Poor voice quality increases average handle time by up to 27%, lowers CSAT/NPS scores, causes misrouted calls, and can cost large contact centers over $6 million annually in lost labor.
Voice quality refers to the clarity, consistency, and reliability of audio during calls, measured by factors like jitter, packet loss, and volume levels. In large contact centers, as many as 30% of all calls can have voice quality issues. That figure was from a study before COVID-19 and the fast, forced mass transition of agents moving to at-home operations. The numbers are likely even higher now.
Key statistics
- 30% of calls in large contact centers experience voice quality issues (pre-COVID study)
- 27% increase in average handle time (AHT) due to poor voice quality (McIntosh Associates research)
- 800+ hours of agent time lost daily in a 200,000-call contact center
- $6 million+ in annual lost labor costs for large contact centers
Voice quality impact on customer satisfaction
Poor voice quality significantly impacts the metrics used to measure contact center success and, ultimately, your bottom line. Those issues can start even before your callers reach an agent. Poor voice quality in the IVR can cause issues with speech recognition, frustrating callers and causing them to drop out of the IVR and request a live person. When that happens, the caller often ends up getting routed to the wrong group of agents, which necessitates another transfer.
In survey after survey, customers indicate that poor voice quality negatively impacts how they view their calling experience. That negative impact can show up in lower CSAT or NPS scores. If the voice quality on a particular call is bad enough, it could result in the caller hanging up and dialing back in. When it takes multiple calls into your contact center to resolve a single issue, there goes your CX budget and reputation.
Business impacts of poor voice quality
- Increased average handle time (AHT)
- Lower CSAT and NPS scores
- Higher repeat call rates
- IVR speech recognition failures
- Misrouted calls requiring transfers
- Increased agent labor costs
Calculating the cost of poor voice quality
Studies have shown that poor voice quality increases average handle time (AHT) for calls. Research conducted by McIntosh Associates found that poor voice quality caused a 27% average AHT increase of calls into the contact center. Their study correlated those increases in talk time to a significant negative impact on NPS scores from those callers.
Let’s look at some math to put all these numbers in context. If your contact center receives 200,000 calls per day and 30% experience voice quality issues, and poor voice quality causes a 27% increase in AHT, then even conservatively, those issues could cost you over 800 hours in agent time per day. Using a fully costed agent rate of $35 per hour, poor voice quality could be costing you $28,000 per day, and more than $6,000,000 in lost labor every year.
Poor voice quality could be costing you $28,000 per day, and more than $6,000,000 in lost labor every year.
Those numbers represent just the agent labor costs and don’t even take into account repeat callers or the financial impacts on CSAT and NPS scores.
Voice quality issues in remote agent environments
The momentum toward moving to cloud-based contact centers, accelerated by the pandemic, has put the spotlight on this issue and intensified the wattage.
Before, when you managed your contact center infrastructure yourself, you had developed the skills and tools needed to address any problem that occurred. Now, if you have moved your contact center operations to the cloud, you must hand over the control of voice quality and other issues to a third party. This raises questions about response times and accountability.
Common voice quality issues to monitor
- Jitter – Variation in packet arrival times causing choppy or distorted audio
- Packet loss – Missing data packets resulting in gaps or missing words in conversations
- Dropped calls – Complete disconnection of calls before resolution
- Volume issues – Audio that is too quiet, too loud, or inconsistent
- Codec incompatibility – Mismatched audio encoding causing quality degradation
- Bandwidth constraints – Insufficient network capacity affecting call clarity
How to solve voice quality issues
There is a myriad of contributing factors that can cause bad voice quality, so there is no single solution. The key to minimizing the budget and business impact is to follow these steps:
- Test from both perspectives – Evaluate voice quality from both the caller’s and agent’s viewpoints before deployment.
- Monitor continuously – Track agent-to-customer interactions in real-time to detect jitter, packet loss, dropped calls, volume issues, and bad connections.
- Capture comprehensive data – Measure headset, mic, CPU and memory, browser configuration, jitter, packet loss, and voice quality metrics.
- Enable rapid troubleshooting – Share aggregated data with agents, supervisors, and IT teams automatically.
- Conduct root-cause analysis – Use call data to determine the source of problems and resolve them quickly.
At Cyara, we can help you test your contact center’s voice quality from both the caller’s and agent’s perspectives. Cyara has the solutions and the expertise to help you test customer journeys built within your contact center platform before you put them into production. Then, once live, Cyara will continually monitor those systems. And, for real-time, live call data, Cyara offers you a solution that provides visibility of remote-based agent environments, measuring things like headset, mic, CPU and memory, browser configuration, jitter, packet loss, and voice quality. With this data automatically captured, aggregated, and shared with agents, contact center supervisors / managers, and the IT teams that support your contact center, Cyara facilitates faster root-cause analysis and drastically reduces troubleshooting and mean-time-to-repair so you can improve agent productivity, lower IT effort, and improve the quality of your customer experiences.
Frequently Asked Questions
Poor voice quality is caused by technical issues including jitter, packet loss, bandwidth constraints, codec incompatibility, and equipment problems with headsets or microphones, particularly in remote agent environments.
For a large contact center handling 200,000 calls daily, poor voice quality can cost over $28,000 per day and more than $6 million annually in lost agent labor alone.
Contact centers can monitor voice quality through continuous real-time monitoring solutions that track metrics like jitter, packet loss, volume levels, and connection stability from both caller and agent perspectives.
Studies show that as many as 30% of all calls in large contact centers can experience voice quality issues, a figure that predates the widespread shift to remote agent operations during COVID-19.
Poor voice quality can increase average handle time (AHT) by 27%, according to research by McIntosh Associates. For a contact center handling 200,000 calls per day, this can translate to over $28,000 in lost agent labor daily and more than $6,000,000 per year.
Poor voice quality can negatively affect CSAT scores, NPS scores, and AHT, and can also drive up repeat call volume when customers hang up and dial back in to resolve their issue.
Yes, poor voice quality in the IVR can cause speech recognition errors, frustrate callers, and lead to misrouting or unnecessary transfers, all of which hurt the customer experience before an agent is ever involved.
When contact center infrastructure moves to the cloud, control over voice quality is handed to a third party, which can slow down issue resolution and make root-cause analysis more difficult compared to managing infrastructure in-house.
Key issues to monitor include jitter, packet loss, dropped calls, volume problems, and bad connections, as well as agent-side factors like headset and microphone performance, CPU and memory usage, and browser configuration.
Continuous monitoring of agent-to-customer interactions is the most effective strategy, since there is no single cause of poor voice quality. Proactive monitoring allows teams to identify and troubleshoot issues quickly, reducing mean time to repair and protecting the customer experience.
Read more about: Active monitoring, Agent experience (AX), Call centers, Contact center, CX assurance, CX monitoring, Net Promoter Score (NPS), Passive Monitoring, Voice, Voice Quality
