Call Quality Challenges Facing Businesses and End Users

Since we were little, we’ve all learned to expect flawless sounding phone calls – and more and more we expect seamless video calls as well.  However, the trends towards cloud and mobility can cause challenges for businesses looking delivering this experience for colleagues, customers and partners.   

We’ve talked about the network challenges here in the past, but add on the fact that there are more cloud and software based voice and video solutions on the market, and the workforce has become virtual with teleworking on the rise (see this post on the rise in At-home Call Center Agents) .  Smart phones and tablets are becoming the devices of choice of a mobile workforce, and the trend towards PC-based softphones continues.  But one thing hasn’t changed is that voice is still the dominant communications method, whether it’s a one-on-one phone call, conference call, webinar or videoconference.

All of these changes are driving the need for reliable, high quality voice and audio endpoints, both headsets and speakerphones.  To get into more detail on why voice endpoints have taken on even more significance, we caught up with Urban Gillis, the Vice President of Sales at Carousel partner Jabra.

Voice and  Audio Endpoints Needs to Perform

“With the challenges of being on the road, connecting from an airport parking lot, or even as a home-based contact center rep connecting through your computer, the need for a high quality audio endpoint has never been greater,” says Gillis.  “We’ve all experienced call jitter as the move towards IP phones and video calls has accelerated and these seem to be increasing as we’ve all been connecting through different types of networks.  Eliminating the possibility of poor quality originating from your headset or mobile speakerphone just makes sense.”

Devices that incorporate technology that support a professional experience can make all the difference.  For example, noise cancelling technology to minimize the impact of that dog barking in the yard next door, or wind noise protection for that sales person on the road.  “Having software-centric products so that adjustments can be made as environments change provides real benefits to a mobile workforce.  The endpoints businesses and their employees choose can deliver tangible results.  There are few pieces of technology that you use as often as your voice endpoint and it needs to deliver and perform for you.”

We couldn’t agree more.  Stay tuned for upcoming information on Jabra’s new Jabra Express solution that allows IT managers to manage all voice endpoints in the enterprise from one location, push updates to devices to streamline workflow, ensure compliance, manage roaming areas and more.

Mutare is a Carousel partner focused on making information access easier. They have a variety of software products that help businesses enhance communications, including unified messaging, smart notification, emergency notification and speech-to-text technology. Mutare’s technology is not just for call centers, however; its products can extend to virtually any corner of the enterprise where the business need demands it.

Speech-to-Text Technology Leads to Reduction in Fraudulent Claims for State Unemployment System

In the recent discussion with Rich, he shared one case study that illustrates the value Mutare’s technology can deliver. A large Midwestern state (not quite ready to be named) has been using an interactive voice response (IVR) system for several years to enable unemployed citizens to remotely file claims and conduct periodic check-ins with its unemployment agency. If any of you have ever been laid off, you know that when residents are on unemployment insurance, they are supposed to be actively looking for work. To ensure they are, recipients are required to check in with the agency every couple of weeks to answer questions, report where they applied, what the result were, etc.

Using the IVR systems for such transactions was supposed to streamline the process for residents and cut costs for the agency.  What the agency quickly realized is that they didn’t have the manpower to actually go back and listen to each recorded phone call, and cross-reference data with various databases to ensure recipients were reporting accurately and still eligible for unemployment insurance.

It didn’t take long for the state to determine that people were gaming the system, calling in to collect benefits when they were no longer entitled to them. The result: An estimated $30 million in fraudulent claims in 2011 alone.

Rapid ROI from Speech to Text Technology Integration

The state received a federal grant to help it reduce fraud and started looking at solutions. Mutare gave them a demo of their giSTT (pronounced: gist) speech to text software, which acts as a plugin to virtually every IVR systems, and soon had it up and running.  The giSST server sits between the audio source server and the customer database, either on-site on in the cloud, takes the audio files, translates them to text in the giSST engine and then delivers them to the appropriate application(s) to be leveraged.

By converting speech to text with giSTT, Mutare was able to help the state utilize the data and cross-reference it against various other databases to make sure claims were valid. It’s a job that is simply not feasible for humans to do alone.

The results were impressive. “The system caught its first instance of fraud within 5 minutes,” Quattrocchi says, “and approximately $10 million worth in the first year.”  Having paid about $1 million for the system, the state generated a 10-times ROI in the first year.

