Education First (EF) is a global education company offering study abroad, language learning, cultural exchange and academic programs around the world. Founded in Sweden in 1965, EF has since provided millions of young people with their first international encounters.

Language teacher in real time video 24/7

The online classroom product EF Classroom brings together has over 20 million learners worldwide to participate in online English language learning. The courses are taught by certified English teachers available on a 24-hour rotation around the world.

© EF Classroom, 2017

As such, real time communication is a critical component of the service and EF has been an industry pioneer in embracing WebRTC. EF’s core WebRTC team successfully released the RTC based online virtual classroom in 2016. Integrated to EF’s internal customer support processes, callstats.io supports the language learning giant’s 24-hour real time video school.

We talked to EF about the process of adopting WebRTC and how callstats.io helps in decision making. Read how callstats.io has helped them on their WebRTC journey.

Building a new version with WebRTC

EF’s start with WebRTC began a few years ago when they started to build a new version of the popular product, EF Classroom, which was to be WebRTC powered from the start. Performance monitoring was seen as a central component of this process and the team began to search for solutions to support that early on.

EF Classroom caters for a global market, thus EF’s biggest challenge was to optimize the global infrastructure and maximize the performance of their real-time communications application.

EF Classroom team knew what they were looking for in performance monitoring and wanted a solution that would:

• Monitor and analyze the application in production and once it was rolled out

• Look at the data from individual conferences

• Work soundly in China, as EF’s core WebRTC team and a part of the infrastructure are located in China

Callstats.io integration was quick and easy

After an extensive research into different options for WebRTC monitoring, the EF team decided to give callstats.io a try. The simplicity of the integration was a critical reason to start using callstats.io. The integration took just a few hours from start to finish. EF also considered using the WebRTC Statistics API but preferred a 3rd party product, so that the core team was able to concentrate on building their own application.

In the callstats.io dashboard, each conference has its own URL. As a part of the integration, EF decided to save the URLs for each conference to their internal system. If a customer sends a ticket regarding their session, it is easy to click the conference link and review the conference metrics in callstats.io to check if metrics confirm what the customer is explaining.

As the EF WebRTC team notes, WebRTC was a new technology for EF at the time. Having a monitoring solution in place already for the development and testing of their WebRTC version was useful, as it provided real and actionable data that could be shared widely in the organization to prove that the approach was working.

The WebRTC based service met with a high customer satisfaction

EF’s WebRTC team’s data-driven approach and selection of an appropriate tool mix has paid off: customer satisfaction is on a high level.

After the initial setup and testing period, the WebRTC powered version of EF Classroom has consistently had high customer satisfaction. The WebRTC team at EF has used callstats.io to correlate monitoring data from callstats.io, which lead the EF WebRTC team to more insights to understand whether a case is caused by client side device, network setup issue, or server side latency.

Using callstats.io analytics product has helped EF to focus on the correct fixes that improve quality, both on user interface and infrastructure levels.

EF’s WebRTC team highlighted their favorite callstats.io features

1. Information presentation. Together with EF internal tracking infrastructure, the callstats.io dashboard helps the EF team to make decisions and to drill deeper into specific issues.

2. Reduction of guesswork. Being able to link to every unique conference directly as well as the automatic diagnosis of the conference in plain English has made it easy for the team to see what and where a particular problem is.

“For EF, the callstats.io product has offered a stable quality, which makes it easy to trust the results.” Chris Chen, VP Technology, EF Labs

“We have never expected it’s an easy journey to adopt WebRTC into our core product line, but callstats has made our progress easier measured.” Daniel Wallmark, CTO, EF Labs