Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / Reality Bytes #20 – Anatomy of a Bad Video Call

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Reality Bytes #20 – Anatomy of a Bad Video Call · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

0:01
Welcome it, change makers to the deck show with Tim Flower and Tom McGraw.
0:06
Let's get into it, everybody. Can you think of a more central
0:13
aspect of contemporary work that have the video conferencing core then than teams or zoom?
0:19
It can't be the office, can it? Because if a pandemic proved
0:23
anything, it's that if you take away our offices, work continues pretty much
0:28
unabated, is it always have? So this being a demonstrable fact that the
0:33
video conferencing call, that, teams, that zoom kind of constitute so much
0:38
of our of a modern day workplace. But it is a kind of a
0:41
workplace in and of itself. It stands to reason, doesn't it that when
0:46
you when when when you have an interrupted experience on video conferencing, you're not
0:52
just interrupting your digital employee experience, you're interrupting the core employee experience itself.
0:59
Well, that's going to be something we're looking at today in today's reality bites.
1:03
We're going to be looking at a dynamic between video conferencing and digital employee
1:07
experience in general, and we're going to be looking at an anatomy of the
1:11
poor video conference in call. What goes into it and what can be done
1:15
about it. So we're going to get started momentarily. Just welcome our reality
1:21
Bites panelists for the day. We've got Diana here, Hey, Dina,
1:23
nice to see Hello, Glad to be here. We've got everyone's wondering who's
1:29
going to be next. We've got Seawan in the house. Hey, Sewan,
1:30
how's it going? Hello? Hello, nice to be here. How's
1:34
it going, Good to see you, man. We've got Oriana, how's
1:37
it going? Arianna? Hello, it's going well. And we've got Sam
1:41
Hey, Sam, Hey, how are we doing? And Sam? This
1:44
brilliant idea for the episode. It started with you. So I think it's
1:47
only right that we start with you. I know this is something that's featured
1:52
as a as a theme as a topic over on your decks Hub quite a
1:56
bit lately. What what what made you think of a scheme of rule?
2:00
What's your own experience and understanding of the bad? Cool? Yeah? Absolutely
2:05
so. I was actually looking at some of the work our product team had
2:08
done on our corporate blog. We have a piece, a recent piece about
2:14
how to improve poor call quality. It's a very technical piece that maybe we
2:19
can get into some of the details of later on today, but it kind
2:23
of got me thinking about this topic in general, in the way that employees
2:28
and it think about video call communication, especially at the stage we're at now,
2:36
you know, pre pandemic. You know, five ten years ago,
2:39
Zoom and Microsoft teams were still you know, a very prevalent part of kind
2:45
of workplace communication, whether you had employees traveling and doing calls. But obviously
2:51
it became over the past few years kind of the central form of communication.
2:57
Whether you're fully remote or a hybrid company, everyone's using Zoom and teams,
3:04
both for internal communication and both for you know, interacting with customers, interacting
3:09
with other businesses. So it really became, in my view, something that
3:16
was part of the workplace before and now is completely essential. And you know,
3:23
I looked back to some of my prior experiences with awkward calls due to
3:30
one side falling apart on the communication front, and it's something that kind of
3:37
everyone experiences and maybe jokes about and complains about. But we're at the point
3:42
where it's so essential to the modern workplace that poor call quality, whether it's
3:49
a one time thing or a consistent problem, can really have a major impact
3:53
both on employee experience even customer experience, which obviously is far more consequential.
4:00
But um so, yeah, I kind of wanted to open the floor today.
4:04
Maybe people can share some of their own stories with poor call call quality
4:11
and the repercussions of that, and then maybe are more technical folks that are
4:15
way smarter than me in terms of thinking about what actually leads to poor call
4:20
quality can maybe shed some light on how we can avoid the problem smart on
4:27
us in every sense. Let's that's right, Let's go straight to one of
4:31
them. Let's go to Oriona. First of all, Arion, it'd be
4:33
really really interested to hear your point of view, first of all, in
4:38
that dynamic between the poor call quality and decks at large. First of all,
4:46
yeah, absolutely everything that I've seen supports what Sam is describing. So
4:50
we did some research with employees to really understand what are their biggest issues,
4:57
what affects them the most, and one of the things that always came out
5:00
on top is communication software issues. They were ranked as some of the top
5:04
issues that negatively affect digital employee experience both their satisfaction, like their day to
5:10
day levels of frustration, and also productivity. So I think the data really
5:15
supports what Sam is saying, is that is really really interesting, and I
5:18
know we've got Shan with us as well. And what I think Sean's been
5:24
looking at is that the technical blog the Sam mentioned that I think was from
5:29
a next Think blog that kind of looks at this anatomy for poor call and
5:34
in general what next Think can sometimes be able to do about it for customers.
