Reporting on network and audio quality for voice

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When your call audio or network quality drops, you'll see a notification in the call console.

These days, more agents are working remotely which presents challenges helping to diagnose call quality issues. In this article you'll learn how agents are notified when call quality issues occur, and how admins can report on these issues and configure computers and the network to improve things.

This article contains the following sections:

Headset audio level notifications

Call connection issue notifications

Reporting on call quality issues

Headset audio level notifications

If the call audio quality drops, you'll see a warning icon in the call console.

If you see this warning, check your headset is plugged in and the microphone input levels are high enough. Also, make sure you haven't muted the microphone. Finally, try a different headset to ensure the one you are using isn't faulty.

For more information about getting the best audio quality, see Preparing to offer voice support.

Call connection issue notifications

If network conditions affect the call quality, you'll see a warning icon in the console. Click the icon to see more details about the problem.

The network requirements article contains a wealth of information to help you avoid and troubleshoot issues. Note that an administrator will need to configure some of the network settings you might need to change.

Reporting on call quality issues

There are a number of issues that might happen on a call leg including:

high_jitter: Two conditions can result in calls being tagged with high jitter, average jitter of 5ms and max jitter of 30ms, or more than 1% of packets delayed by 200ms or more.

high_latency: The Twilio-internal RTP traversal time exceeded 150ms.

high_packet_loss: Packet loss was larger than five percent.

high_pdd: Post-dial delay (PDD) is the number of seconds elapsed between dialing the last digit of the phone number and the start of ringing. The percentage of total calls are represented with high PDD compared against the 99th percentile of all calls to the destination country.

pstn_short_duration: Identifies short outbound calls, when the duration of the outbound call is less than 10 seconds to PSTN destinations.
Note: Frequent short outbound calls (under 10 seconds) can cause carriers to tag your numbers as low trust. Your calls can then be marked as spam or blocked. Monitor this metric and adjust your outbound calling to reduce short‑duration calls.

silence: Silence was detected on the call. This could be due to a missing audio stream or a completely silent stream received. See What does the silent tag mean?

The information in the network requirements article can help you troubleshoot many of these issues. You can use one of the following two methods to report on call quality issues:

Reporting on call quality with Explore

Reporting on call quality with the Incremental Exports API

Reporting on call quality with Explore

Zendesk Explore gives you comprehensive call quality reporting capabilities. For example, you can report on good quality calls, bad quality calls, or dig-in to find detailed call quality information.

The pre-built dashboard contains several reports to help you monitor call quality. For more information, see Analyzing your Talk activity.

On Professional plans and above, you can build your own reports and dashboards using Explore's metrics and attributes. For help creating reports, see Creating queries. To see the available metrics and attributes, read Metrics and attributes for Zendesk Talk.

Reporting on call quality with the Incremental Exports API

You can use the Incremental Exports API to collect data to report on call quality issues. You can access information about call leg quality (Agent Leg and Customer leg) information from the Incremental Exports API soon after the call ends.