We’ve all, unfortunately, been there. Whether it’s having to ask that business associate on the other end of the telephone call to repeat himself because of poor call quality or having to ask the popular question “Can you hear me now?” to the person with whom you are speaking.
And whatever way you slice it, poor call quality is a pain – a pain to individuals and certainly a pain to businesses.
“Call quality is essential when making business calls,” Sonetel’s CEO and Founder Henrik Thomé told TMCnet in a recent interview. “Bad audio quality forces you to concentrate on understanding what the other person is saying – which makes you tired. You may misunderstand each other and have to ask for clarifications more often. The result is that you appear as more distant and more difficult to communicate with. Poor audio quality simply makes it difficult to build good business relations.”
Sonetel, a Swedish-based company, knows a thing or two about the importance of call quality as it globally offers a free, scalable PBX service. Touted as “the easiest, cheapest and fastest way” to get a telephony solution for your company, Sonetel is in the midst of commemorating its one-year anniversary, having unveiled the first version of its phone system in late 2010. More than a year later, Sonetel has established itself as the only company worldwide offering a free, scalable PBX (News - Alert) service, according to company officials.
With the advent of IP telephony, VoIP and PBXs, call quality has perhaps become even more important than it used to be. While traditional fixed line telephone networks were typically characterized by dependable call quality, the wide adoption of mobile phones has resulted in people becoming accustomed to poor audio quality and calls that get disconnected regularly.
Although IP telephony gives users a greater ability to select preferred audio quality, they are still at the mercy of the Internet connection for their call quality. Specifically, if a user makes an IP call across a 3G data network from an app in an iPhone (News - Alert), this can yield unreliable call quality whereas IP calls across ADSL generally work great.
“High call quality is a competitive advantage for your business, as it brings you closer to the customer – gives the customer a more solid impression of you and your business while also providing a more pleasant communication experience for both you and the customer,” Thomé said.
Call quality is perhaps no more important than for the small to medium-sized business as being an SMB is a challenge in and of itself, according to Thomé.
“Customers generally feel more comfortable buying from a larger company close to them,” he said. ”Whatever you can do to become more trustworthy and ‘close’ to the customer can make the difference between getting the order or not. If the prospective customer calls your company and it sounds as ’if you are sitting next door,’ this will naturally be better than if it sounds as if ‘you are in some remote place very far away.’”
“Good call quality simply reduces the distance to the customer and increases sales,” Thomé added.
While the rise of mobile phones has certainly paved the way for poor quality, compression issues have also compounded issues surrounding call quality. When it comes to IP telephony, there is often a focus on reducing costs for service providers by limiting the amount of data that is sent during a call. To accomplish this, audio is many times repackaged and compressed which oftentimes results in lower audio quality.
This converted audio quality is typically analogous to the quality of a mobile phone, while the unconverted audio provides the quality of the fixed line network.
In an effort to address compression issues, Sonetel chooses to not covert audio but to instead use the fixed network quality even when sending calls across the Internet. A regular phone call with fixed line quality requires about 0.1 Mb/s which is a fraction of what is needed to watch an HD movie on YouTube (News - Alert), according to Thomé.
”So for business calls, it really doesn’t make sense to convert audio,” he said. ”Since most IP-telephony services today convert audio, Sonetel has had to be very selective in finding partners for handling calls to and from the traditional telephone network – to ensure fixed line quality.”
Check back to the PBX Channel next week as Thomé discusses how ”Calling Line Identity” (CLI) and latency as they relate to call quality.
Edited by Jamie Epstein