How Contact Centres Monitor Their Telecoms Networks to Reduce Customer Churn

Josh O’Farrell explains that contact centres face issues like latency and jitter every day without even knowing it’s happening.

To combat this, tens of thousands of tests are carried out per day through routes in (currently) 68 countries to ensure phone lines are working. Matthew Lawlor, Co-Founder, and CTO at Spearline explains how.

Contact centres receive thousands of calls every day. You never know how many of those calls fail to reach your representatives, or if there are issues on the lines. This can create customer churn and eventually a loss of revenue for your company.

This is why network monitoring is essential for your contact centre. Ensuring there is no drop in quality, network monitoring alerts your contact centre before issues arise.

Why do contact centres need to monitor their networks and how does it work?

Matthew Lawlor

Network monitoring

Tens of thousands of network tests are carried out per day in 68 countries by Spearline.

These tests are performed for many customers, terminating to different countries across several carriers. This gives customers, such as contact centres, vast amounts of data to monitor their own infrastructure. The internal monitoring metric is constantly monitoring the PESQ scores that are returned on all of their routes. If there is any decrease in the quality across their customers, a ticket will be automatically generated.

When an issue is suspected on the Spearline network, they immediately stop testing in the affected country and stop generating alerts in case they are misleading.

Prevention

Before any route is certified, a rigorous certification process is carried out. This includes sourcing data centres/hosts that provide excellent SLA and guaranteed uptime; for the PRI lines, the distance between the carrier’s router and their server is kept to a minimum. All new routes are tested for three days before customer calls are passed. Only servers and PRI lines with excellent service levels are certified and put into production.

Server load and reliability

All of Spearline’s servers are built to a very high specification to ensure the load on the server is never going to introduce any quality issues. The servers are capable of handling hundreds of calls, but there is a limit of 32 on the number of calls each server can make. This ensures the load on the hardware is always kept low and that quality issues are not coming from the hardware being overworked.

Josh O’Farrell

How we monitor our voice network

Spearline uses a small number of SIP trunks to connect to its carriers. These SIP trunks are monitored constantly looking for network errors, such as packet loss, high latency, and jitter. If errors are detected during a test call, the test is automatically discarded and another test is run. All network information that is sent and received on a SIP call is stored in a PCAP file. After a call, this file is parsed to see if there were any errors on the link between the server and the in-country provider. If any errors are detected the PESQ score generated will be discarded and another test will be run. By implementing network monitoring on your system, you prevent problems arising within your contact centre that could otherwise lead to customer churn.

For more information, visit www.spearline.com

Author: Robyn Coppell