Maintaining business class VoIP and Video call quality
Delivering a consistently high quality of IT service is increasingly being challenged in these tough economic conditions. For many organisations the capital budget has been reduced or eliminated, the staffing levels have been significantly reduced so the associated resource available to manage applications and services is similarly curtailed. IT directors are forced to doing more with less and to postpone all but the most critical-to-business survivability upgrades and improvements. And, to further complicate matters the distributed nature of VoIP services proves there are many more opportunities for service-affecting problems than with the classic circuit switched service. For many organisations, VoIP quality may seem to be beyond their reach. Not anymore.
In response, some enterprises are looking to managed service providers to operate their networks and services, turning the company's fixed cost IT structure into a flat monthly fee. Others are considering hosted VoIP service providers as part of a strategy seeking comparative advantage – allowing the firm and the IT department to focus its resources on applications and functions that only they are in a position to deliver and engaging partners that are skilled and scaled to be world-class in their areas of strength.
VoIP quality however, is not something best left to radical transformation to accomplish. The Psytechnics Experience Manager solution enables the highest levels of VoIP quality regardless of who owns the network, regardless of who operates the network and regardless of which brand of equipment that users engage.
Through a distributed information gathering system architecture, Psytechnics customers can see real time VoIP quality and IP video quality metrics in aggregate or on a session-by-session basis to quickly respond to problems and make sure that any service providers are also appropriately engaged in corrective action. In this way, high VoIP quality service and high user satisfaction are achieved. Both users and the enterprise IT director can do their job with confidence that critical business communications happen with the kind of reliability and quality that users prefer to take for granted.
Psytechnics brings 'peace of mind' value to enterprises
In the When Quality Counts report by Brockmann & Company, 85% of respondents reported that VoIP quality was very important to the success of their business yet only 31% reported that they were very satisfied with their experience. Two-thirds admitted that their perceptions of a supplier’s brand deteriorated when experiencing VoIP quality problems with suppliers. So, VoIP quality is very important to both employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction.
| • | Significantly higher VoIP quality leads to higher user and their customer satisfaction |
| • | Reduced operations costs for real time communications services |
| • | Evidence-based troubleshooting minimises time wasted in diagnosis and minimising service outages |
| • | Objective view of VoIP quality status enables fact-based confidence in project signoff of new sites, upgrades or new service providers |
In many challenging economic and complex technical environments the Psytechnics Experience Manager assures both project managers, operations staff and ultimately users that communications improvements are in fact experience improvements. This is possible through a focus on the end-to-end quality of experience and the availability of mature tools for measuring, analysing and reacting to VoIP quality-affecting problems.
Psytechnics' solutions increases user satisfaction with VoIP quality
The Brockmann & Company report When Quality Counts also reveals that operational attention to VoIP quality is not particularly widespread in that 45% of users experience at least one defect every month, while 22% experience at least one defect every week. Speedy resolution of problems is a key requirement too. Users' perceptions of VoIP quality degrades at an accelerated rate the longer a problem remains unresolved as reported in the Omnibos enterprise study.Psytechnics engineers are experts in the management of real time VoIP and IP video services. Our interactions with and support of customers with POTS, IP telephony, IP video conferencing and unified communications implementations regularly demonstrates that the support of real time IP services are almost always more complex and more costly than customers were originally led to believe by the vendors selling the equipment and the service providers selling the services.
Users disappointment is aggravated by the frequency and duration of VoIP quality defects and service outages, together with the IT support team's inability to overcome both systematic and randomly occurring problems. Oftentimes, Psytechnics engineers have been engaged to consult on half-completed, halted implementations that have failed to deliver customer satisfaction, or the expected profitability.
In these circumstances, our practice has always been to take a systematic, long-term view of the challenge. We recommend the deployment of the Psytechnics Experience Manager. We train support staff on the dynamics of our technologies and specifically on the effective disciplines and processes for troubleshooting real time communications faults and problems which leads immediately to the systematic reporting and correction of the most severe and frequent VoIP-quality service-affecting problems. We take customer satisfaction very seriously, and can point to the 1 million VoIP and IP video communications users whose satisfaction is our highest goal.
Psytechnics' solutions increases efficiency of support operations
| "Managing Quality of Service (QoS) on top of a well designed network will not enable real time applications to run reliably in today’s multi-vendor, multi-service networks. Enterprises need more". |
Ineffective tools can often cost more in operations costs. Even though the QoS tool shows green lights users often remain unhappy with call quality and reliability, and the volume of trouble tickets doesn't subside. The IT support team then has to work 'blind' throwing resources at the problem trying to force a fix – sort of like performing exploratory surgery to cure a stubbed toe. This is costly, wasteful and doesn't necessarily provide enough information to solve the problem. Otherwise the IT support team ignores the users' complain and satisfaction declines and declines.
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Psytechnics Experience Manager overcomes operational blindness through a pervasive distributed architecture of IP Engine voice monitoring and video monitoring appliances reporting to the Experience Servers that analyse real time traffic streams to deliver actionable information that support professionals can use to create the highest user confidence in VoIP quality and IP video quality. This capability cures the single biggest operational weakness – visibility of live VoIP and IP video communications service performance. Psytechnics’ unique service performance visibility, delivered per stream, per call and in real time, enables IT operations and support staff to maintain user satisfaction proactively, and with the use of the right resources at the right time, virtually eliminating the typical exploratory surgery approach of throwing resources at problems.
Through the use of predictive algorithms, Psytechnics users can make the connection between a network event and its impact on user satisfaction. Support staff is therefore able to ignore problems that don’t affect user satisfaction and instead respond to problems before they actually cause users to complain.
Being able to pre-empt and fix problems before they become service affecting is a major innovation in service delivery. When problems do occur the diagnostic information provided by Experience Manager not only enables the right resource to be deployed to effect a fix – Right First Time, it enables IT support to correctly identify third party service or bandwidth provider that may be causing the problem.
