Key takeaways
- Voice quality testing measures audio clarity, latency, and connection quality to confirm customers can clearly hear and be heard during calls.
- Poor voice quality leads to customer frustration, miscommunication, and damaged brand reputation.
- Automated testing using PESQ standards provides objective, around-the-clock monitoring that manual testing cannot match.
- Proactive testing enables businesses to identify and resolve issues before they impact customers.
Whatever business you are in, it’s essential to guarantee your global communications are operating to the highest standard. This is especially important when it comes to voice and video calls as these tend to be customers’ preferred method of communication for high-value and high-priority decisions.
Poor voice quality affecting your personal calls can be frustrating. But, when your business relies on voice calls, ignoring the issue is not an option. If your business operates globally, the experiences of your customers’ can vary drastically, depending on where they’re located, and which contact number they’re calling. The only way to know exactly what your callers are experiencing is by testing the voice call quality across your network by originating the calls in the same way as your customers are.
Managing your customer experience in an ever-changing network environment requires a watchful eye, keen attention to detail, and toolsets which are able to support your needs and identify issues before they become a customer impacting problem.
Voice testing is essential because poor audio quality leads to customer frustration, miscommunication, and damaged brand reputation. Voice quality testing is the process of measuring and evaluating audio clarity, latency, and connection quality in contact center communications to confirm customers can clearly hear and be heard during calls.
Key benefits of voice quality testing:
- Protect brand reputation and revenues.
- Validate clear customer-agent communication.
- Identify network issues proactively before they impact customers.
- Meet carrier SLA requirements with objective data.
How does automated voice testing work?
Many of our customers have expressed that they previously used manual voice testing. This often involved asking a remote colleague or even a family member abroad to call a specific contact number in that country. This individual would then rate various aspects of the quality of the call. However, their experience and perception of voice quality was subjective; they were often not able to provide an accurate measurement of characteristics; and critically they were not available around the clock to conduct test calls.
Manual vs. automated voice testing
A more scientific and unbiased method of testing your voice call quality is to use a pre-recorded voice sample which has optimal quality. A test can then compare the outputted audio to the perfect voice file to create a fully trustworthy and objective indicator of the true quality the listener is experiencing. With proactive testing of your voice quality, you’ll be able to spot straight away if there are any issues.
- Manual testing: Subjective ratings, limited availability, inconsistent measurements, not scalable
- Automated testing: Objective PESQ-based scoring, 24/7 availability, consistent and accurate measurements, fully scalable across global locations
By originating your test calls from an in-country location, the voice quality test allows you to uncover the true experience of callers from different parts of the world, while having full control of how and when your test calls are conducted.
What is PESQ?
Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) is the ITU-T P.862 international standard for objectively measuring speech quality. It produces a mean opinion score (MOS) on a scale of 1.0 to 4.5, where higher scores indicate better audio quality. PESQ is widely recognized as the industry benchmark for voice quality assessment.
The call recordings are analyzed and compared with the original voice sample using PESQ. It accounts for audio characteristics such as:
- Call volume
- Sharpness of audio
- Clipping
- Background noise
- Variable latency
- Audio lags
- Audio interference
What causes poor voice quality in customer calls?
Common voice quality issues include:
- Jitter: Variation in packet arrival times causing choppy or distorted audio
- Latency: Delay between when speech is transmitted and received, causing conversation overlap
- Packet loss: Missing data packets resulting in gaps or dropouts in audio
- Echo: Sound reflecting back to the speaker, creating distracting audio feedback
This allows you to test the quality of voice calls on mobile and fixed-lines; toll and toll-free services, along with VoIP and PSTN, using an internationally recognized standard. With these irrefutable and ITU recognized results, you can make necessary improvements to your audio, hold carriers to pre-agreed service level agreements (SLAs), and make more informed decisions about call routing and carrier-sourcing.
Through regular testing, you have reliable data to understand and benchmark the quality your customers are experiencing at a given time, as well as insights on how this varies in different locations around the world.
