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 ensure various ways of connecting.
Discover how to provide quality CX to customers from around the world with Cyara’s Enhanced Global Dialing.
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 ensure effective communication channels are in place, your agents are unable 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
When using international numbers, it’s important to understand the unique challenges that your contact center may encounter, such as:
- International Dialing Difficulties: Dialing conventions and formats vary between countries. For this reason, your contact center must verify that it’s using the correct international dialing code, country code, and local number. In addition, you must also be aware of instances where countries have different dialing requirements for landlines and mobile phones.
- Quality of Service (QoS) Issues: Variations in telecommunications infrastructure and network conditions may lead to issues in international calling. These issues may include latency, poor call audio quality, or dropped calls due to variations.
- Technology Compatibility: Telecommunication infrastructures and technology standards differ depending on the country. If technology is incompatible, your contact center’s call quality may be negatively impacted.
- Regulatory Compliance: Your contact center must also stay up to date with international regulations related to telemarketing, data protection, and privacy. If you fail to follow these regulations, your business may be subject to legal action and fines.
Assess CX Quality with Continuous Testing
Conducting frequent and thorough tests will help your team ensure 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: Ensure 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, and packet loss 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
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 ensure 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 solution can accurately simulate real-life customer calls and provide a mean opinion score (MOS) for audio quality, round-trip-time, 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
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 more than 100 countries and coverage for 320+ carriers. Eliminate the risk of poor CX and assure that you’re reaching your customers, no matter where they live.