It’s an omnichannel world, however voice calling is THE most essential component of any communication stack.
For many consumers of products and services, it remains the go-to way to reach out to organisations with which they need to interact. And, for enterprises, a sudden inability to connect effectively via voice with customers or colleagues can be catastrophic.
Much of today’s business telephony is cloud-powered VoIP; often routed via the giant communication and collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex and others. The resulting efficiencies are well-known, however those platforms’ voice calling functionalities sometimes lack the monitoring, fault-finding, and analytics needed to support 24/7 dependability.
Moreover, an enterprise-scale Teams or Webex system may be multi-geographical, multi-site, and comprise hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of voice endpoints scattered far and wide.
How can you be sure they are all working as they should? Constant testing is the answer.
“Cloud-based telephony is now justifiably the default for enterprises, but often it’s all managed off-site by a central team with very limited performance visibility – if calls to one line or another are interrupted for some reason, it’s possible for the issue to go unreported for weeks,” says Tim Jalland, Solution Manager at leading digital workplace management software provider VOSS Solutions, whose Insights digital experience monitoring platform has baked-in synthetic testing functionality that ensures continuity.
“Automatically tracking voice performance and then detecting and diagnosing a fault is essential. In the absence of that occurring, enterprises leave themselves exposed.”
It’s certainly the case that 24/7 voice uptime has an increased level of importance to many enterprise organisations compared to, say, the ability to communicate via email or messaging. Choosing to call suggests urgency or the need for an instantaneous conversation.
Prior to the unification of communication and collaboration tools, telephony was largely an on-premises affair: local PBXs and on-site technical support personnel on hand to ensure the phones were working and fix them if they were not.
The VOSS solution responds to the new, modern challenges of the cloud-based, centrally-managed model via the deployment of ‘call digital experience monitors’ – backend bots that simulate user activity by making regular inbound and outbound calls to designated numbers that are redirected to agents, engineers, or answerphones.
In the event of an issue, the solution triggers a response procedure configured against certain thresholds – logging the condition, raising an alert, sending a notification, or taking a specific self-healing configuration action.
All data related to this synthetic testing is captured and presented via clear and easy-to-understand reporting dashboards that track alerts and report on responses.
“The big platforms such as Teams, Webex, and the like have some limited in-built analytics functionality but it tends to relate only to their native tools and features, not third-party telephony that is being routed through them,” says Jalland.
“For example, an organisation’s Teams performance dashboard may be all green when, in fact, there is a serious telephony issue. Similarly, telephone network operators provide very limited visibility into the actual service they provide. You may be able to visit their website and check general connectivity status, but there is unlikely to be much information available. Instead, you would have to raise a ticket and perhaps be forced to wait a long time for a response.
With the VOSS Insights solution, the testing, monitoring, diagnosis, and fix is a fast, smooth, and fully-automated process.”
There’s no doubt that taking a chance on the effectiveness and reliability of enterprise telephony is a risk, as voice calling is simply too mission-critical.
Plus, issues can only be resolved once they have been revealed – and if you don’t look, you don’t find…
To learn more about how VOSS Solutions can help your and your customers’ business benefit from synthetic telephony testing, click here.
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