Proactively monitor your numbers across the US and Canada with Voice Assure Interstate

Helen Scahill

Service Delivery Manager, Intel

Many large organizations that have local access and toll-free service numbers across the United States and Canada could potentially be handling millions of calls every day from customers and prospects. Any degradation in their telecoms service, be it a drop in audio quality, or a complete outage, carries a high risk of damage to their customers’ experience and ultimately to their brand reputation.

It is imperative to be able to check the quality that these individuals experience when they call you. Organizations such as unified communications and those with call centers located across North America rely heavily on multiple carriers to support their infrastructure and ensure an excellent customer experience. However, it can be impossible to isolate where and how connection and audio quality issues are happening. Oftentimes these organizations only become aware of an issue when their customers notify them putting them in a reactive as opposed to a proactive state which is not ideal. This is where Spearline Voice Assure Interstate comes in.

What is Voice Assure Interstate? 

Voice Assure Interstate allows you to proactively monitor your toll and toll-free numbers to optimize customer experience and communications leading to business growth. Run inbound and outbound tests on your toll and toll-free numbers across the US and Canada to accurately measure how your customers experience your service in real-world conditions. 

Why Voice Assure Interstate?

1. Replicate and manage your customers’ experience when they call your organization

   Organizations often monitor what’s happening inside their own network infrastructure, but have little or no visibility of what’s happening outside the network as calls are being passed through different carriers. To know for sure what your customer is actually experiencing when they dial their local contact number, you need to test your numbers from outside your network. The only way to truly do this is by placing a test call from that state, into the local number. This will allow you to check that the call connects and, through recording the call, reveal some objective measures like audio quality and latency. Regularly testing your numbers gives you true end-to-end network visibility from your customer’s perspective. Armed with these insights, you can make corrective decisions to improve your service.   

2. Be proactive in managing call issues, before customers are affected

   If just one of your numbers experiences downtime or audio quality issues, it may impact a large number of customers, leading to frustration and loss of revenue. It’s not enough to wait around for a customer complaint to alert you to a problem, and network monitoring won’t alert you to any of these issues when they’re happening outside of your internal network. Fortunately, proactive, automated testing of your numbers is possible and can make sure you’re ahead of the game when it comes to identifying issues. If you’re testing your numbers regularly, then you’ll know immediately when a problem occurs and, armed with the right information, can get it fixed before customer experience is badly affected.   

3. Measure audio quality using an objective metric

   One of the biggest challenges with testing telecoms infrastructure is the availability of an objective metric to measure performance. A lot of organizations use monitoring tools which look at certain network parameters such as bandwidth, packet loss, latency and jitter. Based on these parameters, they will assume a certain audio quality, generating a mean opinion score (MOS). But these are misleading as they are analyzing network details rather than real audio characteristics. A simple recording of a real call can reveal a number of audio characteristics like audio sharpness, distortions, background noise, call volume and clipping.

   While MOS is, essentially, an assumption based on network characteristics, a recording of a test call allows you to generate an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) industry standard PESQ (perceptual evaluation of speech quality) score, which is an objective score of audio quality. Find out more about PESQ and how it can be used to improve audio quality.  

4. Measure and compare carrier performance to make informed business decisions

   Number testing provides you with the insights to manage ongoing carrier relationships and make key routing decisions based on audio quality data. With information on audio quality, DTMF and CLI functionality, combined with benchmarking data, you can often identify where audio is being transcoded, or when lower quality carriers are being used on your routes. This allows you to make an informed decision on how you route your calls, and ensure your carrier is delivering the service you are paying for.

Free Voice Assure Interstate demo

To find out more about Voice Assure Interstate and how it can benefit your organization, please register your details here to request a free demo with one of our telecommunications experts.

About Spearline

Spearline is the leading network intelligence company in the telecommunications industry. Our platform enables enterprises and telecommunications service providers to test connectivity and quality on global telecoms networks, testing automatically at volume. If you are interested in benefiting from our platform, please get in touch with us.