“Can you hear me now?”

If you read the title of this story and cringed; congratulations! You also appreciate the importance of good quality audio on conference/phone calls and have experience the frustration of burning valuable time dealing with audio issues.

It’s amazing how often prospective clients complain to us about the audio-quality related issues they are experiencing on their current VoIP phone system. Real-time voice is so important to the life blood of businesses that when something isn’t working, everyone hears (and yells) about it.

What surprises me is how many companies deploy Skype for Business/Teams/Spark or other UCaaS solutions without investing in the right headsets/devices. I equate this approach to buying a fancy sports car and opting to replace the V8 supercharged engine with a shitty old lawnmower engine. As my southern friends say “that dog don’t hunt”.

If you’re gearing up for a cloud voice project (or experiencing the pains of poor audio quality right now), here are 5 steps you can take to ensure high quality voice experiences (or solve current challenges).

1. Ensure optimized headsets for the specific UCaaS platform are deployed to all users. I’ve tried them all and tend to come back to Plantronics and Jabra. Solid headsets with tons of options for both wired and wireless.

Plantronics Voyager Focus UC

2. Invest in user training and adoption services to help users get comfortable using headsets. It’s a big change and important to be handled properly.

3. Make sure your users have devices that align with their personas (e.g. road warriors need flexible, durable devices that protect voice quality on the go

Common user personas (left to right): road warriors, open office workers, contact center agents and meeting rooms.

4. The ability to manage devices is a must! Make sure the selected device manufacturer(s) have a solid online portal to monitor devices, update firmware remotely and troubleshoot in real time.

Screenshot of Plantronics Manager Pro Device Control and Management Portal

5. Spend time upfront analyzing your user personas and selecting the right partner to assist through the device journey. There is nothing worse then buying devices online from “cheapdevices.com” and then being sh*t out of luck when something breaks or doesn’t work as expected.

Arkadin offers a free device discovery session to help analyze your user community and make recommendations on the right devices for your project.

To learn more, please reach out to me via email at z.katsof@arkadin.com or contact your local Arkadin sales team here.