Voice Connectivity is Critical
Your phone systems have gone down and you are unable to communicate with your customers. After several hours of troubleshooting you have managed to get the services up again but what do you do now?
Whether you utilize a SIP based VoIP system, digital voice over T1 lines or POTS (plain old telephone service), those voice services need to be available.
There are a number of ways you can monitor your telephone services. If you manage a calling center or support lines for your customers then inbound connectivity is critical. If you manage outbound calling centers or sales teams then you need to make sure those calls are connected.
Verify Inbound Voice Connectivity
Do you know immediately if your clients are unable to reach you? You need to be notified as soon as possible so that you can diagnose and fix the problem.
PhoneNumberMonitoring.com (PNM) is an easy to use inbound phone monitoring solution. At PNM you can setup automated calls to monitor your phone lines. Set the scheduled hours and frequency of calls and then set the expected result- ring tone, answer, voicemail, automated attendant etc… You can even setup a key code that the attendant must enter to verify that the call was received.
Once your call monitor is established you can generate outage alerts, response time reports and view a number of valuable metrics regarding your telephone services.
If receiving calls from your customers is critical to your business then setting up a monitor at PhoneNumberMonitoring.com will help you maintain the highest levels of quality customer service.
Verify Automated System Paths
Use PNM to script tests to confirm that your automated attendant is working as expected.
Build Response Time Reports
View your call center call response time metrics from a client’s perspective outside of your network. You can record the time it takes from initiating a call until the call is retrieved from the queue and build reports of response time over a period of time.
Verify Outbound Calls on SIP Service
If the sales team isn’t making calls you aren’t making money! Whether your team is centralized in one building or scattered around the globe in satellite locations or home offices, their calls need to be routing properly through your VoIP system.
Due to the nature of providing high quality reliable performance, VoIP systems can be very complex and every layer of complexity adds additional points of failure.
- DNS Issues: DNS is an integral part of establishing communication across the internet and there are numerous DNS calls made during the VoIP connection process. Some of the potential issues include: DNS resolution problems from the users location, corrupted DNS routing tables with domain authorities, and DNS lookup problems during the ENUM lookup.
- Local Network Issues: There are many devices along the path data travels on a local network such as a router or firewall that, when configured incorrectly, could cause a communication failure. Hardware failures along the path are another common cause for a service interruption whether a router is on the fritz or a component of your server infrastructure goes down.
- Internet Connectivity Issues: Most local ISPs experience sporadic outages due to unexpected events such as a backhoe severing underground cables or a technician performing an incorrect operation that can take a network down from minutes to hours. Physical devices such as modems can also fail, and even if you have redundant lines connecting your network to the internet, you may find out that the failover procedures for DNS routing and port forwarding do not work as expected during an outage. Many locations set up such failover with redundancy but do not continue to test the setup as other variables in the environment change.
- Phone System Has Reached Capacity: Depending on the type of phone system you have and the bandwidth of the lines coming into your system, it is possible that a user would receive a busy signal or a failure to connect because you have reached the limits of your current infrastructure.
Next Steps
Now that we have acknowledged that there are many points of failure along a VoIP setup, what can you do to mitigate service outages?
Using Dotcom-Monitor you can setup SIP monitors from different locations around the world to ensure that users are able to properly connect to your VoIP server, and once they are connected to your server they are able to properly perform outbound calls. Other benefits include:
- Ongoing monitoring of your VoIP services will alert you as soon as an issue is found so that you can begin to address the issue immediately.
- Long term monitoring will help you find reoccurring issues that you might not even be aware of.
- Phone system monitoring will notify you if you ever reach max capacity.
Monitoring gives you the ability to discover trends and patterns. You may notice issues with your service but every time you run individual tests nothing appears to be wrong. Ongoing monitoring will give you the additional insight you need.
Sign up for a free trial of SIP monitoring now, or head over to www.phonenumbermonitoring.com to try out the inbound line monitoring.
