For most businesses the quality of your voice and video interactions is hugely important. It directly affects your employees’ ability to do their jobs. It is also an important factor in determining the satisfaction that customers and partners have in doing business with you.

If simply talking to you is difficult, it’s unlikely that your relationships will thrive. The main concerns you should consider, when thinking about your call quality, fall into three categories.

Protecting Reputation

In order to protect your brand from gaining a bad reputation:

• You need to continuously monitor your call center’s delivery.
• You need to be confident in your platforms’ ability to deliver exceptional customer experience.
• You need to be able to trace call volumes, latency, and other performance indicators across every element of your service that could be leading to your business becoming known for poor call quality.
• You ideally need information across all geographies, times, session types, and other factors to help you understand what issues are affecting your service, and therefore, your reputation.

Reducing Risk

Connectivity risk

To reduce the risk associated with providing poor customer experiences you need to know if any issues are affecting your ability to connect your customer calls. You need to be confident that any unexpected spikes in traffic can be accommodated and that you have the flexibility to reroute calls through a different network should any critical part fail. You also need to be aware if your service is consistently being let down by a vendor or partner.

Implementing the right tools, along with proactive testing regimens, enables you to truly understand the pain points and issues affecting your network and correct them before they become an issue to your business.

Staff retention risk

Staff retention is also a factor that is affected by poor call quality. Good, confident, contact centre staff are hard to come by. A happy worker generally equates to happier customers and greater productivity.

Continuous, active monitoring gives your team the knowledge that their experience is important to you. It lets them know that, wherever possible, the right steps have been taken to allow them to do their jobs well.

Identify and Resolve Issues

You need to proactively and in real-time identify issues, be the first to know there is a problem, and act in resolving defects before it has an impact on their customers and revenue.

In the ‘old world’, managers worked in the same office as their agents, and were aware of issues affecting calls. As every worker generally used the same technology platform IT issues could be identified and isolated easily. Now that is no longer the case. Staff often works on home, using a vast array of different devices and telecoms carriers. While technology and working behaviour has changed, at the same time, complexity has increased, and confidence waned.

Potential causes of issues include:

• Applications and application hosting.
• Channel and signalling hosting.
• Telecoms carriers.
• Contact centre ISP / Bandwidth.
• Agents’ domestic network / ISP (often limited by upload speed) and devices.

This is why 3rd party QA systems are so important. It’s the electronic equivalent of an independent auditor sitting in your system and ensuring every constituent of your technology stack pulls its weight.

The Solution

Nectar delivers market-leading software solutions to dramatically improve management, visibility, and service delivery across global and enterprise converged Voice-over-IP (VoIP), SIP and MPLS networks. Nectar’s offerings improve service delivery across integrated voice, video, collaboration and contact center solutions by providing critical performance information to your executives and technical resources. Armed with this knowledge, you now have the foundation to align your IT initiatives with business objectives, transform your infrastructure, and free up critical resources.

Not only does this mean that customer experience remains optimal, but it also means more robust business continuity, more productive agents, and a faster release of updates. You can, therefore, rest easy, confident that your systems are doing everything they can to support the business. For more on having confidence in your technology read our blog: Why Confidence is Critical in the Contact Centre.

To explore how Nectar can help your organisation maintain excellent voice quality, get in touch.