Spearline Introduce Latency Testing

Spearline introduce their latency testing, discussing how it can be a key consideration for contact centres.

Time is of the essence, and your customers always want a quick call with no interruptions. A seamless and straightforward human interaction with your agents, quickly resolving their problems and carrying on with their day.

So what happens when your customers experience extreme delays increasing the conversational challenge?

Latency is a constant inconvenience that can interrupt significant conversations between callers, causing irritation. The time delay from when you speak to when the other person hears your voice is latency.

While there will always be some natural delay between call endpoints, a high latency value will lead to great difficulties, cause frustration, and increased call abandonment rates.

If you are a business with a large number of contact centres, you should be mindful of how your customers will be easily impacted by the effects of high latency.

Echo, overlapping noises i.e. talking over one another, “slow calls”, interrupted calls, and disturbed synchronization between voice and video during conferencing are all common effects that can easily end up damaging your business through loss of revenue and terrible customer experience.

You want to make sure the quality of the call is high and is valuable in giving the customer the best experience possible. When a customer service call suffers a poor connection, considerable customer effort may be required, whereas when a connection is of good quality, complete relaxation is possible.

But how can you quantify the amount of latency your customer’s experience?

Spearline Latency Test

The Spearline latency test replicates the customer call flow and allows you to quantify the amount of latency your customer’s experience. Connection success or failure, Post Dial Delay (between the number being dialed and the call is answered), and Latency (or round trip time of audio) are all measured.

Today’s users have very high expectations regarding the quality of phone calls, and there are many issues that can occur with a voice connection, including latency.

Businesses depend on clear communication channels in their customer interactions and more and more are taking a truly proactive approach to audio quality management.

How Does it Work?

The client sets up a number that, once dialled, is placed in “echo back” mode (all audio received is immediately echoed back down the line).

Spearline in-country server dials your toll/toll-free number.

Then the server sends audio tones that, once received, are echoed back to the Spearline server.

Spearline measures the round trip time of the audio tones (the time from when the audio was sent to when it was received).

Key Benefits

Some key benefits of latency testing include:

• Identify and report issues before they significantly impact on customers
• Identify high or variable latency which affects your customer’s experience
• Provides data that allows you to identify changes that have a positive effect on latency

By implementing the Spearline latency test you will also be allowed to proactively measure any delay, and, with repeated testing, detect where there are variations over time.

Research by Spearline analyzed the global network latency of today and the complex interplay of multiple carrier networks in various countries.

The 2003 International Telecoms Union (ITU) recommendations state that where latency reaches 500ms, nearly all users are dissatisfied.

However, the Spearline study has found that latency becomes an issue when the mouth-to-ear delay exceeds 800ms.

Author: Guest Author