In-country number testing replicates your global customers’ experience of dialing your number.
Without in-country number testing, you will only discover a problem if a customer complains. However, research has shown that only 4% of customers complain. That means you won’t get an opportunity to rectify a problem for the other 96%. Unhappy customers may simply switch their business to one of your competitors and are likely to tell others about their poor experience.
What is in-country number testing?
In-country number testing replicates your customers’ experience of dialing toll and toll-free (also known as freephone) numbers and flags problems immediately. It enables you to proactively monitor your global contact numbers, isolate issues, and resolve them before there’s a major impact on your customer engagement and your brand reputation.
Why do I need in-country number testing?
Despite the growing availability of alternative communication methods, the voice channel continues to be the primary contact method for customers. The quality of the call experience strongly influences your customers’ perception of your business and your brand. A high-quality customer experience is critical because good conversations drive business growth. Your contact numbers support sales orders and customer management and when they are "down" your business is not generating revenue and may be losing customers.
In addition to agent-customer conversations, voice analytics, voice-bot call flows, and true interactive voice response (IVR) have a fundamental need for good audio. Managing a global voice and data network with multiple service providers is not easy, and knowing that a vendor is offering good quality today does not mean they will have good quality tomorrow because network dynamics are … dynamic.
Won’t my network monitoring tools alert me to any issues?
Most IT network monitoring tools don't emphasize the quality of the audio channel to support conversation. In addition, these tools are designed to monitor your internal network, so they won’t alert you to issues outside your network such as toll-free number outages, touch tone (DTMF) failures, incorrect carrier routing, and post dial delay (PDD).
In-country testing is key as many services can only be dialed from within the target country, and testing that utilizes the actual network paths that customers transit is most valuable.
Aren’t call failures rare?
Actually, call failures are more common than you might think. Here at Spearline, we have conducted millions of test calls worldwide, resulting in billions of data points. The test calls are recorded, and the audio quality is measured using the industry-standard Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (ITU P.862 - PESQ) method. Based on these tests, we’ve found that (at least) 1 in 25 calls fail to connect or suffer customer-impacting issues such as poor audio quality, latency (delay of voice), or DTMF failures. This represents a very significant 4%+ of daily customer contacts which may result in disappointment; a failure rate unlikely to support the goals of most businesses.
How can Spearline help?
Spearline's unique platform presents a cloud-based SaaS solution with tentacles reaching physical points-of-presence around the globe, connecting to both fixed-line telecommunications networks and mobile operators.
Key benefits:
- Drive improvements in your customer experience by fully understanding call quality from your customers’ perspective.
- Protect your brand and your customer engagement by responding rapidly to any issues affecting your global contact numbers.
- Proactively manage carriers to ensure a consistently high-quality service and monitor adherence to service level agreements (SLAs).
- Pinpoint failures, identify patterns, and share information using our detailed call logs.
- Monitor the performance of your entire telecommunications infrastructure and benchmark your performance against others in your industry using our advanced reporting features.
Case study:
Mastercard - Mastering the fundamentals of brand protection
Mastercard, one of the world’s largest financial services providers, is a highly respected brand with customers all around the world. For Mastercard, protection of their brand is crucial, and they achieve this through their commitment to an excellent customer experience. When presented with Spearline’s solution for automated in-country number testing, Tom Hinds was struck by its unique ability to do exactly what Mastercard needed.
“It’s the ability to go in and create those calls... whether I do it 4 times a day, or 24 times a day, I can create a call that simulates a call originating in any given country, terminating where I want it to go, and I can measure it. I don’t have to wait for a live call.”
Tom Hinds, Vice President, Global Contact Center Management, Mastercard
Armed with those insights, Mastercard is able to make real-time adjustments to their network. By switching carriers or rerouting calls to a different contact center as soon as a degradation in service is flagged, their command center can proactively manage the customer experience. Mastercard runs test calls for contact numbers across every continent in the world and are finding it easy to deploy testing universally.
Read more about how Spearline helped Mastercard to take control of the quality of their customer experience by proactively monitoring their global contact numbers here.
New to Spearline?
If you are new to Spearline and would like to find out more about how you can benefit from our platform, we would love to speak to you! Please send us a brief message and we will be in touch with you shortly.