Reading your trunk traffic: answer rate, ring delay, and detection

Your Trunks & DIDs page now shows what your traffic actually did, not just that the account is open. Six tabs: Status and Info are what they were; Traffic, Destinations, Detection and Calls are new. This explains what each number means and, more usefully, which one to look at when something is wrong.

Picking a period

The pills at the top — Last hour, Last 24 hours, Last 7 days, Last 30 days — set the period for every tab. They are links, so the page re-reads the switch when you click one and the URL changes with it. That means you can send a colleague or support a link to exactly the view you are looking at.

Traffic — the headline numbers

Answer rate

Answered calls as a percentage of calls placed. This is ASR, the same figure your carrier quotes. It is coloured: green above 25%, amber between 10% and 25%, red below 10%. A red answer rate on a list that used to work is a routing problem; a red answer rate on a fresh list is usually the list.

One thing worth knowing: our count and your dialler’s count can differ. Your dialler counts every dial it attempted. We count calls we carried — a call we refused before dialling (over your channel ceiling, say) never becomes a call here at all.

Average call length

Across answered calls only. Averaging over every call instead would make a campaign with a bad answer rate look like one with short conversations, which sends you looking in the wrong place.

Ring delay (median)

The gap between us sending the call to a carrier and that carrier ringing. This is the number your agents feel before any other. A carrier that answers everything but takes six seconds to ring scores identically to a good one on answer rate and cost, and quietly halves how many calls an agent places in an hour.

It shows a dash, not a zero, when nothing rang in the period. That is deliberate: a call refused before it ever rang has no ring delay, and counting those as zero would report the carrier that refuses fastest as the one that rings fastest. Median rather than average, for the same reason — one call timing out at thirty seconds would drag an average somewhere no call ever was.

Above about four seconds is worth raising with us.

Calls in progress, and the busiest second

Calls in progress is live, against your channel ceiling. Busiest second is the most new calls you started in any one second in the period — that is the figure to compare against your calls-per-second limit if calls are being refused and you cannot see why.

"Needed more than one carrier"

If you see an amber note saying some calls needed more than one carrier, it means we tried one carrier, it did not take the call, and we retried on another before it connected. You are not billed twice. It does add ring delay, which is why it is shown.

Destinations — why the answer rate is what it is

Four breakdowns, and the point of all of them is that an overall number hides the thing you need.

• Where your calls went — top destinations by volume. Each bar is coloured by THAT destination’s own answer rate, so one area code answering nothing next to one answering everything is visible at a glance.
• How calls ended — normal clearing, carrier rejected, caller hung up before answer, and so on.
• Carrier responses — the SIP code the far end returned. Useful when a destination is failing and the cause alone does not say why: 486 is busy, 480 is temporarily unavailable, 403 usually means the carrier will not accept that number from that caller ID.
• When you dial — an hour-by-hour bar chart, in YOUR account’s time zone rather than ours. If the chart looks shifted by several hours, check the time zone on the Info tab.

Detection — answering-machine results

Only populated if machine detection is switched on for your account. If it is off, the tab says so and tells you how to enable it per campaign.

Coverage is the first number to read

Coverage is how many of your answered calls got a verdict. It is shown first because it decides whether any of the other numbers are worth reading: a detector covering a third of your traffic is not one to route on, and neither the verdict count nor the call count tells you that on its own.

Below 70% you will see an amber note. The usual cause is that some campaigns are dialling a routing extension that does not request detection.

The rest

• Reached a person / Machine — the share of verdicts each way.
• Confidence — how sure the detector was, averaged. Low-confidence calls are counted separately.
• Slowest verdict (p95) — how long your caller waited for an answer on the slowest one call in twenty. Above two seconds is worth mentioning to us.
• What the detector actually said — its raw output, verbatim. "Machine" is our reading of these strings; this is the fact underneath it. If you ever want to dispute a classification, this is the column that makes the argument possible.

Calls — the list, and the download

Every call in the period, newest first, a hundred to a page. Each row shows when, to, from, how it ended, ring delay, talk time, billed time, the detection verdict, and what it cost you.

Filtering

1. The chips filter by result: All, Answered, Not answered — and by detection: Reached a person, Machine.
2. The search box filters by destination number. It matches the start of the number, so typing 1636 finds everything in that area code.
3. Clear removes every filter at once.

Filters are part of the URL, so a filtered view is a link you can send to support rather than something you have to describe.

Downloading

CSV and Excel buttons sit next to the search box. Both apply whatever filters are on screen, and both cover the whole period rather than just the page you are looking at — up to fifty thousand calls.

The charge column is in dollars to six decimal places, so it adds up against your invoice directly. The ring-delay column is blank, not zero, for calls that never rang — keep that in mind if you pivot on it.

Things that trip people up

• Billed time and talk time differ. Your first billed increment and the rounding step are on the Info tab — a 35-second call on 6-second increments bills at 36.
• A number on this page describes calls we carried for you. If you also dial through your own carrier, those calls are not here.
• If a panel says it is temporarily unavailable, that panel could not be loaded — it does not mean you have no calls, and it does not affect calls in progress. Refresh in a moment.
• The Status tab is the one to check first when calls are being refused outright: it lists which of your servers are authorised to send us traffic. An address that is not on that list has every call refused, and your dialler cannot see why.