When picking a video conferencing solution, there are many factors to take into consideration. Does it have a full set of features? Is the pricing competitive? Does it come with an excellent customer support? While these are all important questions, there is also an additional factor you should keep in mind. Does your video conferencing solution provide reporting and analytics?
With the rise of video conferences, advanced metric tools are starting to emerge. Reporting and analytics can provide you with a better understanding on how to render your meetings more productive and efficient. Leveraging real-time and historical data can be a game-changer for your business!
In this blog post, we want to share with you how video conferencing analytics can benefit your development team and your company culture.
Analytics and reporting for developers
From a technical point of view, direct visibility into your collaborative environment gives you a big advantage in managing performance and system conditions. Which metrics can developers analyze?
Reporting can provide the following metrics:
- number of meetings
- number of average participants per meeting
- call duration
- active video endpoints
- network connection
- device type for each participant
- video and audio codecs
- end-of-call quality
Particularly important for developers is also having an overview on the bandwidth, frame rate, packet loss and jitter. It lets IT staff know when there's a technical glitch with the video conferencing equipment that needs repair, and it offers up quality metrics for both live and past meetings.
For example, when packet loss is occurring just in the upload direction from a single endpoint, then chances are that the problem is at their end and you are limited in the actions you can take. However, if the packet losses on multiple participants and they are all connected to the same node in the cluster, then chances are that the problem is more on your end.
The media processing load is also a quite important tool for developers because it indicates how busy each node in the cluster is. The maximum values will depend on the type of hardware.
In order to optimize the end-user experience, these metrics will be available for completed and ongoing meetings, with values updated in near-real-time.
Analytics and reporting for company culture
Having an overview of your video conferencing data can help you, not only on a technical level but also on an interpersonal level. Since the beginning of the pandemic, more and more employees have reported experiencing a better work-life balance when working remotely. However, At the same time, they also announced an increasing dissatisfaction related to business meetings.
Zoom fatigue and unnecessary meetings have been the main reason for discontent. Measuring and exploring video conferencing data has been a great tool for gaining insights into meeting culture.
At the time when only physical meetings were possible, it wasn’t feasible to collect data in real-time. Today’s technology can help you explore meeting insights for the first time. Now that meeting analytics are available, you can start using them in a transformational way.
According to Harvard Business Review, taking advantage of historical data can help your business create a proactive environment, with increased productivity and engagement. For example, finding out when interruptions occur. Or whenever meetings start and end on time and who in your team is persistently late.
According to the review, 84% of participants consider analytics as important or very important, but only 8% of companies account that they have usable data, and this is particularly true for meetings.
How can companies benefit from observing and tracking behavior? First, they can examine the metrics by gender, role, age or salary and acquire an understanding on the macro-level of the overall meeting culture. Administrators can view mute/unmute activity, network connection types and protocol changes or end of call quality evaluations. This data can be available also for ongoing meetings, with metrics updated in real-time.
For example, a high number of participants leaving the meeting early can be an indicator of different problems. Is it about a connection issue resulting in attendees not being able to participate in the meeting effectively? Or is it about the information presented?
Observing and analyzing video call data can provide your company with amazing insights and drive change in your company since the low quality of meetings is a consistent pain point for organizations. Data is the key to benchmarking!