To learn more about how speech-to-text technology can make your unified communications, contact center and database applications work better, improving business processes and driving ROI, contact Carousel.  And don’t forget to check out our white paper, 4 Ways to Increase ROI from Contact Centers, for more valuable ROI tips.

It is just these types of problems that Carousel Industries’ partner 911ETC can solve. To learn more about how E911 technology works and trends that are driving its use, we talked with Michael Anderson, National Sales Director for 911ETC.

E911 Trends and Requirements

Some 30% of workers now telecommute to work at least a portion of the time and many of them use softphones to connect to their office phone system, usually via a VPN.

“Ten years ago, the technology didn’t exist to cover these remote workers,” Anderson says. “You had to have connectivity to the local PSTN everywhere you had a physical phone.”

That’s a problem for companies with lots of telecommuting workers or road warriors that are legally required to ensure their employees are protected by 911 service, as about 18 states now have such laws. While many of the laws lack significant penalties for lack of compliance, they have served to get the word out about the issue, Anderson says.

In some cases, however, the laws effectively extend to states that do not have them. Anderson tells of one financial firm in Illinois, which has had a 911 law for years. The company’s risk management and legal teams decided the firm should extend 911 coverage to employees in all states. Their rationale was that if something happened to an employee in a state with no 911 law, the company could still be liable because, being in Illinois, the company was aware of the risks.

Providing 911 to Softphone Users

To resolve the issue, the financial company uses 911ETC’s SoftLoc, which is software that enables 911 service on softphones. SoftLoc can tell when a user changes location based on the computer’s IP address, even when Network Address Translation (NAT) is in use. If a user is on the road connecting to the company VPN from a hotel, for example, SoftLoc will prompt the user to enter an address that can be used for 911 purposes.

The address is then entered in 911ETC’s Voice Positioning Server (VPC), which will then route any 911 calls from that user’s softphone to the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) closest to the address.

One 911ETC client, John Hancock, thought SoftLoc sounded good but feared its employees would just tap through the prompt, not wanting to bother entering an address – and thus opening up the company to liability.

Not a problem, Anderson says. “Customers have the ability to disable the softphone until the user puts a valid location into the prompt,” he notes.

SoftLoc also remembers previously entered locations, so users who routinely work from home or visit the same coffee shop won’t have to constantly re-enter those addresses.

Routing 911 Calls Within a Large Buildings

In a large building, such as a hotel, the user will be prompted to enter additional location information, such as a floor and room number. SoftLoc will also give suggested addresses if the user makes a mistake, drawing on its master guide of addresses.

When the user is in an office building on the internal phone system, the company PBX takes over. It is outfitted with location information for each user, based on a series of zones the customer creates.

If a user changes positions, maybe bringing his laptop to a conference room on another floor, once he connects to the company network – either wirelessly or via an Ethernet connection – his position will be identified and located in the 911 database.

These are important considerations if companies are to avoid the sad fate of a Maryland man back in 2006, which we touched on in an earlier post.

If you want to make sure all of your workers, and especially your mobile workers (here’s 5 types you should be supporting), have reliable access to 911 services, contact Carousel.  Along with partners like 911ETC, we can help.

Now, a new report from the University of Texas at Austin has demonstrated that not only are workers still happy to be working from home in their pajamas, but they actually work as many, if not more hours than their office-based peers.  According to an article on the University’s website:

Thirty percent of the study’s respondents who work from home add five to seven hours to their workweek compared with those who work exclusively at the office. They are also significantly less likely to work a standard 40-hour schedule and more likely to work overtime.

One reason for this extended work week includes the elimination of the daily commute.  Workers can get to work earlier and continue to work later.  As a teleworker myself, a recurring (lame) joke in our house is me saying, “Alright honey, I’m headed to work. I hope the traffic isn’t bad”, as I slowly climb the stairs to my third-floor office.  Commute time = 20 seconds.

Line Blurs Between Work and Home Life for Teleworkers

The dramatic improvement in Unified Communications solutions and Mobility, while presenting tremendous efficiencies for workers and employers, also results in a blurring of the line between work and home life for teleworkers.  An example would be taking that video call from a customer on the West Coast at 8PM at night on a Tuesday.  According to the study’s authors:

“Careful monitoring of this blurred boundary between work and home time and the erosion of ‘normal working hours’ in many professions can help us understand the expansion of work hours overall among salaried workers,” says Jennifer Glass, professor in the Department of Sociology and the Population Research Center and lead author of the study.

