Video conferencing and screen sharing are two essential tools that often make or break modern work productivity. Our customer Daily.co is a Y Combinator backed startup that makes fast, easy video calls – both a free browser product and a hardware upgrade – that integrate smoothly into geographically distributed teams’ workflows.

A WebRTC product since its start, Daily.co has been using callstats.io since early 2017 and now relies on the callstats.io platform for all of its quality monitoring.

“The callstats.io team has deep technical knowledge about media streaming and WebRTC, and they have combined that domain knowledge with very good data capture and visualization. This combination is unique and extremely useful.” – says Kwindla Hultman Kramer, CEO

A remote team for remote teams

Daily.co is founded by Unified Communications pioneers and serial entrepreneurs Kwindla Hultman Kramer (Kwin), formerly the CEO of Oblong Industries and Nina Kuruvilla. Kwin, who leads Daily.co development, has been tinkering with WebRTC since its early days in 2014.

At the same time, Daily.co’s founders observed shifts in modern working habits, most of all the trend in remote working. This meant that many workplaces and teams of all sizes began to adopt technology that previously was only available to large companies. In many offices, office managers, for example, could be in charge of communication processes, including office videoconferencing systems. The Daily.co team thus saw that a market existed for conferencing hardware that was simple to use and hassle-free.

The Daily.co communication system, consisting of a combination of conferencing hardware and browser based software tools, has become popular amongst different kinds of distributed teams, from web development and design agencies to more traditional industries like real estate and construction. A growing number of users are outside the US.

A graphical take on conference logs

Fittingly, Daily.co is also a distributed team with loose headquarters in San Francisco. Its WebRTC team is comprised of three engineers and one customer support professional. As the team is small, Daily.co efficiently uses a lot of 3rd party tools to scale their service.

The team initially began to develop their own conference data monitoring tools and logging systems. In early 2017, upon hearing about callstats.io, Daily.co signed up for a trial account and began to explore the interface. Besides getting a fuller, more graphical picture of Daily.co’s call analytics, the callstats.io product also helped the team to prioritize their monitoring needs.

Reassured by the callstats.io team’s long experience in building video products, Daily.co quickly switched over to callstats.io and now completely rely on callstats.io for media quality and service usage monitoring.

“We initially developed our own dashboards for monitoring Daily.co video call quality. When we tried callstats.io, though, it was immediately clear that we could provide better customer support and save engineering time by using callstat.io’s libraries and dashbords.”, – tells Kwin

Maintaining their own WebRTC data analytics took up a significant amount of engineering time for Daily.co’s small team.

“Now that we are able to use callstats.io for this critical part of our work, we can focus more of our engineering time on building customer-facing product features. This saves us money and lets us develop Daily.co faster!” – continued Kwin

Callstats.io as a part of technical support

Jami Morton, Director of Operations who runs customer relations at Daily.co, is the team’s callstats.io power user, who logs into the dashboard daily for troubleshooting customer issues and tracking service level trends.

For Jami, callstats.io is a central part of technical support operations, helping her identify issues in clients’ call quality. In a typical support scenario, upon receiving an issue ticket, Jami would ask for the meeting ID and then check callstats.io for any unusual errors, such as bandwidth issues.

Investigating individual conference issues

A typical scenario would look as follows: On receiving a customer complaint, for example a notification that a customer can’t connect to a conference, Jami will request the box ID number and search for it on the callstats.io dashboard. On the individual conference level page, she typically checks the Automatic Diagnostics window to see if any major issues immediately pop up. If she’s not able to read the situation from Automatic Diagnostics alone, Jami would further investigate user presence graphs and conference graphs.

Depending on the complexity of the issue, Jami gives feedback directly to the customer or refers the case forward to Daily.co’s engineering team. The engineering team will check if there is an issue with e.g. the hardware and Jami will provide feedback to the customer based on this.

“Callstats.io has resolved a core monitoring challenge for us and has been a genuinely useful service. Being able to provide customer support in real time contributes to a great customer UX.” – Says Jami Morton, Director of Operations

A clear picture of service performance over time

In addition to understanding individual client issues, Jami uses callstats.io to understand aggregated product analytics and performance and creates reports out of that data. On a weekly level, Jami would review specific stats for e.g. total number of conferences, total duration and fraction of calls that experience churn and keep regular track of errors in e.g SDP, TURN and ICE relays. Being able to deep dive into usage and tracking occurrences, and, for example, identify bugs, helps create a better story for development to follow.