Key takeaways
- Phone calls remain the most-used customer service channel, with over 50% of consumers preferring voice for support inquiries.
- Poor call quality or missed connections can cost large contact centers nearly $500,000 per hour in lost revenue and productivity.
- 67% of customers leave companies due to poor service, and 80% will switch to competitors after just one negative experience.
- Number monitoring helps identify call quality issues before they impact customers, reducing costly vendor escalations.
- End-to-end proactive monitoring replicates the actual customer call experience to validate optimal quality across all network segments.
Customer service has evolved significantly over the past few decades and will continue to do so. Technological advancements have transformed the way contact centers operate, while consumer expectations have also dramatically increased. Today, customers anticipate an omnichannel experience, where they can choose their preferred channel and engage at their convenience. They also want to be able to seamlessly transition between different platforms when it suits them.
Learn why businesses trust Cyara to improve their CX with automated, real-time monitoring solutions.
Phone calls remain the most-used customer service channel because they deliver immediate, personalized responses that customers expect for complex or high-value issues. Poor call quality or missed connections can cost organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour while driving customers to competitors.
Meeting customer expectations means offering phone service that operates 24/7. It’s also essential to have multiple communication channels available. These may include in-store representatives, phone calls, social media, email, messaging, live chat, and real-time video calls.
Continued importance of phone calls
Personal phone calls have become much less common in today’s world, often replaced by messages or social media interactions. Yet, for customer service, phone calls remain indispensable and their importance should not be underestimated.
Key statistics on customer phone call preferences:
- Over 50% of consumers across all age groups typically opt for phone calls to contact customer service, making it the single most-used channel.
- 75% of customers believe calling is the best way to receive a prompt response.
- 80% of individuals are more inclined to buy from organizations that provide personalized services.
- 63% of consumers expect businesses to anticipate their unique needs before they make contact, rising to 76% for business buyers.
These statistics are further amplified when it comes to high-value decisions or issues which may be complex to resolve. This is because customers generally want instantaneous responses or clear, unambiguous answers from a human agent.
Hence, it’s vital to emphasize the importance of ensuring agents are making your callers feel valued and understood. During a phone conversation, agents can dedicate their full attention to the matter at hand. In comparison, agents who handle email or live chat requests may be juggling multiple interactions simultaneously. Unfortunately, this need for multitasking may lead to a reduction in the attention and thoroughness that agents can provide.
Missed phone calls and voice quality issues
What if a customer attempts to contact your organization but can’t connect?
Missing a call from a customer or prospect can have significant consequences. First, there are the missed business opportunities. Research conducted in the United Kingdom indicates that, on average, 45% of all inbound calls lead to new inquiries. In the UK alone, this results in $393 billion worth of new revenue.
Additionally, an unconnected call may result in missed opportunities to establish, or even strengthen, existing customer relationships. Research by Ujet suggests that a one-hour outage at a large contact center could result in lost revenue of $375,000 and $45,000 in lost productivity. This means that in just a single hour of downtime, a contact center could face a loss of almost half a million dollars and that’s only the direct costs!
When a call successfully reaches your organization, the audio quality provided on your line is also critical. Poor voice quality can significantly impact the rapport between the caller and your agent, leading to a diminished customer experience and potentially substantial loss in opportunities and resultant revenues.
Common call quality issues and their impact on customer experience:
- Latency – Delay between when words are spoken and heard, causing speakers to talk over each other
- Jitter – Irregular packet delivery that creates choppy, broken audio
- Echo – Sound reflecting back to the speaker, making conversation difficult to follow
- Background noise – Unwanted sounds that obscure the conversation
- Time lags – Significant delays that disrupt natural conversation flow
All of these factors contribute to frustrations for both your agents and callers. Consequently, negative word of mouth is likely to spread as customers voice their dissatisfaction. This will further erode your brand reputation and damage existing trust.
In contrast, prioritizing proactive measures to verify your customers have a smooth, high-quality interaction with minimal waiting times can significantly enhance loyalty and affinity towards your brand. However, ignoring this aspect may effectively lead your consumers into the hands of competitors.
The cost of customer churn
According to CustomerThink, 67% of customers cite poor customer service as their reason for leaving a company. Additionally, the Zendesk CX Trends Report (2020) details that after just one negative experience, 4 out of 5 consumers would prefer to do business with an organization’s competitor.
This is particularly concerning given that research by Invesp suggests the cost of acquiring a new customer is six times higher than retaining existing ones. Therefore, it’s imperative your team remains highly focused on ensuring the best possible experiences. This focus ensures customer loyalty and also encourages repeat business.
