You’ve identified your problem, now let’s solve it and maintain the results.
Ongoing traffic maintenance is critical to the success of a well formed traffic management strategy. You must continually monitor your call flows to ensure that the patterns have not changed.
In most cases, weekly or daily traffic reports are run and analysis performed to ensure that no busy conditions are occurring. If they do occur, it is imperative that you first check to see that this is not due to a fault such as a downed T1 that has reduced the number of available trunks on the route. If this is not the case, then a traffic problem exists and needs to be immediately accounted for.
Call Center environments are especially sensitive to traffic problems. In call center environments, an aggressive traffic management strategy should be implemented and diligently attended to. The voice administrator needs to have exposure to everything that is going on related to that route to properly troubleshoot issues or plan for growth.
What information will I need to assess my trunking needs?
Depending on the needs of your organization, the types of traffic information you find valuable will determine which traffic types you should collect and store. For example, peg count and call second usage information can be collected for many different types of traffic based items including trunk utilization, station statistics, group usages, attendant statistics and call center information.
Another traffic type that can be collected is the VoIP statistics information as it relates to any number of different IP based voice devices throughout your communications solution. This information is based on the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) packets that are passed between the devices throughout the course of a conversation. This data is valuable because it tells an administrator how much bandwidth is currently being consumed by voice traffic and over which network segments that information is flowing. It is beneficial in aiding network capacity planning efforts or in troubleshooting problems experienced with VoIP implementations.
Once you’ve collected the data, determining how much you should store will be dependent on your organization’s business needs. Every business is different, but each business likely experiences peaks and valleys in call volumes. If you experience higher traffic volumes on certain trunk routes at certain times during the year, be sure to plan to store enough traffic data to cover those peaks.
Regardless of your particular situation, traffic issues and trunking errors are costly and can potentially damage your organization’s reputation. Knowing the fundamentals of traffic management and coupling that with the right tools is the key to an effective traffic management strategy.
Hey, you made it all the way to the end. Learn more about tools designed by NEC to make traffic management both simple and automatic.
