VoIP technology has revolutionized the way communication is being done today. Gradually, the prominence of VoIP has been spreading to all sections of the society who are now willing to switch from traditional cellular calling services to VoIP calling services. The major boosting point in VoIP adoption is however the reduced call rates and high voice quality. But, in order to catch the audience pulse and experience profitable VoIP business, VoIP providers have to offer maximum customer satisfaction. VoIP providers should regularly carry out an exercise to identify their customer issues and try to resolve them at the earliest.
The following are the 5 common customer complaints faced by VoIP providers:
- A buzzing sound or static on the call
This is an unseen issue that can adversely affect the user experience. It happens because of analog interference in the phone lines. Repetitive transcoding on call legs will cause imperfections and accentuate background noises. So, VoIP providers should ensure to support a wide range of audio codecs avoiding the necessity for multiple transcoding.
- Poor Voice Quality
This is a very common and business impacting complaint faced by the VoIP providers. There can be so many reasons such as insufficient bandwidth, faulty device, traffic congestion, etc. VoIP providers have to take enough care in addressing this issue as it may severely dent their business image and profit margins. In order to mitigate low bandwidth issues, VoIP providers can leverage bandwidth optimization software (commonly referred to as “bytesaver”) which offers uninterrupted and good quality VoIP calling experience even in low bandwidth instances. In other cases, customers must be asked to simply upgrade their softphone clients or mobile VoIP applications to the latest version to help resolve the poor voice quality issue.
- Call drops
There can be many reasons for call drops. It can be due to softswitch’s CPU being overloaded by media processing obligations; gateways not able to keep up with the call rate, or the gateways failing to handle the full channel capacity. VoIP providers should efficiently tackle this issue on an urgent basis to avoid serious pitfall for their VoIP business. One of the solutions to free up the CPU of a VoIP softswitch from overloading by media obligations is to have dedicated resources handle the media processing on the gateways. Also, the gateways should have the full channel capacity.
- Echo on the call
This is another major issue faced by VoIP providers. Echo is nothing but the repetition of sound of the voice after a small lapse of time. It occurs if the media gateway echo tail is too short or if the gateway doesn’t support echo cancellation on all channels. So, VoIP providers should ensure that their gateways should support long echo tails on all channels in order to overcome the echo issue.
- No dial tone and no outgoing calls with internet connection
Usually this scenario happens when the call routing is miss-configured. VoIP providers should be careful enough to identify such network issues and fix them at the earliest. All routes should be tested periodically to diagnose and address routing issues.