Your opinion: How poor does audio quality have to get?

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Call centres seem to have been struggling with poor audio quality.

Noisy contact centres, dodgy headsets and IP telephony seem to be making the problem worse.  How long do we need to go before we take some action?

And it seems to be backed up by some real facts. According to a recent YouGov survey 69% of contact centre agents had experienced hearing issues. While 75% of these agents had experienced problems with customers using mobile phones, more worryingly 59% had problems with a noisy contact centre and 55% had headset or handset issues.

The report also highlighted a number of connection/network problems – particularly with IP enabled contact centres.

The problem gets even worse when dealing with offshore call centres. In addition to the language barrier, many calls are routed overseas through heavily compressed Voice over IP (VoIP systems). These systems have background hiss, poor dynamic range and echo levels that can make conversation difficult at the best of times.

Some of these issues could be relatively easy to solve.

  • Noisy call centres can be improved by adding in a number of noise screens.
  • Hearing problems could be eased by using noise cancelling binaural headsets (headsets that work with both ears).
  • Network problems may be as simple as getting the IT person in to come and tweak the network or exchange carrier.

Why do we put up with such poor speech quality? How much worse does it have to get before we take action?

If you suffer from poor speech quality we’d love to hear from you? Or perhaps you have been able to do something about it? Why not leave a comment in an email to Call Centre Helper

Jonty Pearce, Editor, Call Centre Helper 

Author: Jonty Pearce

Published On: 30th Jul 2008 - Last modified: 11th Sep 2019
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4 Comments

  • We once trialled binaural headsets but found that many agents were not keen on what it did to their hair styles and backed away from them.

    James Portcullis 31 Jul at 07:27

  • I have issues hearing customers a lot, which effects my care scors and ability to provide excellent customer service. I do have a binaural headset and, where I have noticed it does help, I still have a lot of problems hearing the customer.

    Anonymous 31 Jul at 21:02

  • yes I to have had agents under me complaining this type of issue and it really effects the agent and as well the customer and we were able to speak to the relevant department and rectify the issue agents need to keep the relevant people informed and shouldn’t think that this a usual thing

    Andrea John 2 Aug at 10:44

  • A very important point and very relevant at a time when so many businesses seem to see VoIP as a solution to all problems. Yes, using IP can be very powerful in terms of the flexibility that becomes possible.

    However, the decision to use IP to deliver calls seems to often be based on the promise of lower cost structures. This is not necessarily all that straightforward – bandwidth required to achieve the sort of quality normally accepted by customers can be very high. Careful scoping of the network is essential before moving to VoIP, along with thorough load testing.

    Experience has shown me that customers will not tolerate poor call quality for long and the impact on agents can quickly become very demotivating. A painful lesson, but well learnt!

    Jonathan Street 4 Aug at 11:17