The value of number monitoring
Number monitoring is the practice of continuously testing and verifying that your phone numbers are reachable, connected, and delivering optimal audio quality to callers.
Many customer-centric organizations invest in monitoring their internal telecommunication infrastructure. For external networks, they have stringent service level agreements (SLAs) with providers to ensure high-performing lines. However, reliance on such agreements could leave businesses, like yours, blind to occurrences external to your own network.
Calls often traverse multiple destinations and providers before reaching their end destination. If audio quality deteriorates at any point along this path, the poor quality will persist along the entire route. Ultimately, this will then be experienced by your callers. And, in some cases, your providers may even downgrade services without notifying you, further complicating matters.
By implementing number monitoring, you can ensure that your phone numbers function effectively and deliver optimal quality to customers. This also enables your team to reduce the number of ticket escalations they need to submit to vendors and providers. Such escalations can often be very costly and time-consuming. And unfortunately, sometimes by the time your vendor has the resources available to investigate the issue, it’s already too late.
End-to-end, proactive phone call monitoring
End-to-end phone call monitoring refers to testing the complete call journey from the customer’s perspective, from the moment they dial through to call completion, across all network segments and providers.
The Cyara Agentic Platform provides you with an end-to-end overview of your network. It replicates the call experience of your global customers, to provide a thorough understanding of precisely what they encounter when they ring. Furthermore, we record each test call, document call detail records (CDRs), and provide analytics for comprehensive record-keeping. These insights facilitate your team to make more prompt decisions and take corrective actions. This is instrumental in preventing any negative impacts on your customers.
Cyara provides you with end-to-end global testing capabilities that aren’t available anywhere else. This means you can truly and objectively understand call quality from your customer’s point of view. And our unmatched global testing coverage allows you to test what you want, where you want.
Cyara’s automated and proactive telecommunications monitoring offers unrivaled visibility. It verifies failures and conducts automated follow-up testing to ensure your team receives timely alerts when problems arise. Additionally, we have invested heavily in ensuring that our platform can easily integrate with your existing telecoms infrastructure via a range of application programming interfaces (APIs). This means that all results are immediately available to your team in the way that is most convenient for them.
All of this confirms that your numbers are connected and provide the best possible audio experience for your callers. Thereby helping to secure your hard-earned brand reputation, revenue, and most importantly, customer experience.
Frequently Asked Questions
Poor call quality can result in significant financial losses. A one-hour outage at a large contact center can cost $375,000 in lost revenue and $45,000 in lost productivity. Additionally, 67% of customers cite poor service as their reason for leaving a company, and acquiring new customers costs six times more than retaining existing ones.
Common causes include latency (delays between speaking and hearing), jitter (irregular packet delivery causing choppy audio), echo (sound reflecting back to speakers), excessive background noise, and time lags. These issues often occur as calls traverse multiple network providers before reaching their destination.
Number monitoring continuously tests phone numbers to verify they are reachable and delivering optimal audio quality. This proactive approach identifies issues before customers experience them, reduces costly vendor escalations, and verifies callers receive consistent, high-quality connections that build trust and loyalty.
Over 50% of consumers across all age groups prefer phone calls when contacting customer service, making it the single most-used support channel. Customers also value the personal attention a phone call provides, especially for complex or high-value issues.
A missed call can mean lost revenue, damaged relationships, and missed opportunities to build customer loyalty. Research suggests a one-hour contact center outage can result in nearly half a million dollars in direct losses alone.
Issues like latency, jitter, background noise, or echo can damage the rapport between callers and agents, leading to frustration and a diminished experience. This can result in negative word of mouth, reduced brand trust, and lost business.
Number monitoring confirms your phone numbers are functioning correctly and delivering optimal audio quality to customers. It helps your team catch issues proactively, reducing costly and time-consuming ticket escalations to vendors and providers.
Calls often travel through multiple destinations and providers before reaching their destination, and quality can degrade at any point along that path. Providers may also downgrade services without notification, leaving gaps that SLAs alone cannot address.
The Cyara Agentic Platform replicates the call experience of global customers to provide an objective view of exactly what callers encounter. It records test calls, documents call detail records, and delivers analytics to support faster, more informed decisions.
67% of customers cite poor customer service as their reason for leaving a company, and 4 out of 5 consumers will switch to a competitor after just one negative experience. Retaining existing customers is also six times less costly than acquiring new ones, making service quality a direct business priority.
