High VoIP quality works more effectively for your business
VoIP technologies which today may be manifested as unified communications, IP telephony or remote enterprise communications have been responsible for a great deal of productivity improvements over the past decade. Employees have become more accessible in more ways and are more flexible in their workflows and processes than ever before. That's why virtually all enterprises have trialled VoIP and most enterprises are in the process of migrating users from traditional circuit switched telephony to an IP-based implementation. Yet, despite these many benefits and the mature availability and competition in the market for solutions, there are very few large enterprises today that are completely IP-based.
The slow migration to VoIP solutions has many contributing factors including the long lifecycles of telephony applications that are continuing to work effectively a decade or more after introduction, the daunting logistics and installation cost of deploying thousands of new phones to users’ desks, or the new Power-over-Ethernet switching infrastructures, or even the attendant changes in telephone user interfaces that will simultaneously confuse users and initiate a flood of support calls. One of the least understood is the impact of poor quality on the user experience, beyond the increase in complaints and support calls.
What many enterprises have recognised is that VoIP quality cannot be maintained with the thinking of the past. In circuit switched implementations, standardisation and single-vendor approaches led to one throat-to-choke, as it were, and quality could be assured. In modern IP network environments, where real time traffic is mixed with store-and-forward applications on a converged network, the dynamic traffic often overwhelms the mechanisms meant to control them. As it turns out, IP networks have become far more dynamic, far more complex and therefore far more difficult to predict and control. The multi-layered converged network – physical layer, switching layer, routing layer and application layer – introduces unique operating, addressing, multi-vendor, security and integration challenges. Each of these 'degrees of freedom' raises the impact and risk of mis-configurations, functionality drift and unintended user or application interactions that interfere with, or contribute to low VoIP quality.
These issues most often manifest themselves as defects in the quality of real time communications – as jitter, delay and packet loss. But, they are not just limited to the network operation. Endpoints such as IP phones, softphone clients running on laptops, IP video codecs, cameras and telepresence suites and applications servers such as conferencing bridges, directories, messaging and session recording servers each contributes to the potential for problems.
There are compelling business advantages to delivering high quality VoIP services in your enterprise implementation. Independent research has shown that businesses that are able to get their VoIP quality consistently high through the constant measurement and rapid response to defects and experience-affecting problems occurring anywhere in the end-to-end communications flow, have 19% higher revenue per employee, 4 x more customer satisfaction and 3 x more employee satisfaction. As well, Psytechnics customers are able to reduce their support costs with fewer calls to the help desk noting VoIP quality problems, proactive troubleshooting of predicted problems and faster responses to experience-affecting problems when they do occur.
Psytechnics features increase VoIP quality and user satisfaction
Psytechnics takes an end-to-end view of the VoIP quality challenge. We analyse the operating characteristics of endpoints and monitor the attributes and configuration settings that most contribute to quality VoIP calls. We monitor real time communications streams and analyse the voice signal as well as the transport characteristics to form a unique and complete picture of the users experience. The Psytechnics Experience Manager then compiles these data inputs to form the most complete predictive view of the user experience and uses that information to recommend alerts, alarms and ultimately corrective action such that:
| • | Support professionals can manage VoIP quality through real time predictive analysis of session-by-session experience |
| • | IT staff can measure experience impacts of specific gateway ports, codecs and endpoints |
| • | Detailed call visibility reports significantly reduce operations and support costs and resource requirements for real time VoIP services |
| • | The highly accurate problem diagnosis enables accelerated corrective actions |
| • | An objective view of VoIP quality before-after state for project signoff when implementing new sites, new infrastructures or application upgrades |
| • | The rare ability to pinpoint sources of VoIP quality faults, including external service providers is available to Psytechnics customers |
Call quality management is a key issue that has to be addressed
A major factor in support costs associated with maintaining user satisfaction and confidence, are the tools and processes used by support engineers for the management of VoIP quality. Many deployments rely on management processes and tools originally deployed in an all-data IP network. The converged network, however is a very different environment.Legacy tools are almost always network, vendor or device centric, focussing on network performance, quality of service, bandwidth, and device utilisation. As it turns out, few of these factors have much to do with the users' actual experience or perception of VoIP quality. They can continue in many cases to play a role in network and device management, but a different and complementary solution is required for delivery of the highest VoIP quality.
The complementary solution must provide a window into the users experience and the overall real time communications service levels. Psytechnics groundbreaking solution 'Experience Manager' provides the platform for overcoming operational blindness. It cures the single biggest operational weakness – visibility of live, VoIP quality performance on an end-to-end basis.
The unique Psytechnics visibility is delivered per stream, per call and in real time enables the support organisation to proactively maintain user satisfaction and with the use of the right resources at the right time, accelerate problem resolution. Arming the support professional with the information to proactively monitor and respond to experience-affecting problems significantly changes the speed and economics of support.
