Dead air and one-way audio are frustrating but unfortunately common audio issues that can hinder your voice calls. Dead air is a period of time where you can no longer hear the dial tone, ringing sounds, or the other party. The call is simply silent. One-way audio occurs when one party can hear clearly, but the other hears nothing. Both experiences can easily unsettle, frustrate, and irritate callers.
Cyara helps businesses assure voice quality from every perspective with automated end-to-end testing and monitoring solutions.
The Impact on Customers
Research indicates that almost 76% of millennials experience anxious thoughts when their phone rings. This unease increases further when these individuals are required to make a call. So when they do decide to ring your organization, it’s imperative you are able to immediately provide them with the customer support they require.
Failure to do so results in an unsatisfactory experience for your caller and often contributes to a negative brand perception. Even a few seconds of silence on the phone can feel much longer for a caller. This is heightened as they struggle to comprehend what went wrong or why they can’t communicate with your agent.
In cases of dead air and one-way audio, the common solution involves ending the call and redialing. But unfortunately, there’s no guarantee that the caller won’t encounter the same issues again. And when dialing a contact center, the caller often has to rejoin a lengthy queue before even attempting to speak to an agent again. This might lead them to reconsider… potentially resulting in the loss of valuable business.
As a result, customers typically opt to call only when they require urgent problem resolution or need to speak to an agent about a complex issue. In these cases, they want to communicate immediately with a person at the other end of the phone.
Nowadays, there’s also a much greater expectation for first-contact resolution. Few customers are willing to spend long periods of time on hold, let alone have to call your business back. According to a report by Arise, two-thirds of customers are unwilling to remain on hold for greater than two minutes. Additionally, 13% of those surveyed consider any wait time to be unacceptable.
Causes of Dead Air and One-Way Audio
Various factors contribute to call connection failures and audio problems, including call routing issues, network congestion, and gaps in network coverage. Migrations can also be a common reason, with significant numbers of those migrating to VoIP falling victim to one-way audio problems.
Therefore, it’s crucial for your organization to promptly identify the root cause of any issues. If dead air affects only one side of the call, the problem could range from a simple hardware malfunction to more complex network configuration issues. In other cases, the voice packets carrying the voice data may not be able to successfully travel in one or both directions.
Call control packets, responsible for procedures like call setup, routing, connecting, and codec decisions, operate independently of voice packets. This means that even if both packet sets reach their designated endpoint successfully, the call may still encounter issues.
Firewalls can also cause the blockage of specific ports, leading to the obstruction of voice streams. In such cases, session initiation protocol (SIP) call handling may incorrectly suggest call stability, even when the voice packets are flowing in one direction only.
VoIP calls, in particular, can face significant audio challenges, including dead air. When network address translation (NAT) is utilized in the communication path and misconfiguration occurs, it may only authorize one-way communications between devices. Asymmetric routing is another potential cause of one-way audio. This is where one path takes a shorter route with low latency, and the other follows an alternate, longer path with higher latency. This discrepancy can disrupt the audio path for a portion of the call.
The Solution
The good news is that there are solutions to both dead air and one-way audio! Network monitoring tools typically measure a selection of your audio quality factors. However, their visibility and root cause analysis (RCA) abilities are often very limited.
Cyara offers our customers a much more comprehensive view of their audio performance. And most importantly, we provide an end-to-end perspective across global carrier networks through our Voice Assure solution. This helps businesses, like yours, manage and enhance your telecommunication service quality, improve customer experience, and achieve more efficient RCA. A proactive approach like this saves you time, resources, and costs.
