About The Data
To find this data, we had to dig deeply into information that is used in the vRating™ module in our vAnalytics™ software to provide a high level health rating for all key video collaboration metrics. In the screenshot below, you can see what that interactive data typically looks like for our customers. Our goal in the vRating module is to make the high level summary of the key video performance metrics like call quality, call success rate, growth, and usage available at a quick glance, but it also allows users to click all the way through to individual call details.
We anonymized and aggregated data from over 1.3 million calls from 100 different customers over 4 months of use in a wide variety of video configurations. Not only is this a wide variety of customers in terms of size and industry, but it is also a wide variety of video usage. Some customers focus only on a few users like executives and conference rooms, and others have nearly every employee using video for mission critical services like telemedicine. One thing that is clearly reflected in our data is that most systems today use dedicated hardware endpoints for their video interface. There is not a lot of information collected from Lync, Webex, or Jabber endpoints in here, but a shift in more frequent usage of these “soft-clients” will definitely change the makeup of these call failure rates in the future (and these stats are also captured by vAnalytics).
In the next blog, we will cover the top 5 reasons why these video calls are failing, which is also contained in our data warehouse. From there we can give great instructions on how to fix the system, but I can share the #1 reason for call failures right now.
What Is A Failed Video Call?
First, however, I need to explain what a call failure means. That may seem silly, but industry experts will not laugh at the question “What’s a failed video call?” For the purpose of our analysis – a failed video call is any call that doesn’t succeed in creating a video connection between two parties. Failed calls also include extremely short calls (<1 minute) and calls that get disconnected unexpectedly. Basically, anything that would annoy a regular user counts as a failed call.
As you can see, the main reason that calls fail is the very ambiguous “Callee Not Found” error. This can mean several things, but that is another blog post for another time. What I can say is that it usually means that the dial plan used internally is too complex for users and they have trouble dialing their intended recipient. An easy to use dial plan or scheduling tool can help with this.
CONSEQUENCES OF HIGH CALL FAILURE
The fact that over 22% of all calls fail is shocking enough by itself, but what is even more amazing is that the ratio can be as high as 50% for customers who have never run any analysis on their call data! This means that somehow, employees are encountering frustrating call failures every other time they try, yet they are still engaging in video calls!
[bctt tweet=”Imagine what video calls could do for productivity if they were as easy as audio or instant messages” username=”vyopta”]
Now try to imagine that video calling can be just as successful as the latter, doesnt that make UC worth it? One of the worst parts about these video calling hiccups is the number of users that get fed up with making a video call and quit using video altogether! All that investment made in getting video-capable just disappears because of a few easily remedied problems.
