Use call insights & metrics to improve CX

Call centers need to be able to measure call quality in real time to identify problems early, take corrective action and prevent long-term reputational damage or lost revenue. Voice APIs make it easy by providing call data and reports that help you extract actionable insights.

Track call insights to identify and solve issues

Why use call insights and metrics? As an example, a company might track the average handle time for customer service calls to ensure maximum productivity. If the call center manager notices that the average is increasing, he can take steps to find out why and address the issue. Maybe representatives are taking too long to find answers to customer questions, or maybe customers are having trouble using existing self-service options and are opting to speak with a representative instead.

Whatever the cause, by tracking call insights, the company can pinpoint the problem and take steps to fix it. And when you improve conversations between customer service representatives and customers, you'll see not only better customer satisfaction, but also increased sales and loyalty.

Call metrics to track

To understand your audio quality, engineering teams can track several metrics including mean opinion score, interarrival jitter, packets lost and packets sent.

One of the most important measures of audio quality on a given call is the mean opinion score (MOS). This score can help you to identify any issues with call quality and make changes to improve the experience for your users. The MOS score is based on a range from one to five, with five being the best possible score. To get an accurate MOS score, it’s important to have at least ten seconds of conversation on a given call. If you notice a low MOS score, that’s an indication that there may be an issue with the audio quality on that particular call. You can then take steps to fix the issue and improve the overall call quality for your users.

Interarrival jitter tracks how much variation there is in the arrival time of successive packets of data. This variation can impact the quality of a call, so it is important to track interarrival jitter across the board to identify issues with packet loss or corruption.

Packets lost tracks how many packets of data are lost during transmission. Even a small amount of packet loss can negatively impact the quality of a call, so it is important to track this metric. Packets sent tracks how many packets of data are sent during a call. These metrics can help identify issues with network congestion: if there’s a high number of packets lost during transmission, the quality of your voice call drops. For example, sounds might become jumbled, and critical information is lost. Customers and call center agents have to repeat themselves, which leads to frustration and wasted time.

Get additional call insights with SIP ladder diagrams

SIP ladder diagrams are a valuable tool for gaining further insights into call activity, and enable engineers to see the following insights:

Call flows provide a visual representation of the sequence of events that occur during a call, and analyzing these flows can help you identify potential problems and optimize call quality. SIP response codes can provide valuable information about the health of your VoIP system. By tracking the SIP response codes associated with each call, you can quickly identify any issues that may be affecting call quality.

Finally, IP addresses can also be helpful in troubleshooting VoIP problems. By tracking the IP addresses associated with each call, you can more easily identify any network issues that may be affecting call quality. By utilizing all of these call analysis tools, you can ensure that your VoIP system is running smoothly and efficiently.

Choosing your carrier

When you’re choosing a voice solution, it’s important to consider all aspects of quality, flexibility, value and service. Here are some key questions you should ask potential network carriers:

• Is the provider a true carrier? Many providers outsource their services to third parties, which adds unnecessary complexity, causes reliability headaches and raises costs. In an industry where call quality is everything, it’s best to choose a carrier with their own private network. Partnering with a carrier means you have access to raw call data—you don’t have to wait for a middleman to deliver call metrics to your team. Your team always has data to work with, since the metrics are easily accessible through your direct carrier relationship.
• Do they offer reporting and analytics? Voice APIs provide a better way to analyze marketing metrics and extract meaningful insights from your calls. Look for a cloud provider that can store your call data in real time so you can access data instantly for fast, effective decision making.
• Do they support real-time features? Your provider should be able to support media streaming in real time. This opens up a world of value-added features like instant call recordings, sentiment analysis and predictive models.
• Will you get the granular control you need? Look for a provider with APIs that allow simultaneous bidirectional data transmission so you can deploy reliable, low-latency, communications in real time with interactive command and control.
• What does integration/migration look like? Voice and SMS APIs make it easy to build custom Call Tracking applications or integrate with your existing CRM application. A next-gen provider should make the process of migrating to them just as easy as migrating away from them. In other words, they’ll support your migration without holding you hostage.

Choose a single provider, like Telnyx, that can help you measure call center and agent performance with in-depth monitoring & reporting tools. Check out our Voice API page or talk to an expert today.