Voice Management: Call Quality Remains Crucial as Verizon Customers Experience Two-Week Outage

You definitely don’t want to admit this to anyone for fear of sounding dramatic, but experiencing poor call quality or, even worse, no phone service can be a true nightmare. From not being able to hear the person on the other end of the call to slow to no Internet service to not being able to make calls, phone service related issues can certainly spell headache.

Unfortunately, some Bronx Verizon (News - Alert) customers have had that bad taste in their mouth for two weeks now as 150 customers remain without phone and sometimes Internet service more than 14 days after a contractor’s mishap severed underground cables. The incident, which took place on Dec. 15, caused 2,500 customers to initially lose service.

Given the extent of the damage, Verizon Spokesman John Bonomo said, “We’ve actually been doing very well.”

“We didn’t do this; it was done to us. We’ve had no less than 40 employees working on a 24/7 basis,” Bonomo said. “I realize some customers might be without phone service, but we’re working on it.”

But for some customers, this assurance is not worth much.

“This is getting to be annoying but, more than that, many people are helpless (and) cannot use a cell phone, and no phone service for the elderly is dangerous,” Angela Cafaro Monaghan, a client, said in a recent article.

Verizon’s snafu calls attention to the contention that characterized 2011 around poor quality, specifically VoIP call quality. And when it comes to VoIP call quality, if it is lacking businesses can greatly suffer.

According to a recent Infonectics Research 3Q11 market share report, businesses are continuing to transition to IP-based phone systems even though the global economy is still testy: “Hybrid IP PBXs continue to dominate, making up nearly 2/3 of global revenue; pure IP PBXs continue to grow as a proportion of the overall market, making up nearly 1/3 now and growing.” 

 “Clearly the migration to VoIP, SIP, and UC technologies is progressing, and is predicted to continue in 2012,” Tracey Whitney, director of marketing for voice management company Tone Software (News - Alert), told TMCnet. “But as businesses move forward with these investments, they are keeping a close eye on the expected returns in user productivity, improved business processes, and lower overall operational costs.  The catch:  when VoIP call quality is poor, and the voice network is plagued with performance and availability issues, the business cannot realize the expected returns from their converged communications investments.  Poor quality drags down user adoption, impedes user productivity, slows business processes, and increases support costs as IT teams struggle to deal with user complaints and the underlying network issues.”

Nowadays, call quality and proper voice management have become integral components for a company’s success and everyone from IT teams to users to business executives has their eye on these two capabilities.

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Carrie Schmelkin is a Web Editor for TMCnet. Previously, she worked as Assistant Editor at the New Canaan Advertiser, a 102-year-old weekly newspaper, covering news and enhancing the publication's social media initiatives. Carrie holds a bachelor's degree in journalism and a bachelor's degree in English from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Tammy Wolf