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Rate My Call is a
feature in Skype for Business that provides enterprises a way of acquiring
feedback from their end-users via a special dialog window that pops up after a specified number of calls. The Rate
My Call dialog window offers a combination of star rating system, predefined feedback checkboxes
for audio and video calls, as well as the option for custom text based feedback. This gives the administrator a method for adding real user feedback to the existing Quality of Experience statistics that have been available since Lync was first introduced.
Rate My Call Prerequisites
In order to use the Rate My Call feature you will need the following pre-requisites:
- You must have Skype for Business Server installed;
- Users need to have a client version 15.0.4711.1002 or later and using the Skype for Business UI;
- The RateMyCallDisplayPercentage in Client Policy must be set to a value larger than 0;
- Users must be homed on a Skype for Business Server front end pool; and
- The Skype for Business environment must have a monitoring database deployed.
Rate My Call Settings
The Rate My Call
feature has two settings within Client Policy: Display Percentage and Allow
Custom User Feedback. The Display Percentage is the percentage of calls that
the user will be asked to provide feedback on. The percentage number is very
important because if you set this value too high it can result in user survey fatigue
whereby users stop providing relevant feedback due to being asked too often. The Allow Custom feedback setting is used to give users the ability to
offer specific text based feedback in addition to their star rating and standard checkbox responses. The custom
feedback can be great for drilling deeper into what the actual issue may be
that the user is experiencing, rather than trying to interpret checkboxes responses that may not exactly match the user's experience.
There is no action required to enable the base feature, however custom feedback will need to be enabled separately if it is desired. The Rate My Call
feature is automatically enabled in the Client Policy with the following
defaults:
- Rate My Call Display Percentage – 10%
- Rate My Call Allow Custom User Feedback – disabled
The following Windows PowerShell cmdlet is an example of enabling custom end user feedback and changing the interval from 10% to 80%.
Configuring Rate My Call:
Set-CSClientPolicy -Identity
<PolicyIdentity> -RateMyCallDisplayPercentage 80 -
RateMyCallAllowCustomUserFeedback $true
The feature can be
completely turned off by setting the RateMyCallDisplayPercentage to 0%.
Accessing Rate My Call Data
When the Rate My
Call feature was introduced in Skype for Business Server, there was no interface
added to the in the Skype for Business Monitoring Reports interface (which is still true to this day). There was, however, access added in the Call Quality Dashboard product which often doesn’t get deployed due to the overhead of additional SQL server(s) infrustructure. Technet does offer a couple of SQL query examples for getting the basic data out of the system. However, this is not particularly user friendly, so
I thought I might make a simple Powershell tool for pulling out data and
visualizing it so you can start compiling the user feedback that you may already have stored in your Monitoring database.
Rate My Call Viewer Tool
- Select your required start and end date, rating filter (above or below the selected rating), SIP URI filter, Reason filter, and Voice and/or Video to be listed up. Note: the filters use regex, so for example you could use it to filter for multiple reasons using the OR Operator like this “echo|backgroundnoise”.
- Export all events into CSV format.
- Create graphs (Stars Bar Graph, Stars Pie Graph, Reason Pie Graph, Reason Bar Graph, Type Pie Graph, Stars Stacked Bar Graph, Trend Over Time Line) of your Call Rating data.
- Added the ability to select individual monitoring servers from a drop down box. This was added for large environments that have multiple monitoring databases and only want to retrieve statistics from one at a time. By default, all monitoring database will be queried.
- Added a check for the database version. The tool only works on Skype for Business databases so the check makes sure the database is at least Version 7 (ie. Skype for Business level).
- Added date/time localisation checkbox. By default the monitoring server records time is in GMT. This update adds a checkbox to localise all the date/time values to be in the timezone of the server you are running it on (instead of GMT). This changes the date pickers as well as the date displayed in the list and graphs.
- Added the ability to zoom in on the Trend Over Time chart. You do this by clicking and dragging the mouse on the area of the graph you want to zoom to, scroll bars will appear so you can scroll the zoomed in view.
- Fixed an issue with the SQL query used for Video / Audio. The query now gets all records.
- Fixed issue with data grid view scroll bar refresh.
- Fixed a sorting issue with the Stacked Bar and Trend Over Time Graphs that would cause an issue with the output.
- More accurate graphs! When both video and voice are selected the rating data gets listed twice for each call because video calls contain both voice and video ratings. So in previous versions the star ratings were counted as separate calls which artificially inflated the star rating value given. In this version the double counting of this data has been removed from star rating graphs, with the voice and video star rating given by each user being combined.
