Cyara Platform:
Voice Quality Testing

Test and Monitor from the Customer’s Perspective

Customer experience must be flawless throughout the whole customer journey, from self-service (IVR, web), to assisted service (live agent, web chat, SMS). The voice quality between a customer and an IVR and a customer and a live agent must be thoroughly tested and monitored.

Testing voice quality is a challenge as complex contact center environments give rise to a wide range of variables that affect voice quality. The most common issues include:

Codec incompatibility, the software that allows us to efficiently move voice traffic by compressing and decompressing the voice signal
Excessive transfers which may result in a loss of volume with each transfer
The caller’s voice network provider — the most obvious example is a poor cell signal based on location
Bandwidth constraints which can result in packet loss leading to jitter (voice signal breaking up), echoing, low volume, and other conditions that make it difficult for the customer and the agent to communicate effectively
Hardware issues such as headset or softphone incompatibilities

Voice Quality Testing Made Easy

Cyara makes it easy to set up, run, and maintain voice quality testing using the Cyara Automated CX Assurance Platform. With very little effort, Cyara customers typically get immediate and valuable information about issues that enable them or their key suppliers to make decisions to restore voice quality for their customer interactions. Cyara provides Cyara Endpoint and Cyara Audio Generation Devices (AGD) capabilities to flexibly meet your voice quality testing needs.

Cyara Endpoint

A Cyara Endpoint is a simulated phone running on a server connected to a switch, just like a real phone. The Cyara Endpoint connects through the PBX, emulating the agent’s phone for taking incoming calls, allowing you to measure how well customers are hearing agents and determine the circumstances where there is voice quality degradation. Cyara Endpoint will identify any voice quality issues over your phone lines. A Cyara Endpoint simulates an agent having a conversation with a customer.

Cyara Endpoint is a highly scalable and efficient way to enable bi-directional testing, and it is ideal for load tests because it does not require physical stations. Each Cyara Endpoint server can establish up to several thousand virtual endpoints registered to your PBX or SIP Server.

Cyara Audio Generation Devices (AGD)

Cyara’s patented AGD is easily connected to your agent telephony endpoints, whether they are traditional agent handsets, a soft SIP endpoint on the agent workstation, or a dedicated SIP phone. The AGD enables two-way communication between a deployed telephony endpoint and the Cyara Platform, either in the Cyara Cloud or from a call origination point within your company’s Cloud. It provides the required telephony control of the endpoint during a connected call to facilitate end-to-end voice quality testing.

Test at Every Stage of the Development Lifecycle

With Cyara, you can test voice quality at every stage of the development lifecycle, including functional and regression testing during development, load testing before deployment, and monitoring in production. Load testing is particularly important to ensure that quality does not diminish during high call volumes. Equally important is to monitor for voice quality on an ongoing basis.

Test at Various Points Along the Path From Customer to Agent

With Cyara, you can test voice quality from the customer’s perspective (uni-directional), or from both the customer’s perspective and the agent’s perspective (bi-directional).

From the Customer’s Perspective Through to the IVR
Testing from the customer’s perspective (uni-directional), is crucial. The simplest scenario is to determine if there are quality issues between the customer’s equipment and the IVR. Not only can you test from the customer-to-IVR of the chain, but you can also test to make sure the “switch” is tested to uncover any voice quality issues happening upstream from the switch.
End-to-End, Bi-Directionally, From the Customer and Agent Perspective
You can test the whole chain from the customer to the agent, in both directions (bi-directional). This enables you to find incidences at any point in the chain where the customer or agent has difficulty in hearing one another. In particular, the “agent station” must be tested to find any issues between the switch and the agent phone, which is the last part of the customer-to-agent chain.

Cyara offers a comprehensive Automated CX Assurance Platform that executes your complete customer journeys end-to-end, across voice and digital channels, and from self-service through to agent-assisted service. Voice quality testing and monitoring are provided through the Velocity, Cruncher, and Pulse products.