Now more of us are having to work remotely, the need for reliable internet access has been a top priority for most businesses, especially ones in the customer service industry.
Fortunately, the internet has revolutionized how businesses communicate with their customers like nothing before. There’s no doubt that the last 15 years have seen an astonishing explosion regarding internet access.
Due to my work experience, I have also discovered that a lot of things could go wrong in the world of technology and the last thing you need is bad connectivity while solving a query over the phone. The worst-case scenario is losing a valuable customer and getting negative reviews that will lead to a loss of more potential customers.
Times have definitely changed, and so have available contact centre technologies. Not so long ago, contact centres had no choice but to rely on physical telephone lines (on-site), but now they can contact customers via the internet using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), a technology that allows you to make voice calls using a broadband Internet connection instead of a regular (or analogue) phone line.
Keeping in mind that VoIP technology is cloud-compatible, contact centres only need an internet connection to leverage it from anywhere. However, the amount of bandwidth businesses need to send and receive high-quality calls has very specific requirements.
People may assume that broadband is the same as bandwidth. They are not the same, but they do work hand-in-hand.
The term broadband commonly refers to high-speed Internet access that is always on and faster than the traditional dial-up access. Broadband includes several high-speed transmission technologies such as Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), Cable Modem, Fibre, Wireless, Satellite, Broadband over Powerlines (BPL).
The broadband technology you choose will depend on some factors. These may include whether you are located in an urban or rural area, how broadband Internet access is packaged with other services (such as voice telephone and home entertainment), price, and availability.
Bandwidth, on the other hand, is the ability to transfer data (such as a VoIP telephone call) from one point to another in a fixed amount of time. The higher bandwidth speed you have, the more data you can transfer.
Bandwidth is measured by checking your download and upload speeds, in other words, the rate of information travelling to and from your computer. Whichever of the two numbers is lower is considered your bandwidth.
How do they work together in customer service?
Improve Quality of Service
The bandwidth of your connection can often be consumed by other applications on your network (e-mail, YouTube, Facebook, Windows Updates etc). This means that unless you take steps to prevent other Internet traffic hoovering up your bandwidth, you’ll experience periods of crackly calls and complaining agents and customers.
Worse still, if your WIFI password becomes an open secret amongst your staff and this shares the same connection as your call centre traffic, expect your call quality to become very unpredictable indeed!
To solve this problem, you can install extra network equipment that can implement “Quality of Service” or QoS (pronounced quoz), that can reserve a proportion of your bandwidth so that you always have enough upload and download capacity to ensure calls are clear. These routers can also prevent groups of PCs from accessing websites they shouldn’t, which gives you a much simpler way of preventing agents from spending time on Facebook or YouTube than constantly walking the call centre floor. You need to ensure that the router you install is designed for heavy use, as cheaper equipment tends to struggle if it’s given too much to deal with. If this happens, you’ll be straight back to crackly calls, just for a different reason.
Remember when you’re ordering your connection that there’s no guarantee that you’ll get the speed advertised with most of the cheaper connection types. If you check the small print, you’ll usually see that the speed given is the maximum speed that you could get, but in reality, what you’ll end up with is usually slower. This is largely determined by the distance from the exchange to your premises as the quality of the connection gets steadily worse as the copper cable connecting you to your broadband provider gets longer.
A fibre optic cable can transmit data over much longer distances without losing the quality of its signal, which is why fibre connections have much better connection speeds.
They are the main source for the functioning of VoIP
Remember that for VoIP calls a broadband connection is required. Only a broadband internet connection can provide the minimum bandwidth for quality VoIP calls.
Besides, these days most contact centres leverage multichannel communication by providing customer service using several channels. And don’t forget that other applications, such as Facebook, Twitter or Gmail, use bandwidth as well. Therefore, you’ll need to assess the popularity and peak times of all your channels, as there may be periods of low-quality calls if all of your channels are burdened at the same time. Finally, don’t forget that while emails use very little bandwidth, attachments increase that bandwidth considerably.
When discussing contact centre broadband and bandwidth, it is important to think about their investment in their Internet connection relative to how much they spend on wages each day and how much revenue they stand to lose if their operation goes down due to a loss of connection. In this way an expensive Internet connection is a lot like an insurance policy – you might not need it, but you’ll be glad you have it if you do in case of emergencies where employees are working remotely.
Installing a cloud-based call centre has a huge range of benefits both in terms of flexibility and cost that could only be dreamed about just 10 years ago. The key is to get your broadband connection right because this will make your business more reliable, scalable and profitable and ensure that your agents and customers can enjoy crystal clear calls all day long, wherever they are.
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