Channel partners play a pivotal role in helping organizations optimize their unified communications (UC) environments. One of the most effective ways to deliver value is by guiding customers toward meaningful key performance indicators (KPIs) that reveal the true state of their voice infrastructure.
This article outlines the essential KPIs that voice engineers should be tracking, including dropped calls, disconnect cause codes, hunt group performance, abandoned calls, and call center metrics. These indicators provide deep visibility into system reliability, customer experience, and operational efficiency.
For channel partners, understanding and promoting these KPIs offers several strategic advantages:
By equipping customers with the tools and knowledge to monitor these KPIs, channel partners can position themselves not just as technology providers but as trusted advisors. This approach fosters long-term engagement, improves service delivery, and opens the door to new opportunities in UC performance management.
Definition:
Phone calls that end before the speaking parties have finished their conversation due to technical reasons.
Why It Matters for Your Customers:
For your customers, a phone call is often the first touchpoint with their own customers, making the call experience a critical part of their overall service. Helping them deliver reliable, high-quality interactions means you're directly supporting their customer satisfaction.Are you currently able to identify dropped calls in your UC system?
Dropped calls are a direct hit to customer satisfaction. As a channel partner, you can offer proactive monitoring and troubleshooting services that identify and resolve dropped call issues before they impact business operations.
How You Add Value:
Definition:
The reason indicated by the service provider (SP) or customer equipment (CE) for a phone call disconnecting.
Why It Matters for Your Customers:
Unexpected call disconnects, whether during customer service interactions or internal communications, degrade user experience and can signal deeper issues within your UC infrastructure. The ability to quickly determine why a call was terminated is essential for effective troubleshooting.
Disconnect Cause Codes are diagnostic indicators generated by either the SP or the CE. These codes reveal the reason behind a call termination, whether it's due to signaling errors, network instability, or misconfigurations.
Analyzing these codes helps isolate whether the issue lies with the provider’s network or your customer’s UC components. Lack of this insight leads to longer resolution times and recurring problems.
How You Add Value:
Definition:
A type of call in which someone gains access to a phone system to make artificially generated, high-volume calls to premium international numbers.
Why It Matters for Your Customers:
Toll fraud is one of the most financially damaging threats to a UC environment. Once an attacker gains unauthorized access, they can initiate hundreds, even thousands, of outbound calls in a short period, often targeting high-cost international destinations. These calls can result in substantial charges, for which an organization may be held liable.
Beyond the financial impact, toll fraud can also degrade service quality. Legitimate callers may encounter busy signals or reorder tones when trying to reach an organization, leading to poor customer experience and potential reputational damage.
Monitoring for toll fraud requires more than just basic call logs. Advanced tools can detect unusual calling patterns, flag suspicious call volumes, and correlate activity across voice gateways and SIP trunks. Proper configuration and security hardening of the UC infrastructure, especially voice gateways, is critical to preventing unauthorized access.
How You Add Value:
Definition:
A call that delivers pre-recorded messages through auto-dialing software to millions of people each day.
Why It Matters for Your Customers:
Robocalls can significantly impact UC system performance by consuming large volumes of call legs, especially when they repeatedly target an environment. If left unchecked, they can saturate trunk sessions, resulting in busy signals or service provider rejection messages for legitimate callers.
Identifying and filtering robocall traffic is essential to preserving call quality and availability for real users.
How You Add Value:
Definition:
A measure of the number of calls presented vs. the number of calls answered.
Why It Matters for Your Customers:
Call queues and hunt groups are often the first line of contact for customers, and delays or missed connections can quickly lead to frustration. Tracking how effectively these calls are being handled is essential for maintaining service quality and optimizing staffing.
Key metrics such as average wait time, abandonment rate, and agent availability provide insight into whether calls are being answered promptly and routed efficiently. Customers expect to reach a live representative, not get stuck in a loop of recorded messages or excessive hold times.
How You Add Value:
Definition:
The total time the trunk or channel was used for an inbound or outbound call.
Why It Matters for Your Customers:
Trunk utilization directly impacts both service quality and cost efficiency. Overutilized trunks can lead to call failures, degraded performance, and unexpected charges, especially if an organization exceeds its allocated session limits and incurs “bursting” fees, charges for exceeding contracted session limits.
On the other hand, underutilized trunks represent wasted resources and unnecessary expense. If your customers are consistently using far fewer sessions than provisioned, they’re likely overpaying for capacity they don’t need.
How You Add Value:
Definition:
The controlled identification and implementation of required changes within a computer system.
Why It Matters for Your Customers:
Unexpected system behavior often stems from recent changes, whether it's a configuration tweak, software update, or policy shift. If the environment was stable on Friday but broken by Monday, being able to pinpoint who made what change and when is essential to restoring service swiftly.
Robust change management practices, backed by comprehensive audit logs and version tracking, are key to your success. Without these tools, troubleshooting turns into guesswork, and root cause analysis is delayed, impacting both your efficiency and the customer's trust.
How You Add Value:
Definition:
Management of the Direct Inward Dial (DID) and Directory Numbers (DN) within a phone system.
Why It Matters for Your Customers:
Tracking and managing Direct Inward Dial (DID) numbers and Directory Numbers (DNs) is a foundational task in any UC environment, but relying on spreadsheets introduces risk. Manual updates are prone to error, and outdated records can lead to provisioning conflicts, misrouted calls, and wasted time during troubleshooting.
As DIDs become more affordable and often bundled with circuit purchases, the volume of numbers under management continues to grow. Without a centralized, automated system, reviewing changes, such as moves, adds, and deletions, since the last known “clean” version of a dial plan can be time-consuming and unreliable.
How You Add Value:
Definition:
A call made to a call center that ends before the caller speaks with an agent.
Why It Matters for Your Customers:
Long hold times and poor queue management often lead to abandoned calls, a clear signal of customer frustration and a potential loss of business. When callers hang up before reaching an agent, it reflects negatively on an organization's responsiveness and overall service quality.
By analyzing when and where calls are being dropped, users can make data-driven decisions to improve queue performance, adjust staffing levels, and enhance customer experience. A robust UC analytics platform should provide visibility into abandonment trends across time, queues, and call types, enabling proactive resolution before customer satisfaction is impacted.
How You Add Value:
Definition:
Tracking operational and customer experience metrics within a call center environment.
Why It Matters for Your Customers:
Call centers reflect an organization's ability to support and engage with customers. Monitoring performance metrics such as average queue time, average call duration, and call transfer frequency provide critical insight into how efficiently a call center is operating, and how satisfied customers are likely to be.
Evaluating agent performance is equally important. If certain agents consistently transfer calls or have unusually long call durations, it may indicate gaps in training or product knowledge. These inefficiencies not only slow down resolution times but also contribute to a poor customer experience.
How You Add Value:
As a channel partner, your ability to deliver value goes far beyond hardware and licensing. By helping customers track and act on these KPIs, you position yourself as a strategic advisor — one who can improve service quality, reduce operational risk, and drive better business outcomes.
Whether through managed services, advanced analytics platforms, or proactive support, these KPIs offer a framework for deeper engagement and long-term customer success. The more visibility you provide, the more trust you build — and the more opportunities you create to grow your UC offerings.
To get started, assess your current visibility into these KPIs and explore UC analytics platforms that align with your service model. The right tools and insights can transform your customer relationships and unlock new revenue streams.
Your next growth opportunity starts with better visibility. Discover how Variphy empowers channel partners to lead with insights.
Updated on
October 22, 2025
Published on
October 22, 2025
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