5:40
And you had a few a few questions about this this technical side.
5:44
Didn't you show them that you were going to kind of bring to the floor.
5:46
I did. Yeah, I think I have an eye for the technical
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yet I don't have the capacity to explain it. So hopefully you guys can
5:54
help me out here. But I found one of the views within our software
5:58
that I think is very beneficial to IT managers is something where they use to
6:01
diagnose the call itself. And there are four key metrics that came up.
6:06
So if we can run through these four, one of them I recognize right
6:11
away and I think we all probably know what it means is the frame rate,
6:14
which you know, if you're watching a video and it's sped up,
6:16
it looks a little wonky, and you know it can make you dizzy.
6:19
And I think I understand basically the concept of that and how it impacts a
6:24
video call. But the other three I need some help with. So one
6:29
of the metrics is called jitter. I don't know, Tom or Sam if
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you know what jitter means. I think I know what it means in terms
6:36
of your jittery, maybe after drinking too much coffee. But maybe we can
6:41
talk through that from what it means technically, from an IT language or from
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an IT manager's perspective. The other one was packet loss, which again I
6:51
got no idea. This could be Amazon delivers a package to you and it's
6:56
missing some of its contents. I don't know. I know that's not it,
7:00
but has got to be a has got. I think I'm good with
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the metaphors, but that's why I'm looking more for tangible definitions here. And
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the third one is round trip time, so RTT, which I notice,
7:11
and we have several metric dashboards to go in display about that specific metrics.
7:16
So RTT for me, again, I can only think of you know,
7:20
if I go to the grocery store, it takes me fifteen minutes to get
7:23
there, thirty minutes I spend there in fifteen minutes getting back my RTT is
7:28
one hour. That's the only way I can think through that. But I
7:30
know it has nothing to do with network speed and latency in how network computing
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works. So either one of our experts can jump in or both walk me
7:43
through what those three metrics mean and then how an IT manager can use them
7:48
to diagnose and fix a poor zoom or teams called. I love the metaphors,
7:54
really they are spot on. But to give it a bit of a
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more technical outlier, let's say the jitter is the measure of the variation in
8:03
a packet delay for a data stream. So you have a data stream and
8:07
you're trying to measure if there is a bit of delay in the packets,
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and generally when the audios like too high, it becomes very choppy and you
8:16
can hear the small cutouts in the conversation, and the packet loss is well.
8:24
A packet loss occurs when the data packets fail to reach their destination in
8:28
short like the Amazon example right so, or the packages example. So you're
8:33
able to see the percentage of those packages or of those packets getting lost based
8:39
on the total number of packets sent. So assumingly you have one hundred packets
8:45
getting sent and you're losing ten percent of them, then you're able to measure
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your packet loss and your r RTT, which is the round trip time.
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That's the round trip that takes the packet or one single packet to travel from
9:00
the client to the remote endpoint and back back and forth to the client.
9:05
So it's the whole trip that it takes from the point where it was triggered
9:09
to the destination and then back to reflect and that's the round trip. And
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a high round trip time can cause lots of delays in streaming. And this
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is where you can see sometimes the resolution of a video that you're playing or
9:24
that you're seeing in a conversation in a video conference that gets a little bit
9:28
delayed or lagged. And this is where the round trip time is having a
9:33
high time. Okay, that's well explained INNA. And what a current like
9:39
if you're if you're an IT person who's kind of not for instance, deploying
9:41
next, I think at the moment, what are some of the challenges the
9:46
sort of significance in centrality of teams or zoom calls present to you professionally,
9:54
like why are they difficult issues to solve? Or even know about, because
10:01
you're depending on the information you'll be getting mainly from the vendor if and when
10:07
possible. So it means you're only looking at things from the server perspective or
10:13
from the service provider perspective, and you're not really measuring the experience because you
10:18
don't know how you're visualizing it or how you can see how it looks like
10:22
on the endpoint, on the user, on the person who's really using that
10:24
service. Right. So with that next thing, you lack that visibility.
10:28
But with our collaboration experience, having one place where you can see a diagnosed
10:35
in fix right, and you're able to get the information from the coal quality
10:41
correlated with the endpoint, with the current applications running, with the current audio
10:46
drivers in place, the Wi Fi signal strength, all of that information in
10:52
one place, because there are plenty of metrics that contribute into how the call
10:58
will be, whether it's a good call or a call. It's not just
11:01
one good Internet or one bad VPN. It might be one or many.
