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Transforming Customer Experience With An Audio Quality Confidence Metric

by Matthew Avery, Performance Specialist, Spearline Labs - October 27, 2016

Transforming Customer Experience with an Audio Quality Confidence Metric

According to our real-world data, over 2,000 call tests experience failures each month. How many of yours do?

Spearline Labs helps clients to measure, monitor, and improve call center customer experience and contact number / conference bridge availability through our global web-based platform that tests in-country in real-time. Our technology helps multinational clients identify why calls fail to reach contact centres, fail to connect, experience poor audio quality, and finds broken IVR pathways by simulating actual caller experience in-country. Clients can control their testing through our easy to use platform with real-time reporting and alerts, custom dashboards, and detailed analytics.

Before working with us, these failures cost our clients $millions, and lost sales they never knew about. We call it the Spearline Paradox - the call works, but it doesn't work. That is the call connected customer with agent, but didn't give you the service or revenue you're paying for. Without Spearline's automated platform to generate real-time audio quality scores to the ITU-T PESQ protocol, you'll be completely unaware of such calls. You don't realise how much these issues affect your business and it could be costing you millions!

Here’s an example of our Spearline Value Calculator. This is a simplified version, we can do a more in-depth analysis for your business.

Assume 50% of calls are service and 50% are generating sales.

Call Failures

Concurrent call agents - 1,000
Calls per agent per day - 40
Cost per call failure - $0.46
Failure rate - 3.82%
Annual cost of call failures = $114,218

Misses Sales

Concurrent call agents - 1,000
Calls per agent per day - 40
Cost of missed call - $100
Average close rate - 15%
Annual lost sales due to call failures = $3,724,500

Annual revenue loss (call failures + missed sales) = $3,838,718

Summary of service;

1. POP in 59 countries - the world's largest network of in-country testing

2. 24/7 x 365 support team that listen for call failures and ensure client is alerted
3. Automated platform eliminates human error from the testing process
4. Number performance can be benchmarked against our 20 million tests to-date
5. Testing managed through

Case Study - Contact Center

The Challenge

Our customer is a large multinational which has operations across the world. They operate a number of different contact centres for sales and customer support functions. Across the entire organisation they have hundreds of toll and toll free numbers using a variety of different infrastructures and carriers. After an initial pilot project with Spearline Labs we established that there were a number of significant issues with some numbers. The significant issues that typically affect customers would be a total failure to connect the call, silence on the line (i.e. a failure to reach any menu options at all) or audio quality which was below acceptable thresholds. The customer was quite shocked by the variety and extent of the problems encountered and decided to instigate a larger number of test calls across their entire network in order to investigate further. Spearline Labs began to set up tests for the customer in each country to be tested. The test calls are placed from within the country being tested using our worldwide network of servers thereby exactly replicating the callers’ experience.

The Test

The test call which can be scheduled or manually activated is routed though the customer’s call centre menu to a hidden option which plays an audio track which is recorded and analysed for quality using an international standard audio test (PESQ). The result of each test is displayed immediately and the recording of the test is available for playback at any time for confirmation of the result of the test. The test detects non-connection, silence, IVR failures and audio quality. The customer decides on what actions to take depending on the results and decides on what level of alerts and reporting is required. In this case, the customer requested immediate alerts for failures of mission critical numbers which in this case was done by a Spearline Labs automated call to a designated number. Our customer support manager maintained a daily contact with the customer to keep them informed of major issues and to help them resolve these issues where it required intervention with for instance a carrier in a particular country/region.

This means that while the level of failures improved - in this case because a large number of numbers no longer in service were finally taken out of service from our customer’s numbers list - the remaining numbers in service suffered from poor audio quality in particular countries. With those countries identified, we were able to inform our customer of the individual underperforming numbers and help them to deal with their carrier to undertake a programme to upgrade audio quality.

Please contact matthew.avery@spearline.com to book a 20 minute online demonstration.


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