Introducing the Advanced Call Quality Dashboard

If you are an IT administrator looking to monitor and manage your Teams (or migrate from Skype for Business Server 2019, or Skype for Business Online) call analytics, you will be excited to learn that the latest updates to Call Quality Dashboard (CQD) are now available. The new CQD comes packed with exciting new capabilities, features, and reports. The addition of these new latest enhancements represents a major update for CQD. The new reports enable administrators to actively troubleshoot system and individual user issues.

 

Powerful New Capabilities

In order to provide new insights, CQD is also adding new capabilities to support them. Even those Teams administrators who choose not to make use of the new reports will see improvements in CQD thanks to these capability enhancements.

 

Near Real-Time Data - CQD is now available on average in 30 minutes! Admins can quickly receive feedback on the success or failure of their troubleshooting efforts helping improve satisfaction across the board. In the past, Call data used to take 24 hours on average to become available and admins making changes to the network configuration meant waiting 1 or more days before confirming success.

 

“With 350 million monthly audio minutes and 16 million monthly video minutes, we need the right quality data to support Accenture’s more than 200,000 Microsoft Teams and 400,000 active users. The updated version of CQD, with new drill down capabilities, user-level data and latency data, is a game changer. Data from the CQD enables us to pinpoint isolated problems versus enterprise-wide issues and respond quickly to users.” Bill Schulz, Accenture

 

EUII Data (End User Identifiable Information) gives Teams admins the ability to zoom all the way down to the user level. Available fields include the users full IP address, MAC address, BSSID, user IDs, Machine Endpoint Name, the user’s verbatim feedback, and Object ID. (For compliance reasons, PII/EUII data is only stored for 30 days.)

 

Helpful Features

Making the most of these new capabilities, these updates to CQD are also adding a host of features to enable entirely new workflows.

 

Improved Date Controls add new Trend and date parameters to CQD. Rolling Trends allow for the generation of reports that show data for the last 5, 7, 30, 60, or 90 days. New date parameters also allow Teams admins to view the data starting from any given date, as opposed to the previous full month resolution.

Drill Down Fields enable quick analysis by allowing the report user to narrow down on a field and automatically filter on a value across multiple queries. Drill down fields can dramatically speed up the “guess and check” process that is common to most troubleshooting.

 

“The new version of CQD has enabled us as a company to do effective root causing of incidents. Saving us time. The critical missing item in our [previous] approach was the ability to drill down to the user level.” - FrieslandCampina

 

In addition to these changes, we’ve made various quality-of-life improvements and introduced smaller new features like multi-select filters, dashboard-level filters, and greatly improved building data upload speeds. New Dimensions and Measures, such as Call Counts (versus Stream Counts), have also been added in response to customer requests. These are only some of CQD’s new features and the one we’re most proud to introduce, but for a complete listing of the changes, please review our updated documentation.

 

Insightful Reports

By combining all this new functionality, CQD is now also able to provide all new insights. Teams administrators can now investigate problem calls almost as soon as they’re finished, and even analyze issues on a user-by-user basis. Exposing these new insights, CQD now includes several new standard reports, to include the following:

 

“Our partnership, in the development and maturity of CQD portal, has enhanced our ability to quickly define end user issues and promote actionable fixes, in an environment with over 120K users and 100M audio minutes a month. The ability to drill down, within an incident, to an individual’s specific challenge expedites our resolutions and increases user experience scores. What used to take 2-3 days for a report is now readily available, near real-time. My team has switched to advanced CQD, a long-time ago!.” – Sridhar Reddy, Johnson & Johnson

 

Quality Drill Down makes extensive use of drill down fields and EUII data, allowing Teams administrators to slice and review their call quality data by date, region, hour, specific location, specific subnet, and even by user.

 

Failure Drill Down follows a similar workflow as the Quality Drill Down, but with a focus on call failures. As with the Quality Drill Down, an admin could use this report to identify which specific locations, subnets, and users contribute most significantly to Teams’ issues.

 

Rate My Call is similar in workflow to the above reports but differs significantly in that it allows admins to measure and evaluate the subjective experience of their users. Rate My Call draws on direct user feedback to help identify those locations and users who feel as though they are encountering the most issues.

 

“We used CQD to identify sites that require WLAN infrastructure upgrade and confirm the success of the changes. One of the most vivid examples was a large site in EU, that was affecting call quality stats for the whole region. We recently finished WLAN upgrade and as a result [Poor Call Quality] went down from 6.7% to 0.3% in a month!” – Ivan Lukyanov, Mars

 

Help Desk reverses the pattern of most other reports by starting from the user and working backwards to identify specific issues. By leveraging the new EUII data in CQD, admins can now find a specific user or call and work from there to identify the issues that affected their call experience.

 

Client Version allows administrators to view session and user counts for each client version. Administrators supervising large or highly dispersed networks will find this report especially useful, as it helps to identify sources of poor call quality resulting from older or out-of-date client versions. Drilling down to the user level will enable those admins to identify the responsible users in order to help keep everyone up to date across their entire network.

 

Endpoints provides information on machine endpoints by make and model of device, in order to help identify problem platforms. In order use this report, customers must upload endpoint data in a manner similar to building data. More information on that process can be found here.

What’s Next?
As large as these changes are, the updates on the horizon are even more exciting. Future updates to CQD will harness the power of machine learning and Power BI in order to provide automated insights, improved visualizations, and easy custom report generation.

 

These improvements and countless smaller ones are already well into development. We look forward to continuing to deliver industry-leading insights and innovation in the space of call quality analytics.

The new Location-Enhanced Reports provides all the information you have already come to expect, and more!