Call Analytics is the newest member in our portfolio for Skype for Business Online products, that help you manage voice quality in your deployment. In this blog, we discuss what it is, and how it can help you.
Call Analytics & Call Quality Dashboard
Call Analytics, is our visual deep-dive tool to help troubleshoot and analyze problematic calls from a simple and clear user interface. Call Analytics allows you to view all calls and meetings from a single user, then zoom in on single calls from that user, allowing you to view device reports, network reports, or walk through the entire quality report. While this was already possible using PowerShell, as described by this article Troubleshoot individual calls in Skype for Business Online, with Call Analytics this is now an easy process. Call Analytics is a great addition to our already existing quality tool, the Call Quality Dashboard (CQD). The big difference between the two is that the CQD is the aggregate of all Audio Quality Data (AQD), showing you quality trends within your company, while Call Analytics is focused on single calls and meetings, providing a detailed analysis of the selected call or meeting for issue resolution by the helpdesk.
Call Analytics Overview
Call Analytics provides you with a very friendly interface that allows you to search for any user within your organization. This is specifically focused around help desk and escalation scenarios in which a user has raised a quality concern over a call or meeting. Once you have found the user whom you wanted to investigate, Call Analytics provides you with a clear overview of all calls placed by this user.
We know many companies have different tiers of Helpdesk. Tier 1 is usually a first point of contact, and Tier 2 is an escalation group. We’ve made sure to address those groups in Call Analytics. When you deploy Call Analytics within your company, you are given the option to divide groups of users with access to Call Analytics into 2 groups. Tier 1 is the group that has the basic information about the call. Phone numbers are obfuscated and only user names are shown if the support user explicitly searched for them, ensuring the caller and callee’s privacy. Tier 2 has full access to all Call Analytics data to help them perform their troubleshooting tasks.
Call Analytics Process
Once a call is selected, each call will show a high-level set of information, such as when it was placed, who the call was with, the duration. and what the user experience should have been. Call Analytics also supports the upload of site locations, using the subnet data identical to our CQD, so the user’s location is displayed within the reports. Detail guidance on the required format to upload site information can be found in our CQD guidance for SOF here.
If needed, peer-to-peer calls can be separated from meetings to provide a more granular overview. Once you have found the problematic call in question, you can select this call and deep dive into the 4 core areas of the call: Device, System, Connectivity and Network.
- Device shows you specific information around the capture and render device the user was using during this call.
- System shows you system statistics.
- Connectivity tells you how the system was connected for example via WiFi.
- Network shows you networking statistics such as jitter and delay.
Raw quality data allows Tier 2 to deep dive into the complete quality report, if needed.
Please refer to Get Started with Call Analytics below, to learn how to enable Tier 1 and Tier 2 access.
Korneel has a bad day
Let’s put our new-found knowledge to good use.
Korneel called the Helpdesk, because he is having a bad day. While trying to have a call with Thomas, his experience has been poor at best, not something he is used to from the Skype for Business Deployment. He creates a ticket for the Helpdesk, mentioning the time and date when his bad experience occurred.
After the ticket is logged, the Help Desk/System Administrator assigned to the case, logs in to the Call Analytics page, where he searches for all Korneel’s calls.
At first glance, he can see that the client is configured for Online Calling including PSTN Conferencing and PSTN Calling, and gets an overview of all calls placed by Korneel.
He searches for the call based on the date and time Korneel provided, and quickly finds the offending call. He opens the call and begins investigating.
Because Call Analytics highlights possible problematic areas, as soon as the System Administrator/Help Desk selects the problematic call, he sees the network portion as shown below.
He selects the Network icon, which tells him that the average packet loss was exceptionally high.
Now that the System Administrator knows that most likely a network glitch impacted call quality, feeds back this information to Korneel, and asks if he did something different that day. According to Korneel, he worked from the basement, further away from the WiFi hotspot than usual. The System Administrator advises him to stay closer to the hotspot and makes a note to keep an eye on that area and add additional WiFi coverage if needed.
Korneel is happy again!
Get started with Call Analytics
- Access Call Analytics Preview via https://adminportal.services.skypeforbusiness.com/.
- Once your tenant has been enabled, configure Tier 1 and Tier 2 Help Desk.
- Identify or create 2 security groups in Active Directory that contain your Tier 1 and Tier 2 Help Desk users.
- Go to the Permissions section in Call Analytics, and assign Tier 1 and Tier 2 rights to the appropriate AD security groups.
- You and your Help Desk users are now ready to start using Call Analytics!
- Discuss with us in our Community!
Edit May 25th 2017: We update the screenshots to reflect the changed user interface
Edit June 7th 2017: We updated the link to the Call Analytics preview. It is now accessible to all Skype for Business Online customers