Interesting fact: there is a 99% correlation between the divorce rate in Maine and margarine consumption in the US. I was reminded of that fact on Monday when we got a call from a client complaining about audio quality. His question was whether pulling his weekly report was causing the issue.
On the surface, that seems like a good guess. He may have noticed in the past that call quality concerns have coincided with the generation of the report. Maybe in previous weeks it wasn’t a big enough problem for him to ask us about. Maybe the problem had resolved itself by the time he was aware of it. They were pulling their call center report, and they were having audio problems. He wasn’t correct, however.
Think about all the things that go on in a call center on a Monday morning. Your agents may all log in at the same time. Agents starting up machines or opening up browsers with multiple tabs being restored. Depending on your IT practices, maybe they’re all starting YouTube, Facebook, or Pandora. Your Quality Assurance team is getting ahead of the day by listening to the weekend’s call recordings. Every admin and supervisor is starting up their live reports. Calls are coming in, going out. Supervisors are loading the new list of leads for callers. Agents are connecting their softphones. In short, the network is getting overwhelmed.
The problem wasn’t the report. The problem was the network was built to handle the call volume and overall demands of the system. A temporary burst in traffic due to everyone trying to do everything at the same time caused a short period of poor audio quality. The manager who called us wasn’t on the floor, though, and couldn’t see all this activity. All he knew about was the report he was waiting for and the reports of noise.
With a little more information, it can be easy to see when there appears to be a correlation that isn’t there. Just like margarine and divorces. Using the live reporting to see things like the spike in agent activity could have led him to the true source of the problem. Once you know what’s going on, you can then take the steps to solve it. Having your QA team not download the weekends recordings all at once, or limiting the bandwidth for outbound web requests are things that you can do to keep your audio quality great, even on a busy Monday morning.