Glass and her co-author Mary Noonan, associate professor of sociology at the University of Iowa, found that telecommuting causes work to seep into home life, a problem previously identified in the 2008 Pew Networked Workers survey. According to the survey, a majority of tech-savvy workers claim that telecommuting technology has increased their overall work hours and that employees use technology, especially email, to perform work tasks even when sick or on vacation.

One interesting finding was that it is not parents with dependent children looking to create an effective work / life balance that drives who telecommutes.

In fact, parents with dependent children are no more likely to work from home than the population as a whole. According to the findings, employees with authority and status are more likely than others to have the option to work remotely because they have more control of their work schedules.

With all of this said, the trend towards teleworking is not slowing down.  As businesses and managers get more comfortable with the concept and more employees request the option to telework at least part-time, companies need to be sure they are ready to deliver.  To find out more about ensuring you have the right unified communication solutions in place to empower your teleworkers, contact Carousel today.

Kaafee Billah walked into his Gaithersburg office shortly before 9 a.m. Tuesday. The 39-year-old sales representative, who had recently started working at the medical company MedImmune Inc., made the first call from his desk at 9:02. Roughly 40 minutes later, he called 911 to say he needed medical help.

Almost 10 hours passed before someone found his body lying on the floor.

Police say an apparent phone glitch sent emergency personnel to the wrong address, leading them to believe that the 911 call was unfounded.

Sadly, six years since that event, we are still experiencing mix-ups with 911 systems for a number of reasons, not the least of which are the increased complexity of phone networks and the rise of home and mobile workers.

Increasingly Complex Phone Networks Cause 911 Woes

The problem is the same technology that makes phone networks far more feature-rich than they were in the past can make it more difficult to identify where a caller is calling from. In the past a phone number was associated with a particular place – your house, for example – that is far from the case today. “Follow-me” services enable the same phone number to be used for an office phone, a cell phone and at home. Businesses use technologies such as VoIP and SIP trunks that completely deconstruct the relationship between area code and location.

Carousel is a case in point. While our headquarters is in Rhode Island, we have workers all over the country. If one of our Virginia-based folks should call you, you’d likely see the Rhode Island 401 area code pop up on your caller ID – because that’s how our VoIP system works. If that same Virginia worker needs to call 911, he needs a way to ensure the emergency service provider knows where he is – and that he’s far from Rhode Island.

Mobility Increases 911 Complexity

Given the trend toward mobility and work-at-home employees, you can see how the problem can quickly be exacerbated. Increasingly employees use soft phones that are completely computer-based, meaning their phone number is really associated with an IP address, not a physical location. The Carousel example above is again a case in point, as many of our remote workers may well work out of their homes.

Similarly, when users are on the road, if they’re in range of a WiFi network it’s possible they’ll use that network to tie in to their corporate phone network, instead of using the cellular network. Once again, that presents 911 challenges.

E911 Legislation Is On the Rise

States are taking the situation seriously, as 18 of them have already passed legislation mandating that companies with multiline phone systems implement technology that enables effective E911 capabilities. Additional states, including California, are taking steps in that direction.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is looking at putting some rules together governing 911 and multi-line phone systems, an action supported by Carousel’s partners Avaya and 911 ETC as well as groups such as the National Emergency Number Association.

911 ETC, in fact, is a premier provider of software that enables E911 solutions for companies of virtually any size, whether with a traditional PBX or VoIP system. Its offerings include CrisisConnect for the enterprise, RedConnect for small businesses and VoIPConnect for IP, SoftLoc for soft phone provisioning, and on-site notification.

911 ETC works closely with Avaya to ensure its software works with all the latest Avaya gear. In fact, 911 ETC is a member of Avaya’s recently launched Select Product Program and participates in the Avaya DevConnect program to ensure 911 ETC products are compatible with Avaya’s solutions.

With products from the likes of 911 ETC, there’s no need to take risks with your 911 service. And it may well be the law.

In the webinar, Scott Yewell, senior product line manager for Acme Packet, explained that SBCs help companies deal with the challenges inherent in moving to an all-IP network and SIP trunking. Those challenges fall into three categories: integration, security and support.

How SBCs Help with IP Network Integration

One of the problems companies run into when they look to implement SIP trunking to replace PRI or T-1 lines is getting all the IP-based equipment in their various branch or regional offices to work with one another. Maybe some offices have voice and video equipment from Avaya while others use Cisco. That’s not an issue when the offices are connected via PRI or T-1 lines, but when using SIP it’s all IP all the way – so the equipment has to interoperate.

