In this installment of our series on monitoring remote contact center agents, we’ll discuss how to use Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) to troubleshoot issues with Twilio Voice calls. Just to recap, here are the previous write ups about NICE, Genesys, RingCentral, Five9, 8×8, MS Teams, Zoom.
These prominent players in the Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) space offer software platforms for customer facing services. With a significant portion of contact center agents now working remotely, Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) has become crucial. In summary, when a customer facing agent is having WiFi or Internet connectivity issues, they need to be able to detect the issue, isolate it and ensure that their voice and video is high quality.
The Twilio Approach
Different platforms realize the significance of offering remote workers ways to assess their connection quality. Their methods vary, ranging from publishing open infrastructure IPs for ping tests to full-fledged tools that run on laptops. These tools offer additional metrics like jitter, MOS, bandwidth, and traceroute.
Twilio’s approach falls in the former group, and can be found at https://networktest.twilio.com. I’d say that it is one of the most complete and easy to use network test tools. It’s completely browser based, and all the user has to do is open the page for the network test to start running. It tests the following:
- UDP, TCP, TLS connection to Twilio
- Bandwidth test to Twilio
- Number of supported PCMU and Opus concurrent calls
- Records a voice message and provides jitter, packet loss and MOS score
- Video calls to Twilio
Here is a sample output of the logs produced during the test:
The NetBeez Approach to Twilio Agent Monitoring
Twilio’s network test is comprehensive and easy to use, but it has the same shortcoming with all others:
- Execution: It needs to be ran manually by the remote agent
- Requirement for manual execution: It relies on a remote agent to run the test.
- Limited temporal scope: It captures the network status at a specific moment, lacking historical data.
- Lack of proactive monitoring: It doesn’t detect and alert about ongoing issues.
NetBeez can complement this manual network assessment with Twilio DEM Twilio monitoring,, by leveraging measurements to Twilio’s infrastructure. Twilio has published a high level description of how connectivity to their infrastructure works.
It works by measuring and monitoring latency to Twilio’s client endpoints:
- chunderw-vpc-gll.twilio.com
- chunderw-vpc-gll-{region}.twilio.com {Where region is one of: au1, br1, de1, ie1, jp1, sg1, us1, us2}
The set up on the NetBeez dashboard looks like this (there is also a test to google.com as a measure of reference):
In this case, we are monitoring Twilio for latency, DNS resolution time, Traceroute and Path Analysis (PA) traffic flow.
Here you can see how the historical jitter, packet loss and latency look like from laptop to Twilio’s US East (us1) and US West (us2) infrastructure:
You can see that my latency to US East is around 69ms and to US West around 29 ms, and you can guess that I am located in the eastern part of the US.
Historical Information and Alerting
Twilio publishes this table which lists the network requirements to deliver reasonable audio quality:
Reference: https://www.twilio.com/docs/voice/sdks/network-connectivity-requirements
In case a remote Twilio agent has poor audio quality:
- They will contact IT support
- IT support will tell them to go to https://networktest.twilio.com
- Agent will need to report back the results of IT
- IT will assess if there is any network issues or advice accordingly
The advice might be to move close to their WiFi access point, plug into the home router instead of using WiFi, or contacting their ISP.
Now compare that with the visibility IT has directly on the agent’s network performance right from the NetBeez dashboard. They can see over several days or weeks:
- Historical information about their latency, jitter, packer loss and MOS
- Upload/download historical information
- If the agent is connect to WiFi and, if so, what is its signal strength
In addition, by setting up alerts based on the table above, IT can be notified as soon as any of their agents starts exhibiting poor network performance.
In summary, monitoring Twilio with NetBeez offers several advantages over manual testing and other monitoring solutions. NetBeez provides continuous monitoring, historical data, and proactive alerting, allowing IT teams to identify and resolve issues before they impact call quality. Additionally, NetBeez provides path analysis and traceroute data, which can be used to identify specific network segments that are causing problems. This level of visibility and control is essential for ensuring that remote contact center agents have the best possible experience, and ultimately results in improved customer satisfaction.
