Leveraging pre-call checks to improve quality in OTT applications

Originally published on my personal Blogger site tobyallens.blogspot.com on 10 January 2017, during my time at Acme Packet. Reposted here verbatim from the original.

Over the top applications can deliver great call quality if you engineer them well.

I’ve touched on the power of adding real time communications channels like voice and video to mobile applications in the past. The context gained by adding in application calling from something like a mobile banking or travel application is very powerful. It can be leveraged to deliver vastly superior customer experience (CX) compared with using the standard telephone dialer. Customers can bypass IVRs and be delivered directly to a skilled agent by pushing the contextual information into the routing engine of the contact center. They can skip boorish account number entry and error prone guesses of their phone access passwords.

A key component of delighting the customer with this improved experience is making sure that the quality is as good, if not better than dialing over a regular phone line. The goodwill gained in bypassing the IVR is immediately lost if the call quality is bad and the connection drops out. One must therefore ensure that the call will be high quality, at worst it should be as good as a standard call. There are a few tools that can be leveraged to achieve this that I’ll talk about below.

The best CX is delivered when using over the top technologies like WebRTC that allow for high quality video, two way data flows and of course HD voice all over a wifi or data connection. This is best because you can enhance the call by pushing information directly into the app even going as far as having the agent control the device itself in a troubleshooting scenario such as the Amazon Kindle Mayday button. It is imperative though that you know the data connection can handle the requirements. This means checking the network quality before the call is even made.

Pre-call network checks can be as simple as a short speed test or as complicated as a simulated call. As long as you have confidence in the checks it doesn’t really matter. A simulated call can pump a half second worth of simulated traffic across the network and measure the quality. This can even be done from the application itself with a simple loop back service on the other side, leveraging the power of the smart phone to calculate the network quality. If you combine this check with information from previous calls it should be possible to come up with a reliable metric to determine the success of the call. Retaining historical call quality data such as service provider or Wi-Fi network, location and device type would further enhance the accuracy. This is one of the reasons that Twilio has recently added these enhancements and more to its service as I detailed in a recent post on Twilio voice insights.

Now, if the checks determine that the quality is too poor or questionable to leverage an over the top type connection you can still leverage context. A web services request can push all the calling number and additional context information into the contact center ahead of the user dialing in. This means that user can still bypass the IVR and be connected straight to an agent. They can still enjoy the benefits of in-app communication while using the standard dialer. The implementation could be as simple as tacking some extra digits onto the dialed number, leveraging a custom queue to bypass standard IVR prompts. Alternatively, the system could dial back out to the customer if desired. Be sure though to offer the option to opt out of a PSTN call. Perhaps the users is overseas and doesn’t want to incur roaming charges.

Also, if you combine with intelligent call reconnection technology then even if the network connection is lost and the call drops the customer can be reconnected to the same agent the CX is massively improved. There is not many experiences worse than going through all the options and then getting disconnected. Reconnection systems will hold the agent and/or customer on the line and connect them back together avoiding the pain of going through IVR systems again or reintroducing the issue at hand to another agent.

These sort of enhancements don’t drastically alter the operation of the contact center but they do dramatically enhance CX delighting customers and creating passionate brand advocates.