That leaves companies with two options, one of which is to rip and replace some of the equipment so that it’s all from the same vendor. That, of course is expensive and fails to protect existing equipment investments.  The other option is to use an SBC to enable interoperability between the equipment.

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Dig Deeper:  Watch the recorded webinar on Session Border Controller now!
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For example, an SBC will enable interoperability between SIP and the older H.323 protocols previously used for video. Even if all the equipment supports SIP, vendors tend to implement the standards slightly differently. Acme Packet has worked to understand the various nuances of these implementations and ensure they all work with Acme Packet SBCs, essentially providing integration among multivendor equipment.

SBCs Add Security to All-IP Networks

Going all IP exposes companies to risks they don’t face with T-1 or PRI lines. One such threat Yewell mentioned is reconnaissance scanning, where an intruder tries to index the IP network to find open extensions from which they can make outbound phone calls. Another is protocol fuzzing, which is the use of malformed SIP messages to try to take down communications equipment.

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Dig Deeper:  Check out details of the Q&A about Session Border Controllers from the Webinar
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SBCs from the likes of Acme Packet have features to protect against such security threats. In part that’s because the SBC acts as a demarcation point between the service provider and the enterprise network. All inbound calls terminate at the SBC, which then forges a new connection to the enterprise side. So when an intruder tries to scan the network, they can only see as far as the SBC. The SBC can also recognize SIP-based and other protocol-based attacks and will terminate them before they cause any harm, Yewell says.

Improve Troubleshooting and Support with Session Border Controllers

When something goes wrong in a SIP-based network, an SBC can be crucial in troubleshooting the problem, he notes. Consider a company that has SIP connections to two service providers, a primary and a backup. If there’s a glitch, trying to troubleshoot the cause can be a problem.

But the SBC continually tracks and logs all communications that come through it, creating a wealth of historical information that can be valuable in troubleshooting. What’s more, it can measure the quality of a call, including jitter and dropped packets, to further help troubleshoot problems. The SBC will also make intelligent decisions based on all the information it collects. If the primary SIP trunk starts acting poorly, it will proactively switch traffic to the secondary trunk – before users are impacted.

Check out the Carousel Webinar to learn more about the role SBCs play in SIP-based networks. And click here to get a taste of the many questions and answers about session border controllers Yewell fields during the event.

Ronald McDonald House Charities(R) of Chicagoland and Northwest Indiana (RMHC(R)-CNI) recently celebrated a significant milestone — the official opening of the world’s largest Ronald McDonald House, located at 211 E. Grand Avenue in Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood. To enhance the care and support delivered to families of sick children, RMHC-CNI partnered with Avaya to bring Avaya IP Office — the company’s unified communications solution for small and mid-size companies — into the new Ronald McDonald House(R) near Lurie Children’s.

Avaya IP Office provides RMHC-CNI with a state-of-the-art communications solution that ensures families and House staff can easily stay in touch within the House and with local hospitals. Installation and other services were delivered by Platinum-certified Avaya Connect Channel Partner Carousel Industries, with fulfillment support delivered by Westcon Group, Inc.

Avaya IP Office will help the charity deliver on its “families first” mission through an array of features, ranging from enhanced mobility and multi-party conferencing to integration with top-tier guest services. Advanced mobility applications enable staff members to remain consistently accessible to co-workers and House guests through a single number, even when they are working away from the new House. Additionally, an Avaya IP Office application turns a staff member’s cell phone into a full-featured office phone so that House staff members can remain reachable, with business-level communications in-hand. The same feature can be used by the families so they won’t miss important calls when away from their bedrooms.

With Avaya IP Office, employees also get a centralized conferencing bridge that allows all staff members at the four Ronald McDonald Houses in the Chicagoland area — and at the local Chapter Office — to set up conference calls on demand.

Installation and design of the solution was delivered by Carousel Industries, which also provided project management expertise and coordination of operations. Carousel will deliver ongoing maintenance and support, including site visits and system evaluations, as well as assisting RMHC-CNI with on-site programming and ‘adds, move and changes.’

When a family is going though an experience that requires they rely on a group like the Ronald McDonald House, there are few things more important than communication.  We are thrilled to have been able to participate in, and support such an important initiative to insure that the communication needs of the families and staff are taken care of.  Hats off to Avaya and the Westcon Group for making this happen.

