Case Study: Company Improves Global Call Quality

Intrado takes pride in connecting people. And they recognize that the quality of that connection is critical.

The Challenge

Intrado’s customers have had a huge shift towards using tools like MS Teams to support their internal communication and collaboration needs.

Their customers have globally dispersed teams, typically with headquarters in the US and locations spread across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

An increase in remote working means employees are more spread out than ever, and more reliant on collaboration tools to work together effectively.

Yet the quality of connections using cloud collaboration tools like MS Teams and Webex rely on good performance across the entire path of a multinational phone call using traditional (PSTN) telephone networks, as well as the performance of the business’s internal networks.

“Visibility was our biggest challenge. We had no oversight of the end-to-end performance of calls and, therefore, no clear understanding of the customer’s experience, until feedback or a complaint filtered through.” Gregor Rennie – Head of Carrier Strategy, Management EMEA, Intrado Cloud Collaboration

For Intrado to ensure the quality being delivered across the entire path of their customers’ calls, they needed visibility of the end-to-end performance, including multiple hops across telecoms carrier networks globally. Without this, they relied on customer complaints to alert them to call failures and quality issues.

When faults did occur, there could be a long delay between the fault occurring, the customer reporting it, and the telecoms team investigating.

And, as carriers often only hold call data for around 24 hours, the investigation would often lead to a dead end.

The Solution

Intrado uses Voice Assure In-country to proactively monitor the performance of its cloud collaboration services globally.

Using MS Teams voice quality tests, their testing regime places automated hourly test calls from in-country phone lines across almost 30 countries in EMEA, including France, Germany and South Africa.

The test calls dial into the cloud calling number for that country, and the call is routed in the exact way a typical user’s call would be, all the way to Intrado’s customers’ MS Teams cloud PBXs.

Testing for connectivity and voice quality across the entire call path, including their carrier partners’ routes, means Intrado receives early alerts on any quality issues that could affect their customers.

The Intrado team then often uses the Voice assure Realtime in-platform softphone to troubleshoot and gain additional evidence to resolve issues with their carrier partners.

“Spearline’s global coverage of in-country servers is what makes it stand out. I can replicate, essentially, 99% of the precise call path of a customer, without any guesswork or estimation needed.

“Being able to test and isolate issues to either the carrier network, or a customer’s own internal network has been invaluable on hundreds of occasions.” Gregor Rennie – Head of Carrier Strategy, Management EMEA, Intrado Cloud Collaboration

Benefits

Visibility of the entire end-to-end performance of calls across cloud collaboration services like MS Teams.

Understanding of the real experience of customers by replicating and monitoring real call paths, using in-country servers.

Ability to proactively manage service quality, through real-time alerting that catches issues early, rather than being reactive to customer complaints and feedback.

The data and intelligence to be able to manage carrier partners and hold them to service level agreements (SLAs).

“I can’t fault the service we receive from Spearline. Having a named single point of contact [Customer Engagement Manager] is so valuable – I have someone that knows our business that I can reach out to, and that has been able to support us when we’ve made changes to our infrastructure.

“The two-way dialogue we have often means solutions can be tailored to our needs, which has also been a real benefit many times.” Gregor Rennie – Head of Carrier Strategy, Management EMEA, Intrado Cloud Collaboration