In today’s world of customer service, the use of digital messaging channels is steadily rising, so it’s easy to overlook how central voice and telephony are for connecting brands to their customers. AI may be the dominant trend in technology, but it still has a long way to go until contact center interactions are fully automated. Telephony is still the most impactful way for agents and customers to interact. For decades, telephony had to deliver on only two strengths: reliable connectivity between business and customer, and a reliable customer experience once they connected to an agent.
With brands now focusing on customer experience (CX), the stakes are higher for connectivity, because a new value layer comes from capturing conversational data to support AI applications. In this regard, telephony has never been more important for CX, and when brands need to interact with customers, much of that traffic – both inbound and outbound – passes through IVRs and toll-free numbers (TFNs).
How Connectivity Creates Risk for CX
Important as telephony may be for CX, brands may not be fully aware of the risks that can arise by taking connectivity for granted today: Not only do the costs of providing customer service become higher than needed – such as with longer call times or incorrect call routing - but when CX suffers due to poor calling experiences, so does brand reputation, along with virtually every KPI that contact centers measure performance against. With major brands having millions of calls pass through their contact centers, even a small percentage of bad quality call connections can drive costs up and drive customers away.
To better understand this risk, CX and IT leaders need to recognize the many customer service elements that are impacted by connectivity, such as poor audio quality, lags in call answer time, incorrect call routing, or calls being blocked in certain countries. There are countless touch points across the entire call path where connectivity issues can arise, and aside from the risks around these, there is also the risk that comes from the brands not even being aware of the extent of these issues as they occur. Once TFNs are ported to a carrier or cloud provider, the brand no longer has direct visibility into how these numbers are performing.
Not only that, but these risks occur with their inventory of TFNs that are being used on the networks of their carrier partners, either conventional telcos or cloud service providers. Across all sectors – retail, finance, healthcare, hospitality, etc. – TFNs are often part of the brand identity, but the mechanics of how they are used and supported are in the realm of the service providers that carry the traffic for their contact centers.
The Need for Better Solutions to Support CX Connectivity
Call testing and monitoring solutions have existed for many years, but the capabilities of these offerings have been limited, and have not kept pace with the increased AI-driven demands for telephony connectivity. Not only does connectivity need to be at a higher standard to support today’s AI applications, but the testing and monitoring solutions themselves must be AI-based, not just to support today’s call volumes, but also to provide the real-time inputs needed for compliance, quality assurance and fraud mitigation.
These new technologies plus elevated customer expectations mean that the landscape around connectivity has become more challenging, especially for global brands that must support an extensive network of TFNs to ensure a consistent CX across many dozens of countries, and multiple carrier partners. In this environment, connectivity means much more than dial tone, and CX means answering calls as quickly as possible, and making the overall experience as seamless and personalized as possible.
With so much focus on the role of digital channels and AI-driven automation for improving CX, it’s easy to overlook the importance of telephony and what connectivity truly entails to enable great CX. To address this, CX and IT leaders need to think holistically about customer call paths, where testing and monitoring tools cover every touch point that can impact connectivity.
Furthermore, customers expect 24/7 access to service via TFNs, and in their native language. To support this, testing and monitoring must be continuous, with the ability to flag issues in real time. No contact center is able to handle all their inquiries solely with digital channels and self-service, so having a resilient TFN infrastructure is of strategic importance for making CX better.
Two Other Issues for Managing Connectivity – IVA Adoption and New Regulations
The rise of AI is another factor for why this is so important both to the brands and the contact centers that support them. To a large extent, TFNs are routed to IVRs, which engage customers either through touch tone (DTMF) or voice prompts to navigate their inquiry. While very much a product of legacy telephony, this remains widely used, with a well-established regime of testing and monitoring applications.
While fairly easy to support operationally, the limitations of IVR technology create significant pain points for customers, and as such, improving self-service has become a top priority for contact centers. AI brings the next step in self-service evolution via IVA – Intelligent Voice Assistant – which moves away from the legacy-based IVR model. Whereas IVR has limited automation capability, and can only handle simple inquiries, IVAs are more conversational, and take self-service to the next level.
Aside from providing a better experience for the customer than with IVR, call routing will be faster and more accurate. The advantages of IVAs are self-evident, but they are more costly and complex to deploy than IVR, especially since they are primarily speech-based, and can only be effective with clear audio quality – hence the need for better call testing and monitoring.
