Over the past several years, the rise of remote work and digital interactions has completely transformed our world. From remote offices to virtual machines in cloud data centers, everything has become abstract, greatly impacting the ability to manage customer experiences and troubleshoot issues.
Cyara empowers businesses to test, monitor, and support WebRTC-based applications.
Digital experience (DX) is a new term that is used to describe the need to measure, analyze, and monitor the quality of experience that employees receive when accessing a company’s digital services.
While quite a few DX monitoring services promise an end-to-end solution to address these modern challenges, they are often entirely missing or falling short in a key service that all call centers need to maintain day-to-day operations: voice calls.
User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)
The internet is built on top of two main transport protocols, User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Simply put, a transport protocol is what we use to pass data from one machine to another on the internet.
UDP can be seen and thought of as the spartan, “low level,” protocol. It does the bare minimum of sending data across the network, offering no guarantees of deliverability or even ordering. For example, if you send two pieces of data, you never really know if they were received, or if they were received in the correct order.
TCP, on the other hand, is the rich man’s solution. It creates a “connection” between two devices over the network, guaranteeing that whatever is being sent is received and is in the correct order. How? Let’s call it magic (or more concretely, retransmission). It also has its own built-in congestion control mechanism to make sure the network doesn’t get overstrained. But whether that’s effective or not is another question.
This table offers an easy-to-understand comparison of UDP and TCP:
In simple terms, TCP is the web and voice calls are UDP.
Web and TCP
When it comes to the modern internet, TCP is used on a daily basis. For instance, HTTP and WebSocket, the two main internet protocols that web browsers use to receive web pages, are both built on TCP, with only minor exceptions.
Whenever you want to read text, look at an image, or watch a video, you need to have a reliable connection to ensure that all of the pieces are there and in the current order. That’s where TCP comes in. From underneath the HTTP protocol, TCP fetches the page content or images that have been embedded within it.
Voice Calls and UDP
By contrast, imagine that a call center agent is conducting a voice or video call in the browser. In this instance, it’s important that the agent uses a protocol called WebRTC as opposed to HTTP or WebSocket.
Why? As important as information reliability is, latency and interactivity are necessary to the agent’s success. UDP enables the agent to conduct a conversation without any delay, whereas reliability built around retransmissions (such as with TCP) doesn’t offer any low latency guarantees. With TCP, information will be sent in the correct order, but it might be too late.
For this reason, WebRTC (and VoIP protocols in general), opted for the use of UDP-based communication mechanisms.
Why DX Focuses on the Web and TCP
For many people, most of the day is spent on the web, accessing information from web browsers through TCP communications. For example, IT and security teams focus a lot of effort and attention on TCP-related network and firewall configurations, making sure employees have proper access to the relevant services. Meanwhile, UDP traffic and VoIP considerations are a lesser part of their daily focus.
That’s one of the main reasons why DX systems focus on TCP-based traffic measurements and monitoring: it’s a well-known and well-defined scenario that captures the majority of the market.
Why a Web Focus is Wrong for Voice and Call Centers
VoIP, video meetings, call centers all rely on UDP traffic. For this reason, it’s counter-intuitive to monitor your employees’ devices to determine how well their TCP traffic is doing.
When the network gets optimized for TCP traffic, UDP is often neglected. For example, several years ago, a service provider wanted to stress-test his service for approximately 100 video meeting users. However, when users joined the meetings from outside the country, he experienced a lack of bandwidth and huge packet loss. While it appeared that there was sufficient bandwidth, the firewall rules throttled UDP data, causing huge packet losses and congestion for these calls.
This example clearly illustrates the point that looking at quality of experience from the lens of web traffic leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to interactive, real-time communications of voice and video traffic.
Put differently, an employee can have a great network from a bandwidth perspective, allowing him to watch YouTube videos all day and access his emails and documents with ease. But he still won’t be able to conduct a decent voice call. And that means painful experiences for your customers.
The Need for Better Call Center Monitoring
If your employees/users need to conduct a lot of voice and video calls from their devices while working remotely, then it’s up to you to ensure their network and network configuration is adequate. And, you also need to be able to guide them through the process of improving their connectivity.
While your IT team may have been up to the task in the past, each employee’s remote environment represents an individual office that simply can’t be set up and managed by your IT team. Whereas IT teams could once wander the halls of your physical contact centers, they are blindfolded when it comes to supporting your remote employees.
The fact of the matter is that a DX monitoring solution isn’t usually equipped to handle these circumstances. So, you need to find another solution that is able to properly monitor your VoIP and WebRTC calls.
Cyara’s probeRTC & qualityRTC
At Cyara, we’re dedicated to providing effective testing and monitoring tools for the WebRTC market that serve as an alternative to other DX solutions. Our probeRTC and qualityRTC are zero-download solutions that can measure and assist in troubleshooting network issues related to interactive conversations.
If you’re interested in discovering how you can improve your visibility of the employee’s readiness and ability to conduct high quality calls, contact us.
