Repeat after me, loud and clear (no pun intended): Call quality matters.
It’s not like you need us to say it. In a recent study1, more than three in four businesses indicated clear audio was the most important factor affecting video conference quality. Call quality routinely disappoints and it can be difficult to identify and resolve the problem. Recent research found that when using video conferencing for work, over a third of respondents indicated they experienced connectivity issues, and almost one in three suffered from audio quality problems2.
In response to the explosion of video meetings and distance learning, companies will need to incorporate high-quality audio and video into their products and services to be successful and meet customer and employee expectations.
This is particularly true for contact centers. Forced to support agents working from home, IT departments are now facing increased responsibility for home internet service quality. It matters: delivering excellent customer experience remains a primary objective for CMOs. See the Marketing Challenge in this blog.
Generally, when a contact center or meetings solution is moved to a cloud provider, you improve agility and simplify operations, but also lose visibility and control over the infrastructure. There is an opportunity to regain that visibility and control for cloud-based contact centers and video solutions using WebRTC technology. New tools that monitor network performance and gauge the customer experience are now available.
Let's first understand what can go wrong.
WebRTC audio quality can suffer for a variety of reasons, including:
- Network performance issues with the underlying transport network, i.e. the agent’s end-to-end connection through the public internet to the contact center as a service platform.
- Software issues with the WebRTC protocol stack running in the agent’s browser, or issues related to signaling, media transmission or NAT traversal.
- Endpoint platform issues like configuration errors, compatibility issues or environmental issues like CPU or memory constraints.
New WebRTC monitoring tools can help you analyze network performance, troubleshoot hardware and software problems, and resolve potential service quality issues.
Repeat after me, loud and clear (no pun intended): Call quality matters.
It’s not like you need us to say it. In a recent study1, more than three in four businesses indicated clear audio was the most important factor affecting video conference quality. Call quality routinely disappoints and it can be difficult to identify and resolve the problem. Recent research found that when using video conferencing for work, over a third of respondents indicated they experienced connectivity issues, and almost one in three suffered from audio quality problems2.
In response to the explosion of video meetings and distance learning, companies will need to incorporate high-quality audio and video into their products and services to be successful and meet customer and employee expectations.
This is particularly true for contact centers. Forced to support agents working from home, IT departments are now facing increased responsibility for home internet service quality. It matters: delivering excellent customer experience remains a primary objective for CMOs. See the Marketing Challenge in this blog.
Generally, when a contact center or meetings solution is moved to a cloud provider, you improve agility and simplify operations, but also lose visibility and control over the infrastructure. There is an opportunity to regain that visibility and control for cloud-based contact centers and video solutions using WebRTC technology. New tools that monitor network performance and gauge the customer experience are now available.
Let's first understand what can go wrong.
WebRTC audio quality can suffer for a variety of reasons, including:
- Network performance issues with the underlying transport network, i.e. the agent’s end-to-end connection through the public internet to the contact center as a service platform.
- Software issues with the WebRTC protocol stack running in the agent’s browser, or issues related to signaling, media transmission or NAT traversal.
- Endpoint platform issues like configuration errors, compatibility issues or environmental issues like CPU or memory constraints.
New WebRTC monitoring tools can help you analyze network performance, troubleshoot hardware and software problems, and resolve potential service quality issues.
Repeat after me, loud and clear (no pun intended): Call quality matters.
It’s not like you need us to say it. In a recent study1, more than three in four businesses indicated clear audio was the most important factor affecting video conference quality. Call quality routinely disappoints and it can be difficult to identify and resolve the problem. Recent research found that when using video conferencing for work, over a third of respondents indicated they experienced connectivity issues, and almost one in three suffered from audio quality problems2.
In response to the explosion of video meetings and distance learning, companies will need to incorporate high-quality audio and video into their products and services to be successful and meet customer and employee expectations.
This is particularly true for contact centers. Forced to support agents working from home, IT departments are now facing increased responsibility for home internet service quality. It matters: delivering excellent customer experience remains a primary objective for CMOs. See the Marketing Challenge in this blog.
Generally, when a contact center or meetings solution is moved to a cloud provider, you improve agility and simplify operations, but also lose visibility and control over the infrastructure. There is an opportunity to regain that visibility and control for cloud-based contact centers and video solutions using WebRTC technology. New tools that monitor network performance and gauge the customer experience are now available.
Let's first understand what can go wrong.
