Cytracom, a channel-only provider of cloud-based VoIP, today announced Active Intelligence Monitoring (AIM), which delivers interactive call quality analytics to detect and mitigate issues with voice services. AIM is powered by Cytracom’s Voice Intelligence Engine, Ivie, and is available now to channel partners in North America.
AIM collects and displays a broad range of data in graphical format to help managed service providers proactively address call quality issues. Built into the Cytracom portal, AIM provides MSPs a high-level view of their customers’ status and enables them to drill down to location- and extension-level call data. This data includes details into quality of service, latency, and overall network performance.
“Active intelligence is all about enabling our partners to deliver voice services with confidence,” says Zane Conkle, CEO and co-founder of Allen, Texas-based Cytracom LLC. “We want them to have the visibility to know that these services are running efficiently. Historically this has not been possible.”
Typically, Conkle says, the customer plays the role of the canary in the coalmine. “You put the customer in a position where the only way you know there is a problem is if the ‘canary’, or the customer, squeals. That is a problem we are trying to solve with active intelligence.”
AIM supports Cytracom’s voice continuity solution, which was released earlier this year. With voice continuity, partners can set automated failover policies that trigger when there is a disruption to internet services. Now, AIM takes it a step further, providing the data to make decisions on improving services in real time, before receiving customers’ trouble tickets.
Based on the telecommunications industry standard MOS score, which rates quality on a scale of 1 to 5, AIM categorizes call quality as good, fair or bad. Conkle says an MSP can login to the portal and see, for example, that a customer’s call quality is green-lighted every day except around noon, where there is a trend of yellow and red. When the MSP investigates, it turns out the half the office is downloading Netflix at lunchtime. “So now we can start drilling in and realize that maybe our quality of service settings are not set up right,” Conkle says. “Maybe we did not update them. Maybe we did an update to the router and replaced the router and did not get the settings put in.”
Conkle says voice continuity and now AIM enable channel partners to have a business conversation around VoIP with their customers, similar to the one they have around business continuity. “Every MSP talks about disaster recovery, business continuity. MSPs have been asking for years, ‘How long could you be without your server if you lost it? How long could you be without your data?” Now MSPs can have that same conversation about voice continuity, he says. “How long can you be without that phone system? Voice continuity really guards against that. It puts the partner in a position to be a solution provider. This is where our partners are seeing value—literally every customer is a candidate for voice continuity.”
This provides MSPs with a competitive advantage as well as help to stave off the encroachment from telcos, Conkle says.
Next up on the AIM roadmap is an exportable PDF report of call quality health that MSPs will be able to share with customers during a quarterly business review.
And early next year, Cytracom plans to enable predictive alerts via AIM. “We will have some predictive alerts that are pinging our partners, whether we are sending it to their PSA tools via email [or] text message.” Partners will be able to set thresholds and preferences for notifications when those metrics fall out of bounds, Conkle says, similar to the alerts available through voice continuity.
