Almost every day we are on the lookout for trends. Is the financial market up today? Who is trending on social media? Did I gain or lose a pound this morning? But have you thought about the trends that are critical to managing your voice communication network? As we start the journey to learn how data analytics can transform collaboration network management, this post starts with the basic insights into trends to watch to manage and optimize your collaboration environment.

Are short-term or long-term trends important? Both! In some cases, you can simply look at data for the current day. But other times your management team may want to view trends for the past 12 months or even compare year over year trends for the past several years. And, for resource or capacity planning purposes, it is important to have insight into trends based on day of week, or month of year or other cyclical drivers in your business. For instance, if you are an insurance company with registration deadlines in October, how does that impact call volumes? Or, if you are an educational institution, what happens over the summer break?

What are some of the trends to look for? It’s always a good approach to start with the basics and build. So, start with the most basic of simple call volumes. How many calls are carried on the network? But then you can break that out in a variety of views such as:

• By direction (inbound, outbound, internal)
• By call type (local, long distance, international, etc.)
• By time (year, month, day, hour, day of week)
• By organization hierarchy (location, department, cost center, etc.)
• By key numbers (pilot numbers, hunt groups, voice mail, conference bridges, etc.)

What trends can actually help manage my voice network? We will dig into these more in future posts, but for a quick introduction, here are some suggestions.

• Call failures. How many calls on your network are failing to even setup? Is it a small percentage of your total calls or not? Are calls dropping throughout the day?
• Audio quality. Do you know if the quality your callers are experience is getting better or worse? How is it today? Are there certain devices that experience more problems than other devices? Maybe a certain codec is causing more problems than others? Or, maybe it is a particular IP address range that is the issue?
• Concurrent Call Paths (CCP). Are you trying to optimize your network financial investment and create the right balance between paying for more channel capacity versus blocking calls? Viewing your trends for CCP is the answer.
• And, of course, seeing trends is beneficial but often those trends highlight spikes and abnormalities. Can you explain those? Were they driven by the business? Or are those indicators of potential issues like inbound hacking attempts or fraud?

With the new year starting, now is the time to start taking a look at your network trends. Check back soon for the next post to dig in deeper to leveraging data analytics for business transformation.

Clearly See Your Call Trends and Performance with Optic
Optic for Voice Networks™ will give you a clear view into your network’s usage, trending and performance, both from high level trending dashboards to the ability to search for specific calls and see detailed metrics. Visibility will help you improve caller experience and streamline system administration. Contact us today to learn more about proactively monitoring your voice network and gaining seamless visibility across your entire voice network activity and performance.