform, but if you’re shopping around, it helps to know what kind of key things you should be looking for. Watch for tools that check these boxes:
- Multivendor Visibility: Must support Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Cisco, Avaya, and key contact‑center platforms.
- Endpoint-to-Core Telemetry: Real-time data from headsets, network hops, SIP sessions, and core systems.
- Conversational Analytics & AI: Sentiment detection, call summaries, and agent coaching insights.
- Integration with ITSM and WFM: Feeds data into ServiceNow, Jira, Salesforce, NICE, or others.
- Proactive Alerting: Not just reports, but real-time flags when problems arise.
- Proven ROI: Reduced MTTR, improved CSAT, and agent efficiency gains.
Bonus points if they offer lightweight deployment, role-based dashboards across IT and CX teams, and case studies showing real impact, like decreased downtime, improved resolution times, or better NPS.
Getting Smart about Digital Experience Management
Today, your UC stack isn’t just about calling or video; it’s the heart of your digital workplace and customer journey. Monitoring, optimizing, and understanding it is crucial.
The Nectar DXP platform delivers solid, purpose-built solutions for Digital Experience in UC. From real-time multivendor telemetry to AI-driven chat and call insights, integration with ticketing systems, and proactive alerting, this is exactly what enterprises need to gain control, improve quality, and support user experiences at scale.
The communication stacks companies use tomorrow aren’t going to get any less complex, but at least the way you manage them can be simpler.
This post originally appeared on Service Management - Enterprise - Channel News - UC Today.