Global number testing is the process of validating call reachability, audio quality, and connection performance across international phone lines using in-country points of presence to verify customers worldwide receive consistent, high-quality experiences.
Key takeaways
- Global number testing is essential for businesses serving international customers, confirming calls are reachable and audio quality meets expectations across all markets.
- Four main challenges affect global communications: international dialing difficulties, QoS issues, technology compatibility, and regulatory compliance.
- Continuous, automated testing is critical because carriers and regulations change frequently, making manual testing impractical.
- In-country physical infrastructure (points of presence) provides more accurate testing results than Virtual Telco approaches.
- Proactive monitoring with metrics like MOS, jitter, and packet loss helps identify and resolve issues before they impact customers.
As our technology has continued to evolve over the past several decades, businesses have cultivated customer-bases that transcend borders. A single business may provide products and services to customers on the other side of the world. With this global expansion comes the need to effectively communicate with your customers and overcome the challenges that arise when working with international regulations as you design, build, and verify various ways of connecting.
Discover how to provide quality CX to customers from around the world with Cyara’s Enhanced Global Dialing, offering coverage across 145+ countries and 420+ carriers.
For contact centers, this often means implementing toll-free or fixed-line numbers from local carriers in the countries your business serves. This is necessary because without these carrier relationships and services that confirm effective communication channels are in place, your agents are unable to build strong customer connections, resulting in the inability to close sales. When you have international customers, your business’ success relies on your ability to provide high-quality CX, no matter where your customers are located.
The challenges of using global numbers
Understanding these common obstacles helps contact centers proactively address issues before they impact customer experience.
When using international numbers, it’s important to understand the unique challenges that your contact center may encounter:
- International dialing difficulties: Variations in dialing conventions and formats between countries that require verification of correct international dialing codes, country codes, and local numbers. Your contact center must also be aware of instances where countries have different dialing requirements for landlines and mobile phones.
- Quality of service (QoS) issues: Problems caused by variations in telecommunications infrastructure and network conditions that lead to latency, poor call audio quality, or dropped calls during international calling.
- Technology compatibility: Differences in telecommunication infrastructures and technology standards between countries that may negatively impact your contact center’s call quality if systems are incompatible.
- Regulatory compliance: The requirement to stay up to date with international regulations related to telemarketing, data protection, and privacy. Failure to follow these regulations may subject your business to legal action and fines.
Assess CX quality with continuous testing
Continuous testing is the practice of performing frequent, automated assessments of your communication channels to proactively identify and resolve issues before they affect customers.
Conducting frequent and thorough tests will help your team verify that you’re providing a positive customer experience. Data from the tests will help you monitor communication quality and identify if and how your customers are receiving your calls.
While testing across international borders may sound simple, it requires several key steps, including the following:
- Formatting Verification: Confirm your numbers are correctly formatted according to international standards.
- Dial plan testing: Verify that dial plans are correctly implemented for each country.
- Reachability testing: Confirm that calls are successfully completed to the numbers you’re testing. This will allow you to navigate around issues that might prevent that call from completing, such as incorrect routing.
- Number portability testing: Determine whether your number was ported successfully after it was transferred to another supplier.
- Carrier interoperability testing: Verify your number’s compatibility with different telecommunication carriers.
- Quality of Service Testing: Assess whether your calls are experiencing issues including latency, jitter (variation in packet arrival times that causes choppy audio), and packet loss (data that fails to reach its destination, resulting in gaps in audio) that may occur as your call is moving from one carrier to the next. This is especially important when calling areas where network conditions may not be the best.
The advantage of automated testing
Automated testing eliminates the impractical burden of manual verification while providing consistent, reliable insights into global call quality.
Without an automated testing solution, manually testing to verify whether your inbound and outbound numbers are reachable can feel like a full-time job. Carriers make frequent changes to their network and call paths while countries update their security rules and compliance regulations on a continual basis, so it’s critical to perform ongoing tests to confirm that you can always reach your customers. In some cases, having an automated global number testing solution still may not be enough.
Many of the available automated phone number testing tools use Virtual Telco, claiming that they can provide an accurate picture of how your customers are experiencing your calls from around the world. However, this approach can lead to inconsistent and unreliable results.
To truly test what your customers are hearing from the other side of the globe, you need an automated number testing solution that gives you true global dialing visibility. By leveraging physical servers, or point of presence (PoP)—a physical location where testing infrastructure connects to local telecommunications networks—a solution can accurately simulate real-life customer calls and provide a mean opinion score (MOS), a numerical rating from 1-5 that measures perceived audio quality, along with round-trip-time (the delay between sending and receiving data), jitter, packet loss, and more. The test would also identify any interference or other problems, as well as the root-cause of the error, so that you can proactively resolve the issue before it impacts your customers. This testing solution allows you to test reachability and quality for calls in all the countries you serve.
Enhanced Global Dialing Add-On for Cyara Pulse
Cyara’s solution provides true in-country testing through physical infrastructure, delivering accurate insights into real customer call experiences.
Using global numbers can create many roadblocks and challenges for your business, leading to frustration, decreased productivity, reputational damages, and more. However, we’re here to help.
With our Enhanced Global Dialing Add-On for Cyara Pulse, we can help you achieve global visibility of customer experience by leveraging Cyara’s physical infrastructure in 145+ countries and coverage for 420+ carriers. Eliminate the risk of poor CX and assure that you’re reaching your customers, no matter where they live.
Frequently Asked Questions
Global number testing is the process of validating that international phone numbers are reachable and delivering acceptable audio quality by placing test calls from in-country locations. It confirms customers worldwide can successfully connect with your contact center.
In-country testing uses physical points of presence within each country to simulate real customer calls accurately. This approach provides reliable results that reflect actual customer experiences, unlike Virtual Telco methods that may produce inconsistent data.
Key metrics include mean opinion score (MOS) for audio quality, round-trip-time for latency, jitter for audio consistency, and packet loss for data transmission reliability. These measurements help identify issues before they affect customer experience.
Continuous testing is recommended because carriers frequently update their networks and countries regularly change compliance regulations. Ongoing automated testing verifies you can always reach your customers without disruption.
Without proper testing, contact centers risk call failures, poor audio quality, and unreachable numbers that prevent agents from connecting with international customers. These issues can lead to lost sales, damaged reputation, and a poor customer experience.
Key challenges include varying dialing conventions and formats across countries, Quality of Service issues like latency and dropped calls, technology compatibility differences, and staying compliant with international regulations around telemarketing and data privacy.
Contact centers should conduct formatting verification, dial plan testing, reachability testing, number portability testing, carrier interoperability testing, and Quality of Service testing to validate calls are completing successfully and with acceptable audio quality.
Carriers frequently change their networks and call paths while countries update compliance regulations, making manual testing impractical as an ongoing process. Automated testing allows contact centers to continuously monitor reachability and quality without the burden of doing so by hand.
Many automated tools use Virtual Telco environments that can produce inconsistent and unreliable results, failing to accurately reflect what real customers experience. True global dialing visibility requires physical infrastructure, or points of presence, located within the countries being tested.
Testing using physical infrastructure can provide a mean opinion score for audio quality along with data on round-trip time, jitter, and packet loss, giving contact centers a clear picture of call performance across every country they serve.
The Enhanced Global Dialing Add-On for Cyara Pulse leverages physical infrastructure across 145+ countries and coverage for 420+ carriers to accurately simulate real customer calls and proactively identify issues before they affect customers.
