Poor VoIP Audio? Maybe Don’t Blame Office Phone Systems?

If you’re new to VoIP audio, welcome! (What took you so long?)

You’re doubtless aware that using VoIP means you can provide a more flexible service (that also happens to cost less.)

But there’s a chance that the actual audio quality isn’t meeting your expectations. You’re not alone. And although you might point the finger of blame at your hardware, the problem may be bigger than the office phone systems.

In truth, there are several factors for you to investigate.

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What messes with audio? (other than office phone systems)

You can take a tech-heavy look at the factors which impact VoIP audio right here. This post is a more ‘tech-light’ overview, to refresh our memories.

It’s understandable that users might blame their actual, in-the-room phone systems when audio is patchy. You might want to throw a few headsets out of the window or kick a phone. (They’re expensive though, so don’t.)

Take a breath and bear in mind that your hardware is one small link in a giant network. There are plenty of ways for that network to go wrong.

Think about those first 1000 miles

The global network is huge. Think of something big. Yes, the global network is bigger than that. So that’s the gauntlet your calls have to run, way before your office phone systems are involved.

There are three elements that can affect call quality:

• The quality and location of app hosting
• The quality and location of media channel hosting
• The quality of telecoms routes

It doesn’t matter if that’s meaningless to you — all will be explained. Let’s have a look.

The quality and location of app hosting

Your call center has a ‘brain’, and it’s out on a server somewhere. Right now, that brain is making thousands of decisions; things like the next action for IVR, or how to handle a caller’s query.

The amazing service you want to offer usually means giving customers more options and more sophisticated options. But all of the sophistication you’re adding inevitably means a bigger burden on your call center’s brain.

So… it’s pretty important to find out where exactly that brain is and whether it can handle the challenge.

The quality and location of media channel hosting

Application hosting is your call center’s brain. That must make media channel hosting its voice. We’re going to ask the same basic question here: where in the world is that server/voice hosted? If you’re making the voice travel a long way across the network to reach you, there will be delays.

I won’t get into RTP or SIP proxies today. The important take-away is that media channel hosting is one of the larger contributors to audio quality at this stage. That means it’s also one of the biggest contributors to the success of your call center.

The quality of telecoms routes

Obviously, your telecoms routes affect quality. If the phone numbers you purchase are routed through a network that’s too distant from your customers, your customers are going to notice.

You’ll be familiar with the common problems this causes:

• Latency — when there’s a delay between one person speaking and the other person hearing. You’ll know from any bad Skype calls you’ve made that even a tiny delay is disruptive.
• Jitters — when your calls sound like a remix from the world’s worst DJ. VoIP sends audio in discreet ‘packets’, and you get jitters when the packets arrive in the wrong order.

You have almost no room for error with this. The margin between ‘acceptable latency’ and ‘distracting latency’ is 150 milliseconds — just half the time it takes to blink.

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If you can optimize these three things, you’ll be well on your way to providing the best possible audio. You should think about these long before you worry about office phone systems.

Now let’s assume you’ve already covered that. Should we look at the hardware now?

Nope. Not even close.

The last mile

Your signal has travelled around the world. You do not want it to fall apart in the last mile.

The ‘last mile’ means the internet connection in your actual physical location. This is relatively easy to understand because we deal with internet connectivity all the time.

It’s not exactly like your home connection though. That partly because a business can’t just turn a faulty router off and on again.

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The last 100 meters

Now we’re closing in on the end. The last 100 meters (we’re switching to metric) means your internal network. Every business needs to do some work on their network before they can reliably handle high call volumes. That’s actually something we help business do all the time.

What level of quality you can reach mostly depends on whether you’re able to isolate voice traffic from data. If not, you can still achieve decent audio, although it may take some extra work.

(We look at that in detail here.)

What should you look at first?

Well, really anywhere except your office phone systems.

Call centers do need really good hardware. But there’s so much more going on behind VoIP audio that affects quality. Blaming your phones when because audio is bad is like blaming the tyres when your car won’t start.

You can think of babelforce as car mechanics for your audio. Our multi-carrier platform links up over 300 integrated service providers and offers the highest possible quality and reliability.

You can read more about why that’s a good thing (hint: better call centers) and book a demo right here.