Yet behind the green lights of monitoring dashboards and healthy server metrics lies a troubling reality: enterprise communications infrastructure regularly fails customers in ways that traditional observability simply cannot detect.
That’s because these issues often aren’t widespread system failures, but problems affecting individual customer experiences. For instance, if an IVR is not registering a customer’s input, preventing proper routing, this can go undetected for quite some time. Yet, such situations can have disastrous effects.
A Zendesk 2025 study found that more than half of consumers will switch to a competitor after only one bad experience.
Sam Melvin, Co-Founder of Voxology, frames the urgency: “If you care about your customer experience over digital channels, the idea that you don’t have end-to-end cx testing is crazy.”
HeartBeat, an extension of Voxology’s cx testing suite, which includes StressTest, is a system that detects problems which internal monitoring misses. To understand why this goes beyond traditional observability, it’s important to examine the fundamental limitations of current communications monitoring.
Understanding the Customer Experience Gap in Communications Monitoring
Traditional observability systems are often the backbone of company monitoring strategies. However, Melvin believes misconceptions around their capabilities, coupled with migration to the cloud, have created false security.
“One myth is that moving to the cloud means you won’t have scaling issues. The second is that traditional observability tools are all you need,” Melvin says.
These systems’ monitoring is limited to internal metrics rather than simulating real user interactions. They rely on telemetry data—server logs, performance counters, network statistics—to assess system status, observing how components function individually but not generating synthetic transactions that mimic actual customer journeys.
They lack the visibility to place calls outside their network, navigate into calls outside their network. This then stops them from navigating IVR menus, verifying audio quality, or confirming that touch-tone inputs and speech recognition work as intended.
Without external, end-to-end tests traversing the entire customer path—from dialing to completing the call flow—these systems miss degradations that only manifest in real user scenarios. Critical customer-facing issues like unexpected hang-ups, misrouted calls, faulty IVR prompts, or regional carrier problems can go entirely unnoticed despite healthy internal metrics.
“Many organizations assume that if their systems show as healthy, customers are having a good experience,” Melvin said. “Without testing from the outside in, you miss critical failures that only appear in real user interactions. That gap can create churn and lost revenue before anyone knows there’s a problem.”
Traditional observability would eventually show drop-off rates on a widespread issue. By then, you could have thousands of unhappy customers, and employees.
This monitoring gap becomes particularly problematic during low-traffic periods or following infrastructure changes. During off-hours, when volume is minimal, traditional monitoring may miss problems that will eventually impact customers when business resumes. After system updates, internal metrics may indicate successful deployment while customer-facing functionality degrades undetectably.
HeartBeat: Bridging the Customer Experience Monitoring Gap
Voxology’s HeartBeat solution tackles traditional observability shortcomings by continuously validating real-world communications performance. While traditional systems focus on internal infrastructure metrics, HeartBeat places actual phone calls to enterprise customer service numbers, simulating the full customer journey in real time.
“HeartBeat places single calls every so often—whether every 5, 15, or 60 minutes—and confirms that your customer experience is performing as expected,” Melvin explains. “It’s not enough for the system to be ‘up’; customers need to navigate menus, hear correct audio, look up account information, and complete calls successfully.”
This end-to-end testing covers every customer interaction step: calls from outside the enterprise network, navigating IVR prompts, verifying speech recognition, checking audio quality, reaching agents, and confirming completion without unexpected disconnections. As a result, problems due to carrier routing, codec incompatibilities, or inbound service errors are detected quickly.
HeartBeat works in tandem with stress testing by ensuring daily operational reliability alongside load resilience. “StressTest is like HeartBeat all at once—thousands of calls flooding your system to verify your performance, specifically under load. HeartBeat is a single call on regular cadence, ensuring you’re consistently running as expected,” Melvin clarifies.
Together, they provide fuller system health pictures, catching immediate failures and validating capacity under pressure.
Each test call is recorded which equips troubleshooting teams with the exact audio and interactions from all test calls. This recording capability, paired with automated alerts, and descriptive errors, brings context to failures, enabling rapid diagnosis and resolution—contrasting sharply with raw telemetry requiring interpretation.
Equally, simple deployment means HeartBeat installation doesn’t hinder adoption. “We just need your public endpoint, your phone number. No need to install anything on-premise or give us access sensitive data. You can have continuous monitoring running within minutes,” Melvin notes.
This low operational overhead means enterprises quickly gain customer experience visibility, reducing time to value and accelerating problem detection.
Making Proactive Customer Experience Monitoring Essential
Traditional observability limitations create critical gaps between infrastructure health and actual customer experience. Enterprises relying solely on observability risk revenue loss, customer churn, and operational inefficiencies.
Proactive monitoring solutions like HeartBeat transform how companies manage customer interactions by providing real-time visibility into communication system performance.
By bridging gaps with end-to-end cx testing, businesses detect problems early, deploy updates confidently, and maintain seamless service during peak loads or low-traffic periods.
Customer experience monitoring isn’t just an operational necessity but a strategic advantage, ensuring companies meet rising expectations by consistently delivering on them.
