How to Improve VOIP Call Quality
VOIP was supposed to solve all our problems. Either it replaced a on-premise phone system…or is the power behind a shiny new Sales Platform. The system was easy to deploy, simple enough to use and cost a fraction of your outdated legacy phone solution. As soon as it’s deployed, you started having issues where your customer calls became frequented with choppiness, echo and delay. Sound familiar?
You’re not alone. Poor voice quality is one of VoIP’s major setbacks and it can end up costing your business. More than two thirds of customers who experience poor voice quality are likely to hang up and call the competition.
Sometimes, poor call quality problems experienced with VoIP can be fixed by troubleshooting, however, there’s not much you can do when your call is intentionally compromised.
It’s a secret many VoIP providers like to keep to themselves and it’s called using grey routes.
What is a grey route?
Most VOIP providers make money reselling calling ‘minutes’, either by charging their customers on a per minute basis or may provide a ‘flat rate’ that encompasses their expected usage. Either way, it’s a core part of their business model.
However, your VOIP provider is not connected directly to every other phone company out there. In order to get a call from San Francisco to New York, the call at some point has to connect to the regional phone network in New York, and to do this your provider would either need to own physical cabling OR partner with someone who does have that infrastructure present.
Enter the Telecom MiddleMan — thousands and thousands of companies that connect calls across the US for a fee, that is also charged on a minute basis. This all eats into your VOIP provider’s margins, making them try to find ways to connect calls at the cheapest rate while maintaining some adequate level of quality. The process of optimizing these paths is called Least Cost Routing, and that’s ultimately what results in your call quality varying so much.
With so many different ways to connect calls and so many different rates, millions of possible paths emerge for any call to be connected, it takes only a few bad actors (that your VOIP provider doesn’t even know about) to compromise your calls.
In a study that we ran with various telecom providers, we found:
- One call started from a US number, through a US provider in Denver, being routed through the Caribbean island of St Thomas (which is notoriously bad with telco infrastructure) before ending up back in the US in New York.
- An identical call routed through another provider resolved through a private Time Warner Cable ip address, meaning that for all we know, the call was connected through someone’s garage in the New York area.
What can you do about it?
The reason ‘landlines’ don’t have these issues is because they’re owned by enormous Telecom companies that have 1) the monopoly power to charge customers a high price to begin with and 2) the scale and nationwide presence that their minute costs are negligible. In the price-competitive world of VOIP companies, neither of these apply.
The only way to test your vendor is to ask them to very clearly define:
- How they define their benchmark for ‘quality’, and how they can economically maintain that benchmark?
- How much visibility they have into a call once the call drops. For example, can they identify that this outgoing call connected to a Sprint phone that had one bar of service at the time?
- What their business model looks like with regard to charging for minutes?
99% of vendors either can’t or won’t be able to disclose this information, but companies like Truly that have a fundamentally different business model absolutely will be able to.
Need more information on how to fix your VOIP issues for good — check out our Guide to Improving Call Quality
Of course, always feel free to reach out to us anytime at sales@truly.co
