Voip choppy audio: how to quickly find records with stuttering and breaking up

Just fancy: you are on the phone. You ask, reply, and so on. The dialogue runs its course… but suddenly you hear crackles and noise. Perhaps, snatches of words and nothing is clear. Sure, there is no your interlocutor’s will to scoff and mock; much more likely, something happened on the line.

This can happen in many different ways: e.g. audio drops or delay, echo, noise, and so on. For all these phenoms there is a common term: a voip choppy audio which also includes audio breaking up and audio stuttering.

These issues are caused by different reasons. For example, sound delay may happen because of insufficient internet bandwidth, or router overload, or incorrect traffic prioritization. It is also worthy checking that a STUN server works properly and a router supports SIP telephony. As for echo, there is also a lot of possible causes, some of them we've reviewed in this article as well as possible ways of solution.

Either way, dealing with it will be a task for VOIP engineers (let us help them a bit: there is a way for easy call quality checking and our knowledge base) — but how will they know about it? This is what a supervisor shall tell. Theoretically, agents can let them know too but Occupancy Rate in high-effective contact centers is about 70-80% so usually they simply have no time. Yet again, it may appear from time to time and haphazardly. So the issue might not seem like a problem meanwhile quality level and client experience leave a great deal to be desired.

Okay, but how can the supervisor grasp that something goes wrong? This is what the Team service is to signal — this is how it looks like:


Call log in Softphone.Pro Team

Call log in Softphone.Pro Team

It’s a simple and intuitive color coding: blue means everything is OK and there is nothing to worry about; yellow hints at possible quality flaws; finally, the red gear is a reason to put everything aside and pay close attention right now.

For example, why do we think that the call quality in the last line was poor? Have a look.


Diagnostic info sent by the softphone and shown in the call log in the Team service

Diagnostic info sent by the softphone and shown in the call log in the Team service

We see that during the call 4 680 data packets were sent (total number of packets), and 51 of them got lost (total number of packets lost). This is more than one percent, and that’s too much; we’d say beyond good and evil. Most likely, in this ninety-three-second call an agent was inaudible once or twice, or croaked a few times, or all together.

And this is what will be a starting point for a VOIP engineer and crusade for clear voice. Please note that such criteria as acceptable or intolerable level of interference can be set up in the supervisor’s dashboard on their sole discretion: one might allow even a couple of percent loss; for someone a tenth of a percent might be an impermissible deviation from the standards. You decide, you know your situation better. We just give you a cool tool and visual indicator :)


Try the Team and its powerful monitoring, analytics and instant notifications.

All the best and nice calls 💙

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