How Session Border Controllers Let the Enterprise Realize the Benefits of IP Communications

Wednesday, July 18, 2012
2:00 PM EDT / 11:00 AM PDT

Enterprise Session Border Controllers (E-SBCs) play a critical role in unified communications for the enterprise. They protect enterprise networks from security threats, cure incompatibilities between UC systems and network services and ensure service quality and reliability.

In this webinar, Scott Yewell, Acme Packet’s senior product line manager for enterprise products, will provide details of the Acme Packet E-SBC features IT managers can exploit to take control and simplify their networks while lowering their costs.

During this webinar you will learn about:

Connecting UC and legacy telephony systems without ripping and replacing
Securing the network from malicious and inadvertent threats
Managing quality and reliability in voice applications.

Watch Replay Video!

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Operational Efficiencies Beyond the Phone

Wednesday, July 25, 2012
2:00 pm EDT / 11:00 am PDT

You’ve leveraged technology, such as call recording, quality monitoring and workforce management, to optimize the efficiency of customer-facing phone work. But what about all the off-phone work done in your call center and back-office operations?

Off-phone work, such as call wrap up, transaction processing, and special projects can take up to 50% of an agent’s time. Can you forecast, monitor and manage this workload, and the impact it has on your service levels?

This webinar will demonstrate how workforce optimization solutions from Verint Systems have been specifically designed to help contact centers and entire enterprises manage and improve the quality and efficiency of off-phone work.

Watch Replay Video!

Big Shifts: Three Trends That Are Re-Shaping the Contact Center

Today’s contact center is no longer a cost center, but the face – and voice – of the brand.

Customers now expect support via voice, social media and chat, which is changing the contact center. Agents expect the same user experience with devices and technology at work that they’ve come to expect from their personal devices at home – where they increasingly prefer to work.

Register Now and join Carousel Industries and Jabra for this webinar where we will discuss what contact center professionals need to think about right now – and the steps they need to quickly take to meet these expectations.

To get a handle on the current UC challenges and how to deal with them, we talked with Tony McQueen, a solutions architect for Carousel Industries who specializes in UC.

The Unified Communications Integration Challenge

As employees get used to employing more sorts of communications technologies, there’s an impetus to wrap them all into a unified UC solution, McQueen says. “Telephony, IM, presence, video – they’re all just different modes of communication that fall under the UC umbrella,” he says.

Major manufacturers such as Avaya, Cisco and Microsoft are all coming out with unified clients from which employees can access various UC components. The problem is, companies have often turned to different vendors for those components.

“Maybe it’s an Avaya voice over IP (VOIP) system, Polycom for video and Microsoft for IM on the desktop,” McQueen says. “So clients say, ‘It’s great that manufacturers are finally getting everything in a single client, but I’ve already made a huge investment in these other technologies so how do I get them to play together?”

Integration Issues for UC – Security and Traffic Load

As customers seek to integrate these various technologies, they face challenges with issues such as security. On the voice side, that likely means deploying a session border controller, which helps protect the VOIP network from denial of service and other malicious attacks while offering encryption of signaling, among other functions. To protect video streams, companies are installing video border proxies, which open up the correct ports such that video can traverse firewalls without giving up security.

Another issue is simply the amount of traffic that devices such as tablets, smart phones and other wireless devices are adding to the network, McQueen says. “With all the video and collaboration tools on tablets and other devices, the wireless infrastructure can get saturated,” he says, echoing an issue we’ve covered previously.

Deciding When to Move to a Unified UC Client

Given these issues, users are grappling with when it makes sense to make a move to a unified client. While McQueen says the clients are “still in their infancy,” customers need to take the long view. “Yes, customers have a large investment in the technologies they have today,” he says. “But they have to take into consideration what their 3- and 5-year growth paths are and what they want their user experience to be and start working toward that goal.”

To find the right time, he suggests customers build an internal lab and let IT folks and perhaps a few others play with the technology until they’re comfortable with it. That’s also the place to address security and any compliance issues.

Findings from the lab work may also help you make the business case for a unified client, he says. With a unified client, you should require fewer administrators as compared to dealing with separate clients. “So you’re freeing up people to work on higher level projects,” McQueen says.

“I would say, if you can get 90% of your unified communications to work on a single client, that’s the best route to go,” he says. “Otherwise it becomes too convoluted.”

If your UC implementation seems a bit convoluted, contact Carousel – we can help straighten it out.