Imagine being a frequent flier with an airline, yet encountering poor audio quality when calling their premium club line. Whether you’re on a business trip or require a last-minute flight change, inferior audio quality can cause problems with your conversations.
Learn how Cyara’s automated call testing solutions can help you proactively identify and resolve CX issues ahead of customer impact.
Similarly, picture yourself on vacation, suspecting your credit card has been cloned. In a state of panic, you dial the number on the back of the card, only to struggle with a connection so poor that you find yourself shouting your card details into the phone in a public place.
The Impact of Poor Audio
How would this affect your customer experience? And how does poor audio quality impact your contact center operations and staff? Let’s dive in!
Customer Experience
Getting the basics right is crucial. There are numerous tactics for improving customer experience (CX). High quality CX leads to better customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, net promoter scores (NPS), and reduces your customer effort scores (CES). Essentially, your contact numbers must consistently connect callers to agents. And once connected, the quality of the phone line should allow for clear conversations and effective issue resolution.
Poor quality audio will have a negative impact on your customers’ experience. For example, the phoning frequent flier will feel very frustrated before their call even concludes. Regardless of the quality of their eventual flight experience, the subpar phone call experience before it will have already tainted their perception.
Agent Experience
Just as customers suffer due to poor audio quality, agents face challenges too. Spending a full shift engaging in various conversations can be exhausting. And no matter how much money you invest in call center acoustics or noise-canceling headsets, if incoming call audio is poor, agents’ jobs become unnecessarily difficult. This leads to human errors, decreased morale, heightened stress, and greater turnover.
If you’re concerned about your agents’ experience and are monitoring your employee net promoter score (ENPS), one of the most effective changes you can implement is ensuring that your phone lines offer excellent quality.
Reliability of Technology
Newer technologies such as speech recognition or voice biometrics can offer valuable efficiencies and cost savings through reducing call times. They also provide a more streamlined experience for your customers. However, just as good audio quality is essential for customer and agent experiences, it’s equally crucial so these new technologies can function correctly.
Investing heavily in speech recognition or voice biometrics software is futile if the incoming audio is of a poor quality. This is because it prevents the accurate interpretation of what is being said. Therefore, prioritizing high-quality audio is essential for the successful implementation and operation of these advanced technologies.
Call Handling and First Call Resolution
If your customers and agents are struggling to communicate because of poor audio quality, resolving a call inevitably takes longer. Consequently, both parties become even more time-constrained and often end up frustrated with their experiences.
For inbound calls, the worst-case scenario occurs when customers must repeatedly call your contact center. This not only undermines the customer experience but also decreases your first call resolution rate and increases resolution times—critical productivity and efficiency metrics that warrant meticulous measurement.
If your agents engage in outbound calls, for sales, marketing, or call-back requests, poor audio quality will likewise negatively affect your customer experiences. This, in turn, adversely affects average call times, with notable implications for your bottom line.
In contact centers, even minor enhancements such as saving a few seconds per call, improving first call resolution rates, or reducing post-dial delay on outbound calls can yield substantial cost savings for your organization.
Preventing Audio Quality Issues
Our number testing solutions enable you to easily assess your global contact numbers through our worldwide in-country points of presence. Utilizing the internationally-recognized Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) standard, we meticulously measure and calculate your audio quality performance. PESQ takes into account parameters like variable delays, noise on the line, and audio clipping.
You can easily, automatically, and proactively test your contact numbers through our enhanced global in-country dialing (GICD). This ensures a reliable and impartial evaluation of your audio performance across the globe. In turn, this helps to ensure a positive experience for your customers and agents and enhanced operational efficiencies. Likewise, it leads to greater cost savings and an improved bottom line.
