5 Benefits of Testing Your Contact Numbers

Josh O’Farrell of Spearline shares five key benefits of of testing your contact centre numbers.

It is often assumed that network monitoring solutions will have all the bases covered when it comes to monitoring the full line of communication between an organization and its customers.

But this is not always the case. Spearline has put together a list of just some of the key benefits of testing your numbers that you won’t get by just monitoring your network.

1. Replicate customer experience from the outside in

Organizations often monitor what’s happening on their own network infrastructure, but have no visibility of what’s happening outside the network as calls are being passed through different carriers.

Poor audio quality being placed into an excellent network will still result in a poor audio experience for a customer.

Testing your numbers, not just your network, gives you end-to-end network visibility. Platforms like Spearline record every test call so you have full visibility of the customer’s experience as well as how many calls are failing to get through due to connectivity or audio issues.

Armed with these insights, you can make corrective decisions to improve your service.

2. Identify issues with numbers before customers do

We live in a switching economy. Customers don’t call a second time to complain about a poor experience, they simply switch providers.

If even one of your numbers experiences downtime or audio quality issues, it may impact a large number of customers, leading to frustration and potential loss of revenue.

Spearline testing generates alerts for every failure, and each failure alert is verified by a person in their testing support team.

So you can be assured that every alert is genuine and actionable, and can fix the issue before customers are affected.

3. An objective audio quality metric

One of the biggest problems with testing telecoms infrastructure is the availability of an objective metric to measure performance.

A lot of organizations use monitoring tools that 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).

These are misleading as they are analysing network details rather than audio characteristics.

Spearline’s in-country servers replicate the customer dial path and uses tools that focus on audio characteristics such as audio sharpness, distortions, background noise, call volume, and clipping.

The platform generates an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) industry-standard PESQ (perceptual evaluation of speech quality) score, which is an objective score of audio quality rather than the subjective MOS scoring.

4. Benchmark performance against competitors

Spearline has conducted millions of test calls globally, allowing them to benchmark your customers’ experience against country averages.

This means you can see how well your numbers are performing versus other contact centres on a country-by-country basis.

5. Measure carrier performance

Number testing provides you with insights to manage ongoing carrier relationships and make key routing decisions based on audio quality data.

Audio quality, DTMF and CLI are tested on each of your routes. Combined with the country-by-country benchmarking data from our millions of global test calls, we allow you to make an informed decision on how you route your calls.

Josh O’Farrell

In digital networks, carriers have the ability to transcode audio from excellent quality codecs such as G711 to poorer quality codecs such as G729 or GSM.

Number testing platforms measure what codec is being provided by the carrier and ensures your carrier is delivering the service you are paying for!

For further information, visit www.spearline.com

Author: Robyn Coppell