Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
Choppy or delayed audio is nearly always the network, and usually at one specific end. Six checks in order.
Why is our call quality poor?
- Audio breaking up or dropping words.
- A delay that makes both sides talk over each other.
- Echo, or one side hearing themselves.
- One agent affected and not others.
The numbers behind the complaint
Voice quality reporting flags a call on documented thresholds, which is what turns "it sounded bad" into something you can check. That reporting needs Suite Professional or Talk Professional and above; on Team and Growth the same thresholds still apply to your calls, you just cannot see which ones were flagged, so the checks below are all you have.
| High latency | Traversal time above 150 ms |
| High jitter | Average jitter of 5 ms and maximum of 30 ms, or more than 1% of packets delayed by 200 ms or more |
| High packet loss | Loss larger than 5% |
Read the packet loss figure with care. Five per cent is where a call gets tagged; in practice as little as 1% over fifteen minutes is enough to be audible, so a connection can be clearly bad without ever being flagged.
Resolution steps
1. Is it one agent or everyone
The question that halves the problem. One agent points at their setup; everyone points at the network or the connection into your building.
2. Wifi
Zendesk's own recommendation is a wired network with Wi-Fi turned off. Move the agent to a wired connection for one call. If it clears, it was wifi, whatever the speed test says.
3. The headset
Echo is usually a laptop microphone picking up the laptop speakers. A wired 3.5 mm jack headset, which is what Zendesk recommends, removes it. Poor microphones also produce audio the caller finds hard to follow while sounding fine locally.
4. What else is on the connection
Backups, large uploads, video calls. Quality that degrades at the same time each day points here.
5. The browser
Thirty tabs and several applications compete for resources. A browser restart is a legitimate first step, not a fob-off.
6. Both directions
Ask whether it is the agent hearing badly or the caller. Different directions point at different ends, and it is the question people forget to ask.
Where SIP-IN is involved
The call passes through your own telephony first, so quality problems can originate there. Rule out the agent's setup, then involve whoever runs that side.
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