WebRTC audio quality can suffer for a variety of reasons, including:
- Network performance issues with the underlying transport network, i.e. the agent’s end-to-end connection through the public internet to the contact center as a service platform.
- Software issues with the WebRTC protocol stack running in the agent’s browser, or issues related to signaling, media transmission or NAT traversal.
- Endpoint platform issues like configuration errors, compatibility issues or environmental issues like CPU or memory constraints.
New WebRTC monitoring tools can help you analyze network performance, troubleshoot hardware and software problems, and resolve potential service quality issues.
Repeat after me, loud and clear (no pun intended): Call quality matters.
It’s not like you need us to say it. In a recent study1, more than three in four businesses indicated clear audio was the most important factor affecting video conference quality. Call quality routinely disappoints and it can be difficult to identify and resolve the problem. Recent research found that when using video conferencing for work, over a third of respondents indicated they experienced connectivity issues, and almost one in three suffered from audio quality problems2.
In response to the explosion of video meetings and distance learning, companies will need to incorporate high-quality audio and video into their products and services to be successful and meet customer and employee expectations.
This is particularly true for contact centers. Forced to support agents working from home, IT departments are now facing increased responsibility for home internet service quality. It matters: delivering excellent customer experience remains a primary objective for CMOs. See the Marketing Challenge in this blog.
Generally, when a contact center or meetings solution is moved to a cloud provider, you improve agility and simplify operations, but also lose visibility and control over the infrastructure. There is an opportunity to regain that visibility and control for cloud-based contact centers and video solutions using WebRTC technology. New tools that monitor network performance and gauge the customer experience are now available.
Let's first understand what can go wrong.
WebRTC audio quality can suffer for a variety of reasons, including:
- Network performance issues with the underlying transport network, i.e. the agent’s end-to-end connection through the public internet to the contact center as a service platform.
- Software issues with the WebRTC protocol stack running in the agent’s browser, or issues related to signaling, media transmission or NAT traversal.
- Endpoint platform issues like configuration errors, compatibility issues or environmental issues like CPU or memory constraints.
New WebRTC monitoring tools can help you analyze network performance, troubleshoot hardware and software problems, and resolve potential service quality issues.
Why monitor endpoints?
Endpoints, such as contact center agents, provide the best vantage point to gauge the user experience. As WebRTC is implemented in the browser, the best place to get WebRTC performance data is directly from the browser running on a WebRTC endpoint. The WebRTC getStats API supports an extensive collection of real-time communications statistics that can be accessed directly from an agent’s browser.
Generally speaking, the WebRTC getStats API supports three types of endpoint statistics that are vital to analyzing performance and troubleshooting problems. They correspond to stages in the media pipeline, as described in Varun Singh and Marcin Nagy’s blog How Problems in the WebRTC Media Pipeline Affect Quality of Experience:
- Network connectivity - packet transport metrics, including throughput, loss, delay and jitter
- Media - media stream metrics, including throughput per channel (audio, video and data)
- Signaling - metrics for session negotiation (SDP or XMPP) and address resolution (STUN/TURN/ICE).
Typical challenges associated with using the getStats API to monitor WebRTC endpoints include:
- Keeping track of the WebRTC statistics each browser vendor supports
- Ensuring endpoint statistics are collected and transported efficiently and securely
Why monitor endpoints?
Endpoints, such as contact center agents, provide the best vantage point to gauge the user experience. As WebRTC is implemented in the browser, the best place to get WebRTC performance data is directly from the browser running on a WebRTC endpoint. The WebRTC getStats API supports an extensive collection of real-time communications statistics that can be accessed directly from an agent’s browser.
Generally speaking, the WebRTC getStats API supports three types of endpoint statistics that are vital to analyzing performance and troubleshooting problems. They correspond to stages in the media pipeline, as described in Varun Singh and Marcin Nagy’s blog How Problems in the WebRTC Media Pipeline Affect Quality of Experience:
- Network connectivity - packet transport metrics, including throughput, loss, delay and jitter
- Media - media stream metrics, including throughput per channel (audio, video and data)
- Signaling - metrics for session negotiation (SDP or XMPP) and address resolution (STUN/TURN/ICE).
Typical challenges associated with using the getStats API to monitor WebRTC endpoints include:
- Keeping track of the WebRTC statistics each browser vendor supports
- Ensuring endpoint statistics are collected and transported efficiently and securely
Why monitor endpoints?
