To proactively and accurately monitor your telecoms infrastructure around the globe, Cyara has invested in ensuring it has the most comprehensive and reliable global infrastructure. We are proud to provide coverage in over 80 [update: now 140+] countries and support more than 90 fixed-line carriers. In addition, we have over 160 mobile networks available worldwide with a presence in more than 130 locations.
Our global infrastructure
Cyara’s vast coverage allows you to test locations and carriers that are relevant to your organization and its individual needs. The resultant insights allow you to better understand exactly what your customers experience when contacting your numbers and any issues they may be facing. By proactively monitoring your numbers, you save time and money and prevent potential losses in sales or reputational damage caused by outages or poor quality. Additionally, you benefit from testing by ensuring you provide your customers with an enhanced customer experience (CX).
Our customers frequently tell us that they previously relied heavily on their callers to report any issues. This often took a long time and many problems went unreported, leaving these organizations in the dark. This reactive approach has negative consequences for customer loyalty, revenue and reputation. This is why we firmly believe and encourage organizations like yours to take a proactive approach to continuous voice testing.
Following a recent review of our anonymised testing data between April 2022 and mid-May 2023, we made a number of interesting observations.
Connection rates
While residential phone calls can encounter a “busy tone” when a number is dialed, business lines are configured to accept multiple calls simultaneously. Capacity management is required at the destination end of the call, but many network factors may prevent these calls from successful completion. Today’s callers expect to place a call at any time and be connected with your organization, without issue.
The top performing countries in terms of their connection rates during this period were:
While Iceland shows the highest average connection success rate, it also shows variability, with a recorded connection minimum of 87.39% during this period. For most organizations, network stability is a highly-valued feature and should not be underestimated. Less variation, as seen in Australia, is preferred due to its consistency and reliability.
In general, connection rate success is expected to be 100%, with callers anticipating getting through to your organization whenever they choose to make contact. However, a number of the countries we examined did not achieve this. The worst performing countries for connection rates are highlighted in the table below:
Audio quality
When your audio quality is performing well, the environment is suitable for a conversation. But, when your audio quality is poor, it quickly becomes a source of distraction and annoyance for both callers and agents. Research also shows that as your audio quality diminishes, so too does your credibility. This is because reduced quality requires an intensified effort by your listeners and has even been found to affect callers’ emotional states.
Too often, audio quality gets reduced due to network capacity issues which result in audio compression. Technical problems during network transit can also result in packet loss or other issues that degrade the audio quality.
Cyara utilizes PESQ (Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality) for global in-country number testing. This objective and recognized industry-standard for audio quality measurement provides a score from -0.5 to 4.5, with higher scores indicating better audio quality. PESQ takes into consideration characteristics such as:
- Call volume
- Audio sharpness
- Background noise
- Audio interference
- Variable latency or lags in audio
- Clipping
The top performing countries for audio quality during the period examined were:
And the countries with the lowest average audio quality were as follows:
The key results
Based on our analyses, Switzerland and Sweden stand out as top performers for both connection rate and audio quality. Each is a mature economy that has strong network management processes, they also invest heavily to support their network development, change management and capacity augmentation. All of these help to maintain their high levels of quality and stability.
It’s interesting to note that Estonia, which ranked poorly in terms of connection rate, ranked very strongly for audio quality. It’s plausible that their recent robust economic development may have put their communications infrastructure under increased pressure.
We also saw that Italy experienced a positive change in their audio quality from mid-July 2022, this is suggestive of network upgrades being completed during this period. Previously, the average PESQ score was 3.5, while the subsequent average was significantly more consistent at around 3.84.
During the first 90 days of our dataset, we observed that Singapore experienced an average PESQ score of 3.69. In the latter 90 days, this improved to 3.86, which demonstrates slow, but steady improvements. Additionally, China has seen ongoing variation that may be associated with the pressures of rapidly increasing service demand. With this expanding demand for services, China’s networks may struggle to add capacity at the “correct” time, and may compress some audio to preserve their capacity.
Conclusion
Reduced connection rates could mean that your customers are unable to connect with you. Research by Aircall shows that approximately 85% of these callers will not attempt to call back. Instead they’ll likely turn to your competitor or abandon the purchase altogether. Poor audio quality performance means that your callers and agents will have to more actively listen to participate and follow a conversation. Worse still it may cause your callers to become frustrated and simply hang up as the quality is too poor to allow for a meaningful conversation, leading to negative reputational damage for your brand and potential revenue loss.
To provide your customers with the best service and CX, it’s essential that you test your infrastructure, so you will be alerted to issues and are capable of resolving these promptly before they impact your callers. With Cyara Voice Assure, you have the flexibility and power to accurately replicate your CX from anywhere in the world and experience the call path exactly as your customers do.
