Have you ever had a call drop right when you were about to close a deal? Or, have you experienced the dreaded “can you hear me now?” during a crucial support call? In today’s fast-evolving customer experience (CX) landscape, quality network performance is more than just a luxury. Especially within complex CCaaS and CPaaS ecosystems, network reliability is necessary to form the backbone of seamless customer interactions.
Discover how Cyara can help you effectively test and monitor WebRTC-based solutions.
Whether you’re managing a remote workforce, running a call center, or simply aiming to enhance service reliability, the efficiency of your network directly impacts productivity and user satisfaction. It’s likely you’ve encountered frustrating network slowdowns or disruptions that have left you scrambling to find solutions.
That’s where Cyara’s probeRTC and qualityRTC come into play. These tools provide precise, real-time insights into network conditions, so you can proactively address issues ahead of user impact, deliver quality interactions, and optimize your company’s organizational efficiency.
Use Cases for probeRTC
probeRTC was initially built for contact centers to continuously monitor the QoS of all internet connections on their premises.
Continuous Monitoring for Contact Centers
Scenario: A contact center has two internet connections.
Solution: The contact center deploys probeRTC on both connections to continuously monitor the quality of service. This continuous monitoring helps in proactively observing gaps and issues with the day-to-day usage of the internet connections.
Benefit: By running probeRTC on both connections, the contact center can ensure high service levels, promptly identify and address any connectivity issues, and maintain uninterrupted customer interactions. The contact center can also use the probeRTC graphs for the SLA enforcement with their ISP and other providers.
Addressing Remote Agent Issues During Lockdown
Scenario: During lockdown, many contact centers faced issues with their remote agents. Although qualityRTC helped diagnose and resolve many connectivity issues, some cases showed good results during diagnostics, call quality was poor.
Solution: Customers started using probeRTC to gather data over extended periods (e.g., a week or three days). probeRTC runs in the background, collecting data without disturbing an agent’s day-to-day work.
Benefit: This approach helped identify true network performance patterns, as it prevented agents from temporarily improving their network conditions during diagnostics. By continuously monitoring the network, probeRTC provided a more accurate picture of the agents’ working conditions.
Pre-Sales and Onboarding Tool
Scenario: When onboarding new offices or customers to a contact center system, it’s critical to ensure the new location’s network infrastructure is robust.
Solution: CPaaS or CCaaS providers use probeRTC to monitor the new location for at least one week before the full adoption of the new software. This proactive monitoring ensures that the infrastructure can support the new system without any issues.
Benefit: This preemptive strategy reduces the likelihood of network-related adoption issues, making the transition to new systems seamless for new branches, locations, or internet connections.
Monitoring Internet Service Provider (ISP) SLA Compliance
Scenario: Companies need to ensure their ISPs are meeting the agreed SLAs.
Solution: probeRTC can be used to continuously monitor the performance of the ISP against the SLA metrics, such as bandwidth, latency, jitter, and uptime.
Benefit: By using probeRTC, companies can gather concrete data to hold their ISPs accountable, ensuring they receive the level of service they’re paying for and quickly addressing any deviations from the SLA.
Let’s now explore how integrating probeRTC into your network management strategy can elevate your service capabilities to meet the high standards expected by today’s digital consumers.
qualityRTC: Streamlining Connectivity and Quality Assessments
Technical teams in contact centers and CPaaS industries rely on their ability to quickly diagnosis and resolve errors related to WebRTC connectivity and quality. Without the right tools in place, it can incredibly slow and tiring for them to maintain high quality standards. For example, time-consuming traditional methods require extensive involvement and know-how from both users and support teams.
qualityRTC makes it possible for IT teams to quickly resolve network issues, without the hassle. It only takes a single click for users to initiate tests, and your team will receive all the necessary information within minutes. This self-service capability empowers users and equips your IT team with all the data they need to provide support.
Continuous Voice Quality Monitoring, Simplified
Building on qualityRTC’s foundation, probeRTC was specifically designed for RTC (Real-Time Communication), allowing you to continuously monitor voice quality. With this tool, you can ensure crystal-clear connections for both remote employees and in-office settlings.
Seamless Integration and Deployment:
It’s easy to integrate probeRTC into your existing infrastructure. Users can set up a probe directly from their web browser, without any additional installations. This flexibility allows for seamless integration into various operational environments.
Once activated, probeRTC automatically conducts periodic network tests using qualityRTC, ensuring continuous monitoring of the connection. All data collected is then stored and visualized in a clear, accessible dashboard, facilitating easy review and analysis by both users and support staff.
Intuitive Data Presentation:
Results from probeRTC’s monitoring are presented in detailed charts, providing a comprehensive view of network performance, tailored specifically to your needs and CX goals. The intuitive presentation simplifies the troubleshooting process, allowing for quick identification and resolution of network issues.
Bandwidth Speed Test: Optimal Network Performance Insights
probeRTC’s Bandwidth Speed Test rigorously assesses network link capacity by transmitting and receiving a substantial static file, then calculating how long the transfer took.
