UC Network Management Featured Article

The Need for Quality Monitoring in the UC Environment

While many businesses today are using unified communications as a way of broadening their capabilities and saving money, not all of them are doing it successfully.  UC platforms can differ greatly in quality and features, so companies need to be savvy about ensuring that any solutions they choose will provide a great customer experience (CX).

In Nemertes Research’s 2018-2019 Unified Communications and Collaboration study, report authors pointed out that the in today's UC technologyenvironment, “the need for high uptime, quality sound and video, troubleshooting and root-cause detection, along with detailed analytics, has become even more vital.”

Companies need a robust set of diagnostic tools designed to monitor the components of their unified communication and collaboration(UCC) environments, including bandwidth, SBCs, routers, cloud infrastructure, endpoints, encryption and more.  This is especially critical in the contact center, where unified communications solutions – and their quality – can make or break customer relationships.

Solutions such as Nectar’s CX Assuranceadvanced CX testing and monitoring solution, first announced in September of this year, provide automated functional regression and load testing and monitoring of call routing, application performance and capacity for both contact center and interactive voice response (IVR) environments.

CX Assurance by Nectar offers contact center and other businesses a host of features, including:

• Auto discovery – This feature provides automated reverse-engineering of calls flows, speeding up the ever-changing landscape of dynamic IVRs, and enables more accurate and timelier customer experience monitoring of programmed flows without intervention, using accurate speech recognition.
• Real-time alerts – These alerts allow customer support employees to be automatically notified via email and/or SMS text messaging when issues are identified.  PESQ voice quality scores determine the variation of sound quality from original voice quality prompts to those on the call.
• Voice automation – This feature offers powerful text-to-speech and speech recognition functionality that, in combination with call recording, enables a high level of quality control and monitoring.
• Voice quality scoring – This automated scoring functionality uses advanced voice quality monitoring, identifying clicks and noises on the line, artifacts generated by packet loss, intermittent gaps in audio during playback and stutter/jitter due to packet loss to determine voice quality of calls.

For all the latest technologies and trends that will help businesses achieve higher levels of operational efficiency, deliver enhanced customer experiences, and discover new revenue opportunities, don’t miss the TechSuperShow in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, February 12-14.  The event combines educational content, networking opportunities, and an exhibit hall full of technology vendors across all areas of technology impacting businesses today – including SD-WAN, artificial intelligence-drive Future of Work, AIOps, Blockchain, communications and collaboration, managed services, and much more.

Edited by Erik Linask