Regarding AI, there is also valid concern from CX leaders about how well these AI-driven bots will actually perform in terms of understanding the nature and intent of customer inquiries, and how accurately they will recognize speech. With AI evolving so quickly, there is little doubt that IVA will become the norm, but most contact centers are not yet ready to move on from IVR altogether. The need for testing and monitoring here is just as important as with IVR, but at an even higher level given the complexities of speech recognition.
CX and IT leaders must also consider the regulatory compliance challenges which inevitably arise when new, disruptive technologies come to market. Many forms of regulation to provide guardrails around AI are taking shape, most notably the EU AI Act that came into effect in 2024. Of greater relevance for CX-related call testing and monitoring would be another EU initiative, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA).
DORA comes into effect in January 2025, and while the regulation is focused on the financial sector, DORA raises the bar for risk management with digital technologies to ensure more resilient network operations. This certainly extends to contact centers in this sector, where compliance and fraud are prime examples for why network resilience is vital for protecting customers and their data. It’s not a big leap to see why call testing and monitoring is so important for network resilience, and why IT leaders will soon have higher demands on these capabilities in order to support DORA.
In terms of the broader landscape around technology innovation, the EU has been setting the pace with these types of regulations. In time, the US will follow suit in some capacity, so this should not be viewed an EU-only development. In fact, the impact of DORA will occur much sooner for US vendors providing CX solutions to financial entities operating in the EU.
Vendor Considerations for CX and IT Leaders
The call testing and monitoring ecosystem is quite varied, and as with other tech sectors, vendors initially developed purpose-built solutions around a specific set of needs. In this realm, there were three basic types of different, but related forms of testing – number testing, IVR testing and network testing.
- Number testing addresses things like voice quality and how well numbers actually connected once dialed.
- IVR testing focuses on needs such as call routing and mapping, and regression testing to ensure that software updates propagate properly.
- Finally, network testing is done to track IVR resilience under peak load conditions, and the performance of applications such as CRM on the agent desktop, among other things.
With CX becoming the focus of contact centers, all of these forms of testing – and monitoring – are more important, especially as contact centers struggle to provide good customer service - even with resilient connectivity. Rising customer expectations mean even less margin for error when TFNs take too long to connect, or when customers can’t get an agent that spoke their language, or when calls get routed to the wrong person.
In response, vendors have moved towards more integrated solutions and platforms to support all forms of call testing and monitoring. There are simply too many blind spots using a mix of point solutions, not to mention the cost of having multiple vendors, along with the complexity of trying to integrate them into the contact center.
The modern approach is to provide a carrier-agnostic end-to-end solution that integrates all of these pieces and delivers continuous, automated testing and monitoring that is not intrusive for contact center operations. While the brands behind the products and services their customers buy may not be concerned with the details that define this modern approach, these capabilities are vital to the contact centers that support them. As such, when the TFNs owned by the brands are entrusted to contact centers, they must in turn, be ported to carriers to provide connectivity with customers.
When this is done on a global basis, contact centers must deal with a number of carriers and cloud providers, and since the network capabilities and policies vary widely among telephony providers from country to country, it becomes essential for these vendors to be carrier agnostic. Otherwise, they will not be able to provide the consistent CX that brands expect all their customers to have, regardless of where they live.
Vendor agnosticism is not easy to do, and for both CX and IT leaders who have recognized the need for a more modern, complete solution for call testing and monitoring, the first consideration should be for vendors who have been in this space since legacy times. Despite their shortcomings, IVR will remain in play for years to come, but looking forward, the AI capabilities to support IVA will be equally important.
A good starting point to address all of this would be to review the leading vendors, namely Bespoken, Cyara, Klearcom, and Occam. The main point here is that telephony remains the leading driver in today’s CX, and in order to retain resiliency in connectivity, testing and monitoring solutions will be as important as ever in 2025.
To build on this starting point, CX and IT leaders need to consider the full range of testing and monitoring capabilities needed for this level of connectivity, and recognize how this is more demanding than the conventional requirements they are familiar with from legacy telephony.
When contact centers can gain the level of TFN resiliency needed for today’s AI applications – as well as supporting the incoming DORA requirements – CX will improve, and brands will be better able to differentiate based on customer service. That’s the outcome CX and IT leaders should be striving for, and by doing their due diligence on these vendors, they will help brands succeed in ways they may never have expected.