Endpoints, such as contact center agents, provide the best vantage point to gauge the user experience. As WebRTC is implemented in the browser, the best place to get WebRTC performance data is directly from the browser running on a WebRTC endpoint. The WebRTC getStats API supports an extensive collection of real-time communications statistics that can be accessed directly from an agent’s browser.
Generally speaking, the WebRTC getStats API supports three types of endpoint statistics that are vital to analyzing performance and troubleshooting problems. They correspond to stages in the media pipeline, as described in Varun Singh and Marcin Nagy’s blog How Problems in the WebRTC Media Pipeline Affect Quality of Experience:
- Network connectivity - packet transport metrics, including throughput, loss, delay and jitter
- Media - media stream metrics, including throughput per channel (audio, video and data)
- Signaling - metrics for session negotiation (SDP or XMPP) and address resolution (STUN/TURN/ICE).
Typical challenges associated with using the getStats API to monitor WebRTC endpoints include:
- Keeping track of the WebRTC statistics each browser vendor supports
- Ensuring endpoint statistics are collected and transported efficiently and securely
Why monitor endpoints?
Endpoints, such as contact center agents, provide the best vantage point to gauge the user experience. As WebRTC is implemented in the browser, the best place to get WebRTC performance data is directly from the browser running on a WebRTC endpoint. The WebRTC getStats API supports an extensive collection of real-time communications statistics that can be accessed directly from an agent’s browser.
Generally speaking, the WebRTC getStats API supports three types of endpoint statistics that are vital to analyzing performance and troubleshooting problems. They correspond to stages in the media pipeline, as described in Varun Singh and Marcin Nagy’s blog How Problems in the WebRTC Media Pipeline Affect Quality of Experience:
- Network connectivity - packet transport metrics, including throughput, loss, delay and jitter
- Media - media stream metrics, including throughput per channel (audio, video and data)
- Signaling - metrics for session negotiation (SDP or XMPP) and address resolution (STUN/TURN/ICE).
Typical challenges associated with using the getStats API to monitor WebRTC endpoints include:
- Keeping track of the WebRTC statistics each browser vendor supports
- Ensuring endpoint statistics are collected and transported efficiently and securely
Tracking browser releases is a headache.
The W3C/IETF getStats API specifications outline hundreds of potential WebRTC statistics. The vast majority of these statistics are optional, so support varies widely between browsers and browser release versions.
To further complicate matters, browser releases happen frequently. Google, for example, introduces new major releases of Chrome every six weeks, sometimes adding new stats. In any given contact center or company using video conferencing, a variety of browsers may be in use (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.) at different release levels, so it’s important for a monitoring software provider to follow browser releases closely and perform regular regression tests to avoid incompatibilities and keep pace with change.
Tracking browser releases is a headache.
The W3C/IETF getStats API specifications outline hundreds of potential WebRTC statistics. The vast majority of these statistics are optional, so support varies widely between browsers and browser release versions.
To further complicate matters, browser releases happen frequently. Google, for example, introduces new major releases of Chrome every six weeks, sometimes adding new stats. In any given contact center or company using video conferencing, a variety of browsers may be in use (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.) at different release levels, so it’s important for a monitoring software provider to follow browser releases closely and perform regular regression tests to avoid incompatibilities and keep pace with change.
Tracking browser releases is a headache.
The W3C/IETF getStats API specifications outline hundreds of potential WebRTC statistics. The vast majority of these statistics are optional, so support varies widely between browsers and browser release versions.
To further complicate matters, browser releases happen frequently. Google, for example, introduces new major releases of Chrome every six weeks, sometimes adding new stats. In any given contact center or company using video conferencing, a variety of browsers may be in use (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.) at different release levels, so it’s important for a monitoring software provider to follow browser releases closely and perform regular regression tests to avoid incompatibilities and keep pace with change.
Tracking browser releases is a headache.
The W3C/IETF getStats API specifications outline hundreds of potential WebRTC statistics. The vast majority of these statistics are optional, so support varies widely between browsers and browser release versions.
To further complicate matters, browser releases happen frequently. Google, for example, introduces new major releases of Chrome every six weeks, sometimes adding new stats. In any given contact center or company using video conferencing, a variety of browsers may be in use (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.) at different release levels, so it’s important for a monitoring software provider to follow browser releases closely and perform regular regression tests to avoid incompatibilities and keep pace with change.
