Key takeaways
- WebRTC-based cloud contact centers reduce costs and increase agility but introduce voice quality risks that must be actively managed.
- Establish objective baseline metrics (MOS, answer-seizure ratio, call disconnects) before migration to avoid subjective debates about performance.
- Load test your WebRTC solution for concurrent call volume and stress scenarios before going live.
- Implement real-time, outside-in monitoring to continuously measure audio quality from customer and agent perspectives.
- Poor voice quality directly affects AHT, customer satisfaction, and your bottom line.
The contact center has become the turning point for digital transformation in the enterprise. Companies must now compete by delivering innovative, flawless customer experiences. To accomplish this, the vast majority of enterprises, including many of Cyara’s customers, are moving their contact centers to the cloud, for benefits including reduced cost to serve and a more personalized and responsive customer experience.
But as I covered in an earlier blog post, there are several considerations to address when you’re making this move. One of these considerations is that today, most cloud-based contact centers are based on Web real-time communication (WebRTC), which may affect voice quality.
What is WebRTC?
Web real-time communication (WebRTC) is an open-source technology that enables real-time audio and video communication directly within web browsers without requiring plugins.
A few years back, cloud-based contact centers were underpinned by SIP technology. But increasingly, we are seeing these solutions based on WebRTC.
WebRTC allows audio and video communication to work inside web pages by allowing direct peer-to-peer communication, eliminating the need to install plugins or download native apps.
WebRTC-based cloud contact centers offer several key benefits:
- Reduced infrastructure costs – Eliminates hardware and software maintenance and other operational expenses.
- Flexible scalability – Allows companies and providers to operate purely on consumption, unlike solutions requiring permanent SIP trunking.
- Faster feature deployment – When providers introduce new features, organizations can just flip a switch to enable them rather than going through costly upgrades.
This increases CX agility.
But, there are inherent risks to voice quality in moving agent communications to the cloud:
- Changes to the internal network can cause defects that affect voice quality.
- Firewall modifications can have a ripple effect on audio performance.
- Any disruption along the communication chain impacts the customer experience.
Poor voice quality will increase agent handle time (AHT), cause customer frustration, and often results in customers having to make multiple calls to resolve a single issue. Ultimately, this impacts your CX and your bottom line.
Overcoming the risks
So how can you mitigate these risks? To validate voice quality when migrating a contact center to the cloud, organizations should establish baseline metrics before migration, conduct thorough load testing, and implement real-time monitoring in production. These three strategies help identify issues early and maintain consistent audio quality throughout the transition.
Step 1: Baseline your current environment
We’ve all been on projects where the perception is that “it’s not as good as it was before.” You can avoid that resulting state of paralysis based on subjective opinion by conducting a simple voice quality baseline. This will provide all stakeholders with objective metrics such as mean opinion score (MOS), a numerical measure of voice quality rated on a scale of 1 to 5, where 4.0+ is considered acceptable for business communications, answer-seizure ratio (the percentage of calls successfully connected versus attempted), and call disconnects. These can be used as minimum success criteria against which to benchmark any new solution.
Step 2: Pressure test before moving to production
Before you move live customers and agents to your new WebRTC-based solution, you need to ensure that the solution can handle the volume of concurrent calls and agents, as well as avalanche and soak scenarios, without having adverse effects on voice quality.
Step 3: Monitor in production
Now you’ve operationalized your cloud contact center, what’s next? Ideally, becoming more agile has enabled you to roll out new CX initiatives on a more regular basis. With this constant change, you need to assure that the CX being delivered by your production platform is not degraded. Real-time monitoring from the outside-in provides the capability to measure audio quality from the customer’s and agent’s perspectives using true audio.
Learn how Cyara can help with your migration to the cloud.
Frequently Asked Questions
WebRTC is a free, open-source project that enables real-time audio and video communication directly within web browsers and mobile applications via APIs, without requiring plugins or native app downloads. Cloud contact centers use it to reduce infrastructure costs, enable flexible scalability, and quickly adopt new features.
Changes anywhere along the network chain, such as to internal networks and firewalls, can introduce defects that ripple through and degrade voice quality. Poor voice quality increases agent handle time, causes customer frustration, and often forces customers to call back multiple times to resolve a single issue.
A voice quality baseline captures objective metrics such as mean opinion scores (MOS), answer-seizure ratio, and call disconnects before any migration takes place. These metrics serve as minimum success criteria to benchmark your new solution against, replacing subjective opinions with measurable data.
Pressure testing ensures the new solution can handle the volume of concurrent calls and agents, as well as avalanche and soak scenarios, without degrading voice quality. Identifying these issues before live customers and agents are moved prevents avoidable disruptions.
Real-time monitoring from the outside-in measures audio quality from both the customer’s and agent’s perspectives using true audio. This ongoing monitoring ensures that frequent CX updates and changes do not degrade the experience being delivered by the production platform.
