When I’m out on the road meeting customers, I always ask one important question – do you have any voice quality issues? Surprisingly, the answer that I hear the most often isn’t a straight “yes” or “no”. It’s actually “no idea”.

At first, this intrigued me. How, I wondered, could IT managers be totally unaware of whether or not their enterprise’s network had problems with voice quality? Then the fog cleared a bit. In the absence of any complaints from network users, most IT managers simply assumed that everything was functioning exactly as it should. After all – out of sight, out of mind.

Yet this was only the beginning. As I delved deeper, I unearthed additional maladies. If users did happen to complain about the voice quality, how could IT managers identify the cause of the issue? And what if users never complain because they assume that voice issues are a given (force majeure) and that nothing can be done about them?

All this seemed to make perfect sense at first. But the more I thought about it, the more it struck me that I was encountering severe cases of learned helplessness on an almost daily basis. It was almost like being stuck in a loop: “If nothing can be done to fix the problem, why should I go out of my way to make a complaint? In any case, nothing can be done to fix the problem.”

Now, having made the right diagnosis, how could I, well, help? It just so happens that we at AudioCodes have designed and built the One Voice Operations Center (OVOC) network management application to identify and remedy voice quality issues. And it’s exactly what the doctor ordered.