CPaaS provider Voxbone,
soon to be subsumed by Bandwidth, is looking to push the boundaries on voice call quality performance management with a
new cloud platform that provides businesses with a view of services quality, consumption, and billing metrics, end to end — meaning, across both their own and carrier connections.
The new call quality performance platform, called
Voxbone Insights, allows enterprises to see voice quality and consumption metrics within seconds of a call ending, said Matt Brown, VP of product management at Voxbone, in a No Jitter briefing. The goal is to allow businesses to better address quality issues that lead to a poor customer experience, time eaten up in troubleshooting dropped and blocked calls, and difficulty measuring return-on-investment delivered by communications providers, he said.
Voxbone Insight is a natural follow-on for the enterprise-grade, full-stack, cloud-native voice platform the company introduced in February 2019 and now offers in 33 countries. Once they have a voice platform in place, the next question for enterprises is “how do I get the tooling in place to manage, monitor, and operationalize my network activity?” Brown said. “That’s the jumping-off point for where we wanted to go with Insights,” since providing the answer on a one-by-one basis was nonsensical and a waste of resources, he added.
Rather, Voxbone determined a better approach would be to develop what would essentially a business intelligence (BI) platform that it would integrate over the top of its network and expose the same tools it uses internally to allow all customers to do their own real-time anomaly detection and alerting, as well as real-time reporting on quality and operations, Brown explained. For Insights’ launch, Voxbone settled on a three-tier offer of metrics, monitoring, and alerting, he added.
From the Insights dashboard, an enterprise voice operations team can get immediate access to call data records (CDRs) upon call completion. They can view metadata such as mean opinion score, roundtrip packet loss, and jitter broken out by multiple legs — from the customer site to Voxbone, and from Voxbone downstream into the domestic network, Brown said. “This means there’s no more arguing about SLAs, there’s no more arguing about whose fault it is when quality drops. There’s full transparency on where the issue arises in the call flow,” he added.
With the monitoring component, the voice team can “start generating intelligence out of the reports,” using real-time charting and graphing to help spot anomalies, Brown said. For example, they can use real-time monitoring of channel utilization to watch spending and identify where they might reallocate usage to avoid dropped calls or unused capacity. And, with customized alerting, the team can receive essential information they need for proactive decision making on the network.
Voxbone also has taken compliance concerns into consideration, and the Insights reporting aligns with data privacy and storage regulations in all countries with which it does business in, Brown noted. Additionally, while all this is available from the Insights platform, the CDR data is also ingestible into other BI systems should an enterprise so choose, Brown said.
Voxbone is offering Insights, now available, in a freemium model, with all customers receiving access to the metrics package on their last 500 calls, he said. Beyond that, additional subscription fees apply should customers want longer retention periods for their data, monitoring capabilities, and customizable alerts.
