Proactively Detect Issues with your Telecoms Carrier

Caroline Leonard of Spearline shares how you can detect issues with your telecoms carrier before presenting a case study of how Spearline’s platform can be used to do so.

If you have a global customer support number and that number goes down, how do you know?

“The successful telecom of the future won’t simply provide connectivity – it will offer customers personalized digital services,” according to Dan Bieler, principal analyst for Forrester Research.

Your contact numbers are critical to how your global customers see your brand. Most cloud-based contact centers rely heavily on numerous carriers to support their complex infrastructure and ensure an excellent customer experience.

The challenge for any organization with a global footprint of contact numbers is that it is impossible to know whether those numbers are working correctly in-country or not.

Carrier relationships and the importance of objective data

If you have a global customer support number and that number goes down, how do you know?

It is not unusual for a contact centre to have little or no visibility over connectivity and audio quality concerns with their carriers.

It’s also not unusual to only become aware of an issue if a customer contacts them to let them know that there’s a problem with a line.

If you have SLA (service level agreement) challenges with your carrier, objective data helps. It helps very significantly.

The concerns raised in the vendor relationship are not typically about financial penalty, the priority is quality, and service improvement.

Alternatively, when a relationship is crumbling beyond repair, objective data and SLA enforcement can allow you to exit a contract early and migrate to a more suitable network partner.

Your contact numbers are mission critical. Your customers globally use toll and toll-free numbers to contact your enterprise each and every day and typical network monitoring only covers your internal network.

What is happening on the external side that may be impacting the Quality of Experience? Thousands of calls fail to connect to your network and while many calls connect successfully, poor audio quality prevents a conversation from being conducted.

Manage the performance of your carriers with Spearline automated testing

With platforms like Spearline you get objective data to help you hold your carrier accountable.

Every issue identified by Spearline automated testing can be entered into your carrier’s ticketing system, and automation allows for a problem area to be repeatedly targeted to increase ticket volume and escalation energy, and to verify resolutions.

Case study

Aircall – proactively detecting issues before a customer is impacted

Aircall, providers of an intuitive, powerful, cloud-based business phone system and call centre software solution trusted by over 5,000 companies worldwide, was in a reactive state when facing customer issues. Paul Rousselle, Strategic Project Manager at Aircall, says “we always focused on improving call quality for our customers, but we were struggling to effectively assess the quality offered by our various carrier partners.”

In order to improve customer experience, Aircall wanted to be more proactive, detecting issues before a customer was impacted and to choose a carrier that offered the highest level of service.

Using Spearline’s network of in-country servers, Aircall was able to replicate their customers’ call-flow. When an issue with connection, audio quality or other functionality is identified, Aircall is now immediately alerted with a full call details record (CDR), allowing them to resolve the issue quickly.

Aircall has described the Spearline offering as a “crystal ball” they use to proactively monitor outside their network and spot problems before they happen. Read more about how Spearline provided Aircall with a way of identifying issues with their existing carrier partners here.

More than just testing numbers… meet your dedicated Spearline carrier engagement manager

We know that time is precious and you have a number of things going on in your organization that need your time and attention. This is why we can offer you a dedicated carrier engagement manager on a full- or part-time basis.

A Spearline carrier engagement manager’s role is to work closely with your carriers to identify and resolve any issues that may arise. This is the perfect solution for organizations who don’t have the time, resources or industry insights for this function in-house.

Caroline Leonard

A Spearline carrier engagement manager will proactively monitor test data and liaise with partners on your behalf, providing supporting information on number outages, and assistance towards sustainable audio quality improvement.

This unique offering provides you with an experienced Spearline representative as your very own dedicated resource, along with access to the full range of Spearline in-house data and resources.

For further information, visit www.spearline.com

Author: Robyn Coppell