Little Changes That’ll Make a Big Difference With Your VoIP Service

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) enables businesses to deliver voice communication and multimedia content over the internet. Unlike conventional telecommunication protocols, VoIP help enterprises to install, configure, maintain, and scale their telephone systems without investing additional time and resources. In addition to supporting a range of call features provided by traditional phone systems, the hosted VoIP solutions also help businesses to work with remote agents and reduce overall operational cost.

Studies suggest that the demand for VoIP services has been increasing consistently. According to Persistence Market Research, “The global VoIP services market is likely to witness a substantial growth during 2017-2024. The global market for VoIP services is also estimated to reach US$ 194.5 Billion revenue towards the end of 2024.” Enterprises from various sectors have been adopting VoIP services to reap benefits in terms of features, cost, flexibility, scalability, and portability.

However, no enterprise can improve customer experience and engagement without maintaining consistent VoIP call quality. The quality of VoIP calls depends on a number of factors – latency, audio codec, packet size, packet loss, echo, silence suppression, and network parameters. Also, it is essential for businesses to optimize their VoIP services. You can quickly optimize the quality of VoIP services by avoiding some performance bottlenecks and implementing some simple hacks.

8 Simple Hacks to Fine-tune Your VoIP Service Performance

1. Use a Single Network for Handling both Voice and Data

You must invest extra time and resources to create and maintain separate networks for voice communication and data transmission. You can further keep the levels of communication service uniform and consistent by handing both voice and data through a single network. While setting up the network, you need to ensure that adequate bandwidth is available to handle both voice and data efficiently. Also, you need to opt for a network that supports unified messaging, in addition to being flexible, scalable, and reliable.

2. Prioritize Voice Traffic

When you decide to set up a single and unified network, the same network will handle different types and classes of traffic. You must prioritize voice traffic to improve VoIP performance and call quality. While setting up the network, you can take advantage of Quality of Service (QoS) to differentiate different types of services and traffics. You can further customize QoS deployment to prioritize voice traffic over other services and traffics. However, it is always important to configure and customize QoS according to your organization’s telecommunication needs and strategy.

3. Address Common Performance Bottlenecks

While optimizing VoIP services, you must focus on identifying and resolving common performance bottlenecks like packet loss, latency, and jitter. Packet loss leads to gaps in communication, whereas latency increases the time required to transmit a data packet from the source to the destination. At the same time, jitters delay generation of voice and delivery of output to the caller. You can identify the performance bottlenecks using some VoIP testing tools and solutions. It is also a good idea to detect and resolve these performance issues as part of the VoIP migration process.

4. Detect and Eliminate VoIP Security Threats

Like other technologies, VoIP is also vulnerable to a myriad of security attacks. You cannot keep your voice communications and customer data secured without eliminating various VoIP security threats. You can efficiently address common VoIP security threats by encrypting voice traffic, using a virtual private network (VPN), and setting up robust firewalls. If you decide to use IP PBX, it becomes essential to protect them against viruses and targeted malware attacks by keeping them locked.

5. Choose the Right Phones and Handsets

Your choice of phones and handsets will have a direct impact on the quality of VoIP services. You must remember that the phones with more frequency often cause more interruptions. It is always important to pick the VoIP phones with the perfect frequency. Likewise, you need to choose VoIP headsets with the right cabling. While comparing headsets, you must check if the cable is thin or poorly insulated. You can even improve VoIP call quality by opting for earphones with short and properly insulated cable.

6. Keep the Bandwidth Free

You cannot grow and maintain VoIP service performance without increasing bandwidth availability. In addition to opting for bandwidth with a higher contention ratio, you need to explore ways to free up the bandwidth. You can quickly increase bandwidth availability by keeping the computers and IPs free. Likewise, it would help if you instructed the staff to stop common background activities like file download, file transfer and automatic data backup. At the same time, you must opt for a router that prioritizes voice over data.

7. Pick the Right Call Management and Monitoring Tools

In addition to unifying the voice and data networks, it is also essential to pick the right call management and monitoring tools. You have the option to choose from a wide range of software-based and hardware-based call management tools. But you must remember that the software-based tools simplify call management and monitoring.

It is also important to compare these tools based on their core features like call recording, call recording backup, call conversion monitoring, and report generation. At the same time, you also need to opt for software solutions that monitor and assess VoIP services in real-time based on common performance bottlenecks like packet loss, delay, echo, noise and jitter.

8. Reskill and Upskill Your Staff

When your organization decides to adopt VoIP services, it becomes essential to train the voice and data staff adequately. In addition to making the voice and data professionals work as a unified team, you need to reskill and upskill each staff. When there is no barrier between the data and voice staffs, they can work with and share the same network seamlessly. However, you need to prepare an elaborate training program covering both basic and advanced aspects of VoIP technology, the hardware and software used by your organization, and the predefined communication process.

Conclusion

As a conclusion, the performance of VoIP services is affected by a number of factors. These factors make the performance of VoIP services fluctuate from time to time. Hence, you must monitor the performance of VoIP services consistently using the right tools or solution. Also, you need to implement a robust strategy to optimize the quality of VoIP services without any interruptions.