How do you feel when echo, choppiness, or delay in a phone call disrupts the flow of your conversation? It feels irritating and unattractive. This is why people should always pay close attention to the quality of their phone calls.
Especially businesses that rely heavily on virtual business phones to run their business should maintain good call quality in phone calls. Having good call quality is crucial for all businesses to deliver a great customer experience. Make sure to take the best VoIP Phone system for your business.
We know a virtual business phone utilizes VoIP technology to make inbound and outbound phone calls via the internet. So it’s natural to blame the internet connection whenever there is a loss of quality in VoIP calls. But your internet is not the only culprit. There are more issues such as jitters, latency, etc., that affect the clarity and responsiveness of voice calls.
To tackle such inconveniences, various practices are introduced to enhance the performance of call quality of a virtual business phone. Let’s have a look at them.
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10 ways to improve the call quality of a virtual business phone
Different things can be hampering the quality of your phone calls. Identifying the source of the problem is one thing and solving it is another thing. You need to understand and go through each and every issue to solve your problem. Here are 10 ways for you to go through to improve the quality of phone calls in your virtual business phone.
1. Increase bandwidth for network stability
As we have already said, a virtual business phone requires an internet connection to make phone calls. A poor internet could harm the quality of calls in many ways. The call participants can experience intervals of silence or robotic voices. There should be at least 100kbps bandwidth on both ends to eliminate packet loss and improve overall VOIP calls.
Also, having multiple devices connected can disturb your network. It may be wise to increase your bandwidth if your network is not sufficient to connect multiple devices and users.
Increasing your internet bandwidth will support a larger number of users or devices on the network simultaneously. Sometimes increasing bandwidth is not an option for a small network. In that case, you can reduce the bandwidth utilized by other apps during your VoIP sessions.
2. Use VoIP-optimized routers
Businesses must use business-class routers to connect their devices to the network. These routers are usually VoIP-optimized. But one of the most common blunders businesses make is that they use a simple router for everything. If you want to use the same router for data transfer and phone calls, it needs to be a powerful business-class router that can handle both. If the router isn’t powerful, then you are compromising with your call quality.
Using a VoIP-optimized router opens up powerful settings like Quality of Service (QoS) settings, jitter buffer, Session Initiated Protocol (SIP), and more. These settings level up the capacity of the router to prioritize the data packets transferred during phone calls via VoIP. A strong router provides a seamless flow of traffic in the network.
3. Eliminate jitter using jitter buffer
When data packets arrive out of sequence, it causes a jitter. Generally, packets must arrive sequentially in real-time for the best clarity in VoIP calls. Otherwise, jitter can drastically degrade the quality of calls. The constant stream of data can become choppy because of network congestion, poor queuing, varying packet delays, or setup mistakes which can cause jitter.
Jitter buffer can help you to eliminate jitter. This mechanism sits between the voice decoder and the incoming packets, allowing data packets to arrive in the proper sequence. It aids in the proper distribution of packets by collecting, storing, and delivering packets at regular intervals.
Remember, jitter buffer takes time to collect and store data packets which can cause a delay, but it still provides a smoother experience for the end-user.
4. Configure Quality of Service (QoS)
Quality of Service (QoS) is the measurement of the performance of routers to give the best call quality possible. Generally, routers have Quality of Service (QoS) settings to prioritize the VoIP traffic. You need to configure the QoS setting to your advantage.
QoS guarantees that it will run applications and traffic with high priority using the given network capacity. In our case, it will put VoIP phone calls at high priority. So whenever a phone call is made via the internet, QoS helps maintain audio clarity throughout the call duration.
Network congestion can overwhelm traffic to affect the path taken by data packets. But QoS assists you to run prioritized systems during congestion in the network.
5. Set up a Virtual Local Network (VLAN)
Like QoS, Virtual Local Network (VLAN) assists you in prioritizing VoIP traffic. All you need to do is set up a Virtual Local Network (VLAN) in your network.
A VLAN enables a set of devices to share a connection to certain servers even if they are not in the same geographical area. If your company is located at multiple locations, this can be really beneficial to get similar call quality in all branches.
You can partition voice traffic with a VLAN which helps you to prioritize voice traffic across all users in your company.
6. Buy high-quality headsets
Sometimes the issues of having poor call quality can be very simple. The poor quality of the headsets you use to talk can ruin your experience during your business phone calls. A headset is a medium through which sound is transmitted from the mic and received through the speaker.
A badly built headset can cause all sorts of problems with your audio calls. A headset can break your conversation experience due to issues like echoes, static sound, background noise, etc. You must buy high-quality headsets for your virtual business phones which address all these issues. Don’t let a simple headset make you lose a potential lead.
7. Avoid network interference
The devices that you are using can cause network interference while ultimately disturb the quality of calls. Phones that operate at higher GHz frequencies are more prone to cause interference.
Most VoIP phones operate at a frequency of 2.4 GHz. Also, the devices operating on 5.8-GHz and 5-GHz are present in the market. Although the 2.4-GHz frequency has a longer range than the 5 GHz band, data transmission is slower. Although the 5-GHz band has limited reach, it provides faster data delivery.
You should think about what frequency is best for you. It depends upon your office location and the number of phone users. To be on the safe side and avoid interference, using 2.4 GHz with appropriate bandwidth is a viable option.
8. Connect to ethernet
Connecting to a wireless network like Wi-Fi doesn’t give a stable connection all the time. If you are using Wi-Fi on your device like VoIP phones, laptops, desktops, etc., while making VoIP phone calls, then it’s time to switch to ethernet.
The strength of a wireless connection can falter due to the distance between your device and router, network interference, etc. But you will not have to worry about it if you use ethernet. An ethernet connection is far more secure and faster than a wireless connection. It will constantly provide the same speed.
9. Constantly monitor call quality
There are various issues that can degrade the quality of phone calls. So it is important to constantly monitor the call quality. You need to keep your eye on the insights from your side that provide details on jitter, packet loss, latency, internet bandwidth (upload and download), etc. These basic details can help you identify simple issues that you can solve yourself.
Monitoring your phone calls will reduce the time you will spend troubleshooting VoIP call quality issues. So you’ll have more time to address the issues before they become costly to your company. Also, make sure all your equipment and devices are in good condition.
10. Choose a reputed business phone system
The business phone system you are using to make phone calls is also responsible for maintaining good call quality. They are indeed designed by keeping VoIP call quality issues in mind. But not all business phone systems deliver the quality. That means you need to do complete research on them before choosing the best one for your business.
While researching the business phone systems, you need to check their review in the marketplace, features/solutions, and customer care services. Even better if you sign up for their trial periods to meet your expectations by personally experiencing it. For example, KrispCall offers a 15-day trial period for you can make phone calls to test its call quality. If you don’t like it, then you can always move on to others and try them.
A reputed business phone service provider will always monitor the performance of its product from the server-side to give you the best call quality it can provide.
Time to improve your call quality
All the aforementioned ways are sufficient for you to deal with jitters, latency, echo, or any issue affecting the call quality. They will assist you to experience uninterrupted call experience while dealing with your customer or clients. Identify what issues are troubling you and improve the call quality of your virtual business phone for growing your business.
