4 Ways Our Tech Team Has Focused on Reliability in 2023

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At Aircall, we take reliability very seriously. Our phone and communication platform is trusted by more than 17,000 clients worldwide, and in 2022, we gained our spurs (or more accurately—our hooves) when we reached Centaur status with $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR). 

If we weren’t doing everything we could to make Aircall a reliable phone and communication platform for our users, this wouldn't be possible.

So, how are we doing this?

The Team That WorksTogether, Resolves Together

As Aircall’s VP of Site Reliability, Security Engineering, and Architecture, it’s my job to head up a cross-functional set of teams within Aircall’s technology department all dedicated to dependability. 

Together, the team and I work on delivering quality and reliability and making a range of incident prevention improvements. 

There are a number of ways we approach incident prevention:

• Ongoing incident reviews

• Improving our support ticket processes

• Continuing to cancel out tech debt

• Following regulatory compliance

• Improving hardware, carrier, and cloud connections  

To help, our team of more than 260 experts use industry-leading tools. This year, this has grown to include DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics to further improve our software delivery performance. 

First developed by Google’s analysis of more than 32,000 DevOps professionals, DORA is an industry-leading way to preserve the consistency and quality of our software delivery and continue making improvements to our product. And given everything Aircall has in the pipeline, it’ll be more important than ever.

A Big Year for Testing

2023 has been a big year for Aircall. First, we launched our AI-support call and voicemail transcription feature, transcribing over 65 million calls in its first six months. 

Now, we’re set to enter phase two—launching a range of products that will take call and performance insights, plus coaching opportunities, and help sales and customer support teams get to the next level. 

These new products include:

The AI Starter Package

Through the AI Starter Package, customer-facing teams will find everything they need to deliver more meaningful customer interactions. Located within Aircall’s Conversation Center, the AI Starter Package offers team leaders and reps alike a deeper dive into call and performance metrics, including call summaries, key topics, and talk ratios. This is one single place to assess performance, maintain quality assurance, and gain a quick understanding of the conversations you’re having.

Smartflows

Getting calls to where they need to be on the first ring is key to optimizing your team’s productivity and not wasting your customers’ time. With Smartflows, sales and customer support teams can personalize their customer journey even more with a point-and-click editor that’s easy to use and easy on the eye. You can even personalize Smartflows using data from your CRM or help desk.

Analytics

New analytics dashboards will help teams achieve their business goals with data-driven decision-making. This includes an Unanswered Calls dashboard that shows a heatmap of when calls were missed and why, so your team can respond quickly and appropriately and continue to drive up your answered call rate.

SMS improvements

We’re also improving the way teams perform their SMS outreach, making it more intuitive and seamless to switch between voice and SMS conversations within Aircall. This includes new filters and a dedicated Messages section within the platform, plus more ways to start a text conversation.

This is an exciting moment for Aircall and its customers—and for my team, it means the pressure is on. This is why, to coincide with these launches, we have launched a new deployment process and quality assurance (QA) testing environment for increased assessment and reduced risk.

At Aircall, we know that however much we invest in the reliability of our products, there’s always the threat of downtime due to our external Cloud Service Provider (AWS). This is why we’re also putting a significant amount of Aircall’s spend on AWS directly toward being able to distribute and recover our systems fast—within 10 minutes of an AWS failure—which means your team can keep doing what they do best.

Bringing Peace of Mind to Customer Conversations

Our mission at Aircall is to help our customers utilize the power of voice. When they take a call, we want their focus to be 100% focused on the conversation, bringing meaning to the interaction and driving customer experience.

But we cannot pretend that Aircall is perfect. For example, we recently experienced some outages where we did not live up to our mission. While these experiences aren’t what we want, the outage led us to take several actions including accelerating improvements with our infrastructure providers, reinforcing testing procedures, and improving communications with customers to proactively alert you to the unlikely event that you experience a disruption in the future.

Learning from these experiences and getting to a point where we’ve covered all bases is how we keep reliability a main pillar of our product. 

To find out more about how Aircall can bring reliability to your sales and customer support teams, get in touch with our team today.

Published on November 20, 2023.