RCI - Fix your VoIP!

[LadyShiva]

Second call where I'm having difficulty getting good customer service because the person isn't understandable due to VoIP issues.  I was waiting for a half hour to get someone on the phone... and now I am having to repeat myself while their home network is strained by taking my call.

 

I get that people are working from home... but not being able to be understood is fixable by RCI.  Do a QoS audit.

[cruisinfanatic]

37 minutes ago, LadyShiva said:

Second call where I'm having difficulty getting good customer service because the person isn't understandable due to VoIP issues.  I was waiting for a half hour to get someone on the phone... and now I am having to repeat myself while their home network is strained by taking my call.

 

I get that people are working from home... but not being able to be understood is fixable by RCI.  Do a QoS audit.

Maybe it's you

[twangster]

QoS audit in someone's home?  What would they do with the findings?

 

The internet has no QoS, it's best effort.  

 

So you had a bad phone call.  That happens despite modern technology.  Cell phones aren't perfect either.

 

 

[goldfish65]

Don't take this as an attack, just a reminder that with the pandemic continuing to have great impacts on so many things, customer service may not be as good as before. I am in customer service myself, believe me there are many challenges you wouldn't think of.

[cr08]

As someone working from home from a call center position, I agree with the previous posters: There's only so much you can do. It's going to be a best effort scenario. Even with my employer highly encouraging people to connect wired to their router and softphones being VPN'd back to the office, we're are at the mercy of our ISPs and local network equipment. The latter can be handled but most of the employees won't know what to do other than 'buy <x> off the shelf router from Best Buy and plug it in'. And the former may still be sketchy these days. I know my ISP is still having somewhat of a hard time with network loads from people staying at home.

 

And it also doesn't help the vast majority of residential ISPs only offer asymmetrical bandwidth tiers and for work from home ideally you want a solid and reliable upload which is hard to come by for resi users. I do have QoS set up specifically on my upstream but it only helps up until the point my ISP can actually handle a set upload speed. Once it drops, QoS isn't going to do squat. It really relies on knowing you have a minimum reliable speed in either direction.

 

Also VoIP is very sensitive to latency and jitter so even if stuff like basic web browsing, file downloads, etc act fine and you can get good bandwidth, the connection can still be unreliable in terms of latency, packet loss, jitter, etc. that will easily interfere with VoIP and cause call quality issues.

 

All in all: Be patient with those working from home. We're all trying our best in these times trying to make things work as best we can.