Version 1.04 (15/5/2017)
– C2R Update
- Now Supports Skype for Business C2R 2016 client Rate My Call issue items. The C2R 2016 client has an entirely new set of rate my call feedback, so the tool has been updated to include these.
- Re-worked the graphs again to handle new data
- Voice and Video calls don't get listed twice in this version (as it did in the previous version), graph processing was updated from previous version to handle this.
- Get Records processing speed was increased by limiting records by date range in SQL query.
1.05 Update (16/3/2018)
- Total Rows Counter added at the bottom
- "Top 10 One Star Users" graph added. This can be used so you can follow up with these users about their bad experiences.
- "Top 10 Zero Star Users (Lync 2013 Client)" graph added. This can be used to follow up on Lync 2013 client users that are not responding the Rate My Call dialog.
 |
| Old and New Rate My Call dialogs |
I have had to abbreviate these sentences into values that
can be easily displayed in the tool. I believe the abbreviated names are fairly
self-explanatory, however, here’s a list of the names I’ve used:
Type
|
Issue
Sentence
|
Abbreviated
Name
|
Relation
to old values
|
Audio
|
I could no hear any sound
|
NoSpeechNearSide
|
New
|
Audio
|
The other side could not hear any sound
|
NoSpeechFarSide
|
New
|
Audio
|
I heard echo in the call
|
Echo
|
Existed in original
|
Audio
|
I heard noise on the call
|
IHeardNoise
|
New
|
Audio
|
Volume was low
|
VolumeLow
|
New
|
Audio
|
Call ended unexpectedly
|
VoiceCallCutOff
|
New
|
Audio
|
Speech was not natural or sounded distorted
|
DistortedSpeech
|
New
|
Audio
|
We kept interrupting each other
|
TalkingOverEachOther
|
New
|
Video
|
I could not see any video
|
NoVideoNearSide
|
New
|
Video
|
The other side could not see my video
|
NoVideoFarSide
|
New
|
Video
|
Image quality was poor
|
PoorQualityVideo
|
New
|
Video
|
Video Kept Freezing
|
FrozenVideo
|
Existed in original
|
Video
|
Video stopped unexpectedly
|
VideoCallCutOff
|
New
|
Video
|
The other side was too dark
|
DarkVideo
|
Existed in original
|
Video
|
Video was ahead or behind audio
|
VideoAudioOutOfSync
|
New
|
Prerequisites:
- This tool should be run on a machine that has the Skype for Business powershell module installed. This is required because the "Get-CSService" command is used to discover the location of the Montoring Database.
- The user running the tool needs to have sufficient rights to run select queries on the "QoEMetrics" database and SELECT access on the following tables: Session, AudioStream, CallQualityFeedback, CallQualityFeedbackToken, CallQualityFeedbackTokenDef, User, MediaLine
Built-in Graphs
The Stars Bar Graph is
the simpliest way to quickly see the how the users are rating calls on the
system. In general you can ignore 0 star ratings because they these will be
non-rated calls.
The Reason Bar Graph allows
you to easily see trends in the number of each type of issue reported by users.
This can be useful for picking out specific types of problems in your network.
The Reason Pie graph
give you a quick view of which types of issues are most prevalent within your
environment.
The Starts Pie Graph
give you an idea of the how pleased your users are overall with the quality of
calls within the environment.
The Stars Stacked Bar
Graph allows you to differentiate between the ratings of Video and Voice calls
separately from each other. This will allow you to understand if the either of
the modality types is having more issues than the other. This will allow you to
make choices about what to focus your future troubleshooting on.
The Type Pie Chart
gives you an extremely simple depiction whether users are having more issues
with Voice or Video calls within the environment.
The Trend Over Time
Line is useful for tracking over time how the call quality has been changing
within the environment. Note: if you are graphing over a long period of time it
can be useful to maximize the graph window to see more details in the graph.
The “Top 10 One Star Responders” graph will show you the users
that have responded with 1 star the most often. This can be useful to help you find users that are having issues with the system so you can contact them directly to follow up one-to-one to address their problems.
The “Top 10 Zero Star Users
(Lync 2013 Client)” shows the top 10 users that have not being responding to
the Rate My Call dialog box. Some organisations set their feedback dialog
percentage in the system to be 100% in order to get feedback from users during
trials, etc. So this can be useful to find users that aren’t responding with feedback. Note, this only applies to the Lync 2013 client using the Skype for
Business UI. The Skype for Business 2016 client does not log 0 stars anymore when user don't respond. In
fact, when using the 2016 client the user must select a star value between 1-5 in order
to log any feedback in the database.
