According to Liam Dunne, Chief Commercial Officer (CCO), Spearline (pictured, above), if you run an international company with toll and toll-free numbers, detecting deficiencies like blind spots in telecoms networks can present complexities. “Are your contact center operations centralized?” A thought-provoker presented by Dunne during our chat. This is a key consideration, according to him, due to issues such as time-zones, language barriers, etc., that all contribute to increased blind spots.
Dunne said, to counter this notion, international companies across financial services, pharmaceutical, travel, and retail, need to proactively perform number testing. Leaders in these companies, Dunne said, should regularly test for connectivity and audio quality to ensure telecoms infrastructure performs to the highest standards. “There’s also the factor of maintaining consistent and high customer service rates as well as keeping staff satisfied.” Both happen to be critical concerns.
When a phone number does fail, it can lead to quite the quagmire for enterprises, which in many cases aren’t aware of issues until after they occur. Naturally, data on poor service quality and interruptions are not the kind of data service providers retain. While this makes sense for telecoms providers, it doesn’t quite cut it in a contact center environment experiencing issues they’re not even aware of. This is unless they test phone numbers themselves, and precisely why Dunne said proactivity is key on behalf of enterprises.
According to Spearline, companies that rely on customers to tell them when they’re experiencing downtime have it all wrong, research suggests only four percent of issues receive a complaint. “Being reactive does not work in the case of contact centers.” Dunne added, “Multinationals that proactively test phone numbers can learn the root cause of problems by having call detail records and exact timestamps.” If everything goes well, he said they can replicate this exact customer experience and the call path for more accurate
results in the future.
Monitor your Biggest Assets, Network, and Toll-Free Numbers
Number testing is not a replacement for network monitoring, instead, the duo work in harmony, according to Dunne. Network monitoring extends the visibility of everything on SIC (standard industrial classification) codes. Outside of that network, he shared, there’s a blind spot. “When a number is down, customers know about it, but the organization that has the number isn’t aware. When companies don’t treat their numbers as assets, their customers experience a negative impact.”
Multinationals should view customer-facing numbers as assets, he said. Continuing, organizations spend millions building contact centers and millions monitoring them. “Things can still go awry when numbers that have minimal costs to rent go down.”
By testing international numbers, companies can identify where the issue(s) resides. The alert can be sent to the appropriate team, complete with CDRs, so they don’t waste engineering resources and generate dozens of superfluous tickets. The cost of dealing with the outages becomes much more minimal than it does traditionally without using number testing, Dunne advised enterprise leaders.
“At the end of the day,” he added, “It is our responsibility to hold service provider’s feet to the fire and ensure they offer top-notch service,”
…an influential message for enterprises with poor call quality.
