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

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