With Cyara Voice Assure, you have complete control over the scheduling and frequency of your testing process and in the event that issues arise on your numbers, you will be notified immediately. Our powerful reporting and analysis features will assist you with identifying the root cause of the issue and help to prevent future issues.
Why is voice testing critical for contact centers?
1. Protect your brand reputation and revenues
The main aim of voice quality monitoring is to identify issues before they impact your customers so that you can protect your brand. In turn, this helps to confirm your revenue is not negatively affected. Any degradation in your number’s quality will lead to a poorer customer experience, which will ultimately lead to negative brand perception and lower levels of loyalty and spend. Staying on top of voice quality issues through insights and alerts will allow you to make adjustments to your call routes ‘on the fly’, so that you can proactively manage quality, customer experience, and reputation.
2. Help your team to identify and resolve issues quicker
Proactive voice quality testing means you are alerted to issues as soon as they happen. While your engineering team may be monitoring the performance of your internal network, they have no control over and typically, no visibility of what’s occurring externally. As such issue identification tends to be a result of customer service complaints eventually trickling back to the engineering team. Sometimes this doesn’t happen and even when it does, the fault may have already been ‘live’ for a significant time before the team is made aware and can work to resolve the problem. Proactive monitoring eliminates these gaps.
3. Test the true quality being provided by your carriers
Organizations rely on their telecommunications carriers to provide a high-level of service in line with SLAs. However, even global telecom companies often need to rely on their strategic and business partners to correctly and effectively pass audio along the full call path. International call paths in particular, will have a variety of potential routes with multiple hops and handovers through differing carriers. This leads to significant challenges in maintaining optimal call quality and troubleshooting issues.
Voice Assure provides you with all the information and call detail records you require to verify that you and your customers are receiving optimal quality along all parts of the call journey.
Conclusion
The quality of your calls and audio is critical to the success of your business. Voice quality monitoring and testing provides you with invaluable insights into the experience of your customers. It enables you to eradicate gaps, resolve issues more quickly and optimize your customer experience and brand reputation.
Voice Assure helps you to understand how your number’s audio compares to our benchmarks, along with your own historical data. Test results also have the power to reassure your customers that you are being proactive regarding voice quality and working to verify you provide them with the best service at all times.
Most importantly, proactive voice quality testing is pivotal to guarantee that you receive early warnings whenever issues do occur, and that you have the insights to quickly fix them.
Frequently Asked Questions
Voice quality testing is the process of measuring and evaluating audio clarity, latency, and connection quality in communications to confirm customers can clearly hear and be heard during calls.
Voice testing is important because it helps businesses identify audio issues before they impact customers, protecting brand reputation, ensuring clear communication, and maintaining customer satisfaction.
The primary metric is PESQ (Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality), which produces a MOS score from 1.0 to 4.5. Testing also measures call volume, audio sharpness, clipping, background noise, latency, and interference.
Manual testing relies on subjective human ratings and limited availability, while automated testing uses objective PESQ standards to provide consistent, scalable, 24/7 monitoring with accurate measurements.
Manual testing relies on human perception, making it subjective and inconsistent. Testers are often unable to accurately measure specific audio characteristics and are not available around the clock to conduct calls.
Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) is the ITU standard for measuring audio quality. It compares a call’s audio output against an original high-quality voice sample to produce an objective, trustworthy measurement of what callers actually hear.
PESQ accounts for call volume, sharpness of audio, clipping, background noise, variable latency, audio lags, and audio interference.
Originating test calls from within a specific country replicates the true experience of local callers, revealing quality issues that may vary by region or contact number.
By identifying issues before customers are impacted, proactive testing allows teams to adjust call routes on the fly, preventing poor experiences that lead to negative brand perception and reduced customer loyalty.
Proactive testing alerts engineering teams to issues the moment they occur, eliminating the delay caused by waiting for customer complaints to surface and reducing the time a fault remains unresolved.