11:05
And with having all that information centralized through the next thing, you're able to
11:09
actually see more how you can improve that and to add to it as an
11:15
IT manager or looking at the UC teams, they are basically struggling because they
11:20
are always reactive. They're waiting for somebody to reach out and say we have
11:24
issues, etc. Etc. And they lack the session data and the information
11:31
on the call as well having the visibility and the ability to actually pinpoint that
11:37
there is an issue with one user right click, drill down and then see
11:39
that this is happening across multiple regions, multiple locations and users, and you
11:45
have a fix for it after you do some diagnostics and analytics. This gives
11:50
a lot of edge to the end user computing teams and the IT managers in
11:54
general because we are able to improve the now hands and arms of people to
12:00
do work remotely. So I think this is a fantastic perspective from the A
12:05
side, Right, you either have the information or which next thing gives you,
12:11
or you really don't have the information that you need in order to troubleshoot
12:16
and really find the source of the issue because there are so many different things
12:18
that could be causing the issue, and with call quality especially, it's actually
12:24
one of the things that makes it really difficult is also the employee perspective on
12:28
this, right, because people genuinely don't know, Like, if your call
12:31
goes bad, you don't know if it's your WiFi, you don't know if
12:35
it's the other person's WiFi, you don't know if it's the vendor. Right,
12:39
so, we as end users have no idea what's going on, and
12:43
it's very hard for us to let an IT team know, and it's often
12:46
happening in the worst possible moment in order to report that. So when we
12:52
were talking to end users about call issues, this was actually the perfect example
12:56
of how people will try to troubleshoot a little bit on their own and just
13:01
kind of scrape by without opening a ticket. So IT teams won't even know
13:05
unless they are using a tool like next Thing to proactively track and fix these
13:11
types of issues. Because it's the worst and most impractical, impractical time to
13:18
reach out for help, and it causes huge delays. Right, even if
13:22
your meeting is somewhat less effective, people often don't want to reschedule that because
13:26
that causes delays and work because it's very frustrating. Right, So, even
13:31
if there's a very small issue that maybe people don't even feel like it's worth
13:35
reaching out to it, it can still have a big impact on the work
13:39
People were reporting that dealing with minor call issues made them more unfocused, it
13:43
made them unhappy. It actually ended up rolling over into other things, right
13:48
because their meeting might run late because it was much less effective, and so
13:52
that would affect the next thing that was happening. So this is one of
13:56
those issues where you can have this big chene reaction effect of negative impact on
14:03
decks that's virtually invisible to an IT team unless they have that kind of visibility
14:07
to see all the possible sources of the issue. That's fascinating, and I
14:13
mean we're describing a dynamic whereby we're saying, look, nothing could be almost
14:16
more important to workplace experience in these calls, and yet there's so little control
14:24
of you know, a kind of conventional IT team can hope to have over
14:28
them. You know, that's a that's almost a perfect storm. I was
14:31
wondering, Sean listening to Oriana describe that research. I know you spearheaded a
14:37
lot of research projects. When you think about that dynamic between IT and the
14:43
employee, did that bring any research that you've done to mind, specifically in
14:48
terms of like the kind of impact that those kind of interruptions can have an
14:52
employee's day or flow or work life experience in general. Yeah, actually at
14:58
one term, and this is an old search project we've done before where we
15:01
coined it as kind of digital sabotage. So if I'm trying to figure out
15:05
how to fix my computer, oftentimes I'll waste time trying to do it because
15:09
I don't know what I'm doing, or I'll waste the time of one of
15:11
my colleagues. So I might message you Tom and see if you're experiencing a
15:16
similar problem. And then now I have potentially two or more folks trying to
15:20
figure this out who were not it workers clogging up my team Sean with these
15:26
dessent messages right exactly, and that happens daily. So I'll chime in with
15:31
an example that we had with one of our customers. So they were updating
15:37
the VPN globally to everybody, and one of the users had a ticket post
15:41
immigration was there and ideally everything was working fine and connected, complaining from the
15:48
update of the VPN, saying post that update, now I'm getting disconnected midway
15:54
of my calls and I'm not able to complete my conversations, and whether it's
15:58
a video call or an audio call Zoom teams so be it, and through
16:06
the analysis that the customer was able to do an next thing customer, So
16:10
they were able to investigate further into the calls and see that there is a
16:14
correlation between the fact that every time they were in the middle of a zoom
16:18
call or a team's call, their audio driver was trying to connect again and
16:27
it was failing and crashing in the background. So every time the application was
16:33
crashing, the audio driver was crashing. It was causing the disconnects that they
16:37
see and from their perspective or from the I perspective, looking just at the
16:42
internet connection or your WiFi and everything. They had fiber internet, so they
16:47
had very good high speed and everything was working fine, except that in the
16:51
middle of the conversation they always get the call disconnected a little bit or there
16:56
is a bit of a jitter sometimes or delay. So the UC team did
17:02
someone else's they found that the application was crashing is the audio plug in in
17:06
the background? Found out the fix looked at the rest of the people who
17:11
were not complaining to it through a ticket, but they were just silent,
17:15
silently struggling, and they launched a quick fix and a remote action to update
17:22
how how the application should be performing and be on the most compliant, up
17:26
to date version that was more compatible, let's say, or consistent for them,
17:33
which drastically avoided any amount of tickets that would have been created post that.
