Using an IP network to offer voice services can provide significant cost savings over traditional phone systems. Making this move can also result in productivity-increasing benefits, such as extension portability, unified messaging and softphone clients on a PC, all of which are advantages that can give your organization a competitive edge.

However, maintaining a high quality voice solution can be challenging due to the presence of many potential points of failure in today’s IP telephony installations. For example, network failures and high data traffic can cause service availability issues. Other network and system issues can result in problems, such as noisy or choppy sounding voices and “underwater” sounds. Additionally, one-way audio can occur when firewalls or session border controllers are not configured correctly, or when call routing errors occur. Any of these issues can be enough to entirely negate any benefit your company might have hoped to obtain, and possibly add significant cost (both monetarily and brand-wise).

So why is voice quality so important? Here are three points to consider:

1. Customers expect high voice quality.
When customers call into a contact center, they do not care about the technology used. All that concerns them is getting through to the appropriate person within your organization and having their request or comments be heard and handled appropriately. If customers cannot be heard or understood, or if calls are dropped, people are likely to become frustrated and angry, take their business elsewhere or create bad publicity about your company. None of these are good scenarios, particularly in the current challenging economic conditions.

Although older Time-division Multiplexing (TDM) systems do not offer the same technological advantages that the newer IP systems provide, one thing they do deliver is consistently good voice quality. This in mind, in order for IP systems to be considered a worthwhile investment, they must provide equal or better voice quality. One way to ensure that you are getting the most out of your IP telephony investment is to continually monitor and evaluate the voice quality provided by the infrastructure. In this way, you can quickly discover and fix issues, before they impact the customer experience.

2. Phones are your organization’s lifeblood.
Amongst all the communication modes that are, or are becoming, available, the phone (and therefore voice communication) is still king.

Phones go beyond providing a link that customers can use to maintain a connection with your company. They also provide a means with which your organization can reach out to your customers to communicate additional services, reminders and offers – not to mention the fact that they supply employees with connections to one another.

With this in mind, it is crucial to avoid common IP-related issues that can result in voices sounding garbled, dropped calls, one-way audio or long connection times. These types of problems waste time in a best case scenario. In a worst case scenario, they make day-to-day business impossible.

3. Voice quality can improve or ruin the customer experience.
Customer interactions should be as meaningful as possible. What is the point of calling into an organization if your request or comment literally cannot be heard? Of all the customer service issues that could potentially exist, poor voice quality should not be one of them.

If, however, any voice quality issues become evident, it is critical to identify and fix them immediately, but keep in mind that identifying the cause of an issue in a complex IP environment can pose quite a challenge. In fact, manually searching for the cause of an issue can take days or even months, valuable time that can cost you revenue as customers abandon their efforts to stay in contact (and possibly do business) with your company.

That is why it is to your advantage to invest in a proactive voice quality monitoring solution. Utilizing a solution that provides detailed information on any problems that are detected can vastly shorten the troubleshooting process. In addition, such a solution makes finding trends and recurring problems simpler, so you can avoid some voice quality issues altogether.

With these three points in mind, it is easy to see why a high quality voice experience is essential to keeping your business running smoothly. When you are able to provide a high quality voice experience, you save time and money, your employees are better able to perform their tasks, and your customers are happier with the service you offer them. The result is a better telephone experience for your users, and therefore, more business for you.