Without in-country number testing, you will only discover a problem if a customer complains. However, research has shown that only 4% of customers complain 1. That means you won’t get an opportunity to rectify a problem for the other 96%. Unhappy customers may simply switch their business to one of your competitors and are likely to tell others about their poor experience.
What is in-country number testing?
In-country number testing replicates your customers’ experience of dialing toll and toll-free (also known as freephone) numbers and flags problems immediately. It enables you to proactively monitor your global contact numbers, isolate issues, and resolve them before there’s a major impact on your customer engagement and your brand reputation.
Why do I need in-country number testing?
Despite the growing availability of alternative communication methods, the voice channel continues to be the primary contact method for customers. The quality of the call experience strongly influences your customers’ perception of your business and your brand. A high-quality customer experience is critical because good conversations drive business growth. Your contact numbers support sales orders and customer management and when they are “down” your business is not generating revenue and may be losing customers.
In addition to agent-customer conversations, voice analytics, voice-bot call flows, and true interactive voice response (IVR) have a fundamental need for good audio. Managing a global voice and data network with multiple service providers is not easy, and knowing that a vendor is offering good quality today does not mean they will have good quality tomorrow because network dynamics are … dynamic.
Won’t my network monitoring tools alert me to any issues?
Most IT network monitoring tools don’t emphasize the quality of the audio channel to support conversation. In addition, these tools are designed to monitor your internal network, so they won’t alert you to issues outside your network such as toll-free number outages, touch tone (DTMF) failures, incorrect carrier routing, and post dial delay (PDD).
In-country testing is key as many services can only be dialed from within the target country, and testing that utilizes the actual network paths that customers transit is most valuable.
Aren’t call failures rare?
Actually, call failures are more common than you might think. Here at Spearline, we have conducted millions of test calls worldwide, resulting in billions of data points. The test calls are recorded, and the audio quality is measured using the industry-standard Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (ITU P.862 – PESQ) method. Based on these tests, we’ve found that (at least) 1 in 25 calls fail to connect or suffer customer-impacting issues such as poor audio quality, latency (delay of voice), or DTMF failures. This represents a very significant 4%+ of daily customer contacts which may result in disappointment; a failure rate unlikely to support the goals of most businesses.
How can Spearline help?
Spearline’s unique platform presents a cloud-based SaaS solution with tentacles reaching physical points-of-presence around the globe, connecting to both fixed-line telecommunications networks and mobile operators.
Key benefits:
- Drive improvements in your customer experience by fully understanding call quality from your customers’ perspective.
- Protect your brand and your customer engagement by responding rapidly to any issues affecting your global contact numbers.
- Proactively manage carriers to ensure a consistently high-quality service and monitor adherence to service level agreements (SLAs).
- Pinpoint failures, identify patterns, and share information using our detailed call logs.
- Monitor the performance of your entire telecommunications infrastructure and benchmark your performance against others in your industry using our advanced reporting features.
Case study:
Zoom – A global brand, with local access numbers for dialing in to conferences all over the world.
Zoom are a global brand, with local access numbers for dialing in to conferences all over the world. For a company that prides itself on high quality, it’s imperative to be able to check the quality that global customers are experiencing when they call in via those local access numbers. Yet it is impossible to dial in to in-country toll free access numbers from outside the country in question.
Zoom needed to be able to proactively monitor and check that their access numbers are connecting for their customers, and, importantly, delivering the high quality that their customers praise them for.
Spearline notifies us of any potential issue before our customers do.
Arnie Chencinski, Senior Voice Network Engineer
To maintain their high standards of quality, and ensure they remain key leaders in their field, Zoom use Spearline Voice Assure to schedule regular testing of their global access numbers, with the facility to amend their testing programmes, including frequency and time of testing, at any time.
Read more about how Spearline helped Zoom to take control of the quality of their customer experience by proactively monitoring their global contact numbers.
New to Spearline?
If you are new to Spearline and would like to find out more about how you can benefit from our platform, we would love to speak to you! Please send us a brief message and we will be in touch with you shortly.
About us
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 our platform, or would like more information, please get in touch with us.
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