If you work on a service desk, you’ve had this ticket more times than you can count: “My calls keep dropping.” Or “people say my voice is robotic”. Or the classic, raised half an hour after the meeting that went wrong, “Teams is rubbish today”.
It’s a hard one, because three different things can cause the same symptom, and the usual response (reinstall the client, reset the headset) only fixes one of them.
We’d work through it in this order.
First: one person, or lots?
Before looking at anybody’s laptop, find out how widespread it is.
- A whole site or office points at the network: the internet link, the firewall, a change someone made to the proxy.
- A team or department often points at something that was pushed to their devices: a new app, a policy, a different laptop model.
- One person usually means their home network or their device.
This takes five minutes and saves a lot of reinstalling.
If it’s the network
Bandwidth is rarely the problem on its own. Video calls don’t need much. What wrecks them is packet loss and jitter, where data arrives late, out of order or not at all.
The common causes are mundane. Home Wi-Fi with the laptop two walls away from the router. A crowded 2.4 GHz band in a block of flats. And, in many companies, the VPN: meeting traffic gets sent all the way back to head office before going out to the internet again. Microsoft, among others, recommends letting that media traffic bypass the VPN. Check whether yours does.
If it’s the laptop
A call needs a steady share of the processor. When something else grabs it, audio and video are the first things to suffer. The usual culprits:
- A security scan or an update that kicks in mid-afternoon
- Sync clients catching up, or forty browser tabs
- Background blur and video effects on an older machine
- Battery saver throttling the processor when the laptop is unplugged
- Dock and headset drivers. Bluetooth headsets in particular: when the microphone is in use, many of them drop to a lower-quality mode, which is why people sound fine until they speak.
If it’s the app
Less often than people think, but it happens: a meeting client that’s several versions behind, a corrupted cache, or two versions of the app installed side by side. These are the cases where clearing the cache or reinstalling actually helps.
Use the data you already have
The meeting platforms keep their own call quality records, and they’re more useful than the user’s memory of the call. The trick is putting them next to what the device was doing at the time. A call that dropped while the CPU sat at 95% for ten minutes is a different problem from one that dropped while the laptop was idle on a hotel Wi-Fi network.
Seeing the call and the laptop together
Nanoheal measures call quality for Microsoft Teams and Slack alongside the rest of the device data, so you can see what the laptop was doing during the call that went wrong. When a whole group gets worse, Haya ranks which sites and device groups drove it, which answers the first question in this post for you. There’s more on DEX Intelligence.