17:38
And people would correlate that to the VPN update because this is the only
17:42
change they have seen on the endpoint or no about, but they didn't know
17:47
that there was bigger impacts in the background to implicate that that's great? And
17:51
what about from a user perspective, everybody is anybody to round things off,
17:55
got any noteworthy video conferencing debacle's worth worth? Bring it? I can jump
18:02
in there because I was thinking about UM when we were we were talking about
18:06
the impact on employees, how it kind of you know, can lead to
18:11
burnout and lower productivity. I think one thing that's really important is especially early
18:18
in someone's job, whether it's you know, in the onboarding process or when
18:22
they're new to a company. UM. I feel like poor call quality can
18:26
have a way bigger impact just because newer employees are just naturally going to be
18:33
a little more kind of like on edge and making sure everything's going right.
18:37
And so for something that is so unpredictable to keep happening, it can really
18:41
have an impact unemployee experience. And I thought of that because it reminded me
18:45
of a call I had very early on in this role. Um. I
18:51
believe it was a call an interview I was doing for like a deck sub
18:55
article with someone in a leadership position. So naturally I was kind of,
19:00
you know, a little nervous about making sure I came off while on the
19:03
call, um and so, and I was recording it to kind of refer
19:07
back to, and there was a lot of moments of his voice kind of
19:11
chopping in and out. And it's usually with these problems, it's it's rare
19:15
that you get a call where someone uh, it's just completely unintelligible and you
19:19
can't hear them at all. It's usually you know, their voice drops out
19:23
for a second, you kind of what did they say? I think I
19:26
got what they said, so I'm not gonna I'm not gonna ask them to
19:30
repeat it. That kind of like that that that fine line where it's almost
19:36
a serious problem, but not serious enough that you're gonna kind of like raise
19:40
the issue. So it was one of those calls. And then I remember
19:41
going back and listening to the recording and just realizing how bad it was and
19:45
how I just uh, I kind of just floated through it because I didn't
19:51
want to, um, you know, say, hey, person who's very
19:53
much more senior than me, your audio is bad, so let's figure it
19:57
out. So you just kind of roll with that. Um And a lot
20:00
of times when especially when it's something where you need to refer back to your
20:03
notes or a recording of the call, you kind of realize after the fact,
20:07
you're like, oh man, that that did not sound well, and
20:10
now you're kind of left with trying to put the puzzle pieces together with all
20:15
of that missed audio. Yeah. Great, great example. And there's in
20:21
so many circumstances. It's always you know, that kind of early onboarding phase
20:26
of an employee's life where user experience issues can become particularly disruptive and unnerving.
20:33
M. Dina. I mean in terms of in terms of a sort of
20:37
onboarding experience in general, anything you want to sort of add to that in
20:42
terms of the dynamic between video calling and employee experience at large, generally people
20:49
do not complain a lot to it. So having the visibility and that edge
20:56
in the background. So even with the previous example of the cost are mentioned,
21:00
so even if we don't have that in place, that user coming and
21:03
complaining, we can have a set of alerts, set of walkouts, let's
21:08
say, or red flanks that could be raised whenever there is an issue,
21:11
so we can proactively try and fix it. And this is where I think
21:17
generally reflects to improving the end user experience at the end of the day,
21:21
generally looking at things from from that perspective and moving a bit from being reactive
21:25
to proactive. I love it. And what about you showing if you had
21:27
all your questions answered about the anatomy, if a bad call now been cleared
21:33
up for you, as you say, I think I have, and I
21:36
think the jitter, packet loss and round trip time on this particular recording has
21:42
been phenomenal. It's been phenomenal. I was going to say my experience,
21:47
my worst experiences of via conferencing are always podcasting recording podcast recordings, which especially
21:55
when you have a big guest, can be incredibly stressful and you know you
21:59
only get you only get one chance of them, and you need everything to
22:02
come out crystal cliffs. So hopefully the audience feel that the general Deck Show
22:07
audio standards are fairly high, but let me let me let them know that
22:11
it's not always easy getting it into their into their hands in this kind of
22:15
state. Listen, it's been a it's been a as you say, shown,
22:18
a great a great call, a great conversation. Thanks Sam for bringing
22:22
this idea along, really appreciate it, and we will direct everybody very pointedly
22:29
to the Deck Show deck Hub mothership not least to read this very article that
22:34
we've been discussing about how you can improve poor care quality on our Microsoft team,
22:40
specifically with the help of next Think. There'll be a link to that
22:42
in the show notes, so please do go and check that out, and
22:47
we'll see you all again shortly for another reality bite. Thanks everyone, goodbye.
22:53
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nextthink dot com. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time