Graphical Insights for Strategic Decision-Making:
probeRTC’s Bandwidth Speed Test graphs jitter and bandwidth, providing you with a clear visual representation of network stability and consistency over time. This feature offers valuable insights to inform your network capacity planning and management. By leveraging probeRTC, your company’s decision-makers can easily review trends that impact network performance.
Accurate, Unbiased Measurements:
Unlike standard free speed tests that may use local servers, probeRTC’s servers are strategically placed in data centers, which can be customized to best represent media server or Session Border Controller (SBC) locations. This setup ensures the bandwidth measurements are unbiased and accurate, providing a true reflection of network performance.
Continuous Monitoring for Proactive Management:
probeRTC’s tests are continuous, constantly monitoring network availability and bandwidth. With this ongoing surveillance, your team can catch issues ahead of user impact, even during peak traffic and other periods of instability. This rapid issue detection and remediation ensures your network is always responsive, under all conditions.
Example 1 – Office Location Network Performance:
The graph below illustrates an office’s network performance, highlighting periods of significant instability and reduced capacity on specific days. Notably, it shows that jitter—a critical indicator of network stability—tends to spike during daytime hours, coinciding with peak office activity when more employees are actively using network resources. This graph of data showcases exactly how office activity and network demand relate as well as recurring patterns of network strain or congestion.
With these insights in-hand, you can make necessary adjustments to network capacity to ensure performance, such as increasing bandwidth or enhancing network configurations before high-activity periods.
Example 2 – Home Network SLA Violation:
The following graph illustrates the network challenges that a remote employee has been facing, including the downlink limitations during daylight hours. This observation is crucial as it indicates a violation of the Service Level Agreement (SLA) with the employee’s Internet Service Provider, which promises a minimum of 300 Mbps download speed. These types of discrepancies can significantly impact productivity, especially when it comes to tasks that demand high-bandwidth connectivity.
Voice Call Quality Assessment
Our Voice Call Quality Assessments are critical for evaluating performance during a WebRTC session. By initiating a brief voice call through your system, probeRTC monitors essential metrics such as Mean Opinion Score (MOS), round trip time (RTT), packet loss, and jitter. Data from these tests is then presented in easy-to-understand charts, highlighting the network’s ability to sustain high-quality WebRTC calls and identify potential issues.
Example: Diagnosing Network Congestion Through Call Quality Analysis
The graph below shows an increase in round trip time (RTT) and jitter during daylight hours in the US, which causes fluctuations in the Mean Opinion Score (MOS). Though initially detected on the office’s primary connection, the issue persisted even after switching users to a secondary connection. Because this was observed in isolation, with no other local system activities impacting the results, it was confirmed that congestion occurred in the ISP’s infrastructure during peak working hours.
Throughput Testing: Optimizing Voice Call Capacity
Purpose and Importance:
probeRTC’s Throughput test is necessary for environments where multiple users simultaneously utilize the same local network, such as in call centers. This test provides deep insights into the network’s stability dynamics by measuring the communication channels’ minimum, maximum, and average capacity.
Testing Methodology
By operating over raw sockets, the Throughput test achieves a higher degree of accuracy than typical Bandwidth Speed tests. Its specialized focus on voice call capacity ensures the results are particularly relevant for settings that require robust voice communication capabilities.
Insights from Throughput Data
Significant fluctuations between the minimum, average, and maximum throughput values may indicate an unstable and erratic network connection. These types of variation often mirror trends in jitter, which affect overall network performance.
Case Study: Analyzing Variance and Call Quality
The following graph notes an increase in throughput variance, which corresponds with a decline in the Call Quality Mean Opinion Score (MOS). This direct relationship highlights how throughput stability affects voice communication performance and underscores the importance of consistent network performance.
TURN Connectivity: Ensuring Reliable WebRTC Communications
WebRTC media traffic predominantly uses UDP to reduce latency and improve media quality. However, when direct UDP connections are obstructed, TURN servers are essential.
Testing Methodology
Cyara’s TURN Connectivity test measures efficiency of connecting to TURN servers by measuring both initial connection times and roundtrip times. The test assesses UDP, TCP, and TLS connections.
The test aims to identify potential barriers that firewall configurations may create, thereby affecting traffic, especially over UDP. These insights improve your understanding of how quickly and reliably connections can be established across different protocols to the TURN server.
Example: Network Infrastructure Analysis – Identifying Network Barriers
In this example, the network infrastructure is unstable in its ability to establish consistent connections when using UDP, TCP, and TLS. For contact centers, where connection reliability is a must, this instability can be particularly challenging.
Embracing probeRTC and qualityRTC transforms how your organization addresses network challenges—not only by troubleshooting but by proactively enhancing communication quality. Learn how you can streamline your operations and significantly boost customer satisfaction by integrating our solutions.
Adopting these advanced tools is about more than just resolving issues as they arise; it’s about preempting them. This proactive approach ensures your network infrastructure is robust, responsive, and consistently ahead of demand, enabling you to maintain a competitive edge in today’s fast-paced digital landscape.