Dialer Best Practices for Users

Follow these steps to help ensure your Dialer phone calls have crystal-clear audio quality

Jun 28, 2024
Knowledge

Created Date

6/28/2024, 3:55 PM

Last Published Date

6/28/2024, 3:56 PM

Article

Dialer Best Practices for Users

Groove Dialer makes it easy to make and log phone calls from Gmail, Salesforce, and Groove Flow, but ensuring you have crystal clear audio quality on those calls isn't always as easy.

We don't want you sounding staticy, muffled, or muted on your calls with prospects/customers and have built the following guide to help ensure you sound your best when making calls with the Groove Dialer.

A Quick Background

Before we give you tips on how to solve the most common issues we see related to call quality, it's important to understand how Groove makes these calls possible and what factors can adversely affect your call quality.

To make phone calls from your computer to other mobile phones/landlines possible, Groove utilizes a 3rd party Voice over IP (VOIP) provider called Twilio. This means that once you start phone calls on your computer with Dialer, Twilio and it's partner carrier networks, make the magic of the phone call happen.

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Services you may be familiar with, such as Google Hangouts and Skype, also rely on VOIP technology. Like any other VOIP service, call quality with Dialer can be highly dependent on the following factors:

Network Speed/quality
Computer hardware and software
Headset mic/bluetooth quality

Important Note: If you are using bridge dial, the quality of your phone calls will be heavily dependent on the connectivity of your bridge phone (i.e. your cell phone or desk phone)

If you're a Groove Salesforce Admin, we recommend reviewing the following Twilio documentation on best practices for your team. In summary, it highly recommends using wired headsets and working with your IT Team to prioritizing web traffic for Groove Dialer.

Network Issues

If you are ever experiencing poor call quality, it's likely due to an internet network issue, and we recommend you do the following to help improve your call quality:

Close/quit any bandwidth/CPU heavy applications: Video streaming (Youtube, PGA Live, WatchESPN, etc.), audio streaming (Spotify, Apple Music, etc), large downloads, etc. can utilize a large amount of your computer's bandwidth and CPU, you'll want to close these while making phone calls
Connect via an ethernet cable: Wi-Fi connections can be unstable and have lower bandwidth than ethernet connections
Try using bridge dial: If your internet is ever slow/spotty, you should try turning on bridge dial (note, this requires you have a forwarding number configured). When you use bridge dial, the quality of your phone is much more dependent on the connection your bridge phone has (i.e. your cell phone/desk phone)
Higher bandwidth: Ensure your network can support bandwidth of at least 25-50 mbps per person
Ensure you have a VOIP compatible router: Older routers can't support VOIP calls and will need to be updated
Firewalls: Ensure your firewall is not blocking Twilio

If you're ever experiencing call quality issues, we recommend testing your network using the following tool. You'll want to ensure that your network is able to support at least as many people you have making VOIP/Dialer phone calls in your office/space, reference the number of 'Twilio Client connections' to determine how many VOIP calls could have been made during the test:

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Computer Hardware and Browser Requirements

In order to ensure the highest quality calls, we recommend the following hardware/software setup:

Stay up to date: ensure you are on the latest version of Google Chrome. Details on updating Chrome can be found here.
8GB of RAM/memory: make sure your desktop/laptop has at least 8GB of RAM. Details on how to check how much RAM your device has can be found here (PC) and here (Mac)
Close/quit any bandwidth/CPU heavy applications: Video streaming (Youtube, PGA Live, WatchESPN, etc.), audio streaming (Spotify, Apple Music, etc), large downloads, etc. can utilize a large amount of your computer's bandwidth and CPU, you'll want to close these while making phone calls
Connect via an ethernet cable: Wi-Fi connections can be unstable and have lower bandwidth than ethernet connections

Headsets

Headsets help improve the audio quality of your phone calls and can help reduce echo sounds in your calls.

USB headsets tend to provide the best call quality, but if you have a higher end computer, a 3.5 mm headset should work alright.

We ourselves use the Groove dialer daily and have had good luck with the following headsets (note, your satisfaction with these may vary):

USB: Jabra UC Voice 550 Duo
Bluetooth: Jabra Evolve 75 and Jabra Evolve 65

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Dialer Best Practices for Users

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