The Importance of Intelligibility in Call Centres

 Why should voice quality matter in a call centre?  After all, aren’t the agents just trying to finish your call and get into the next one as quick as possible?  Well, no.  That’s what used to happen, but now things are more sophisticated.  Sure, all the simple interactions are done through IVR or on the web (or Twitter for those at the cutting edge!) but complex transactions need to be done through the phone.  People usually need to be guided through a lengthy interaction, and get the confidence from a human that they are doing the right thing.

 It’s for this reason that intelligibility matters A LOT in call centres. 

So what do I mean by intelligibility?  Simple, it’s the ability of the call centre agent to understand correctly what the end user is saying, and in return, the ability of the end user to understand what the call centre agent is saying.  So why should this be difficult?  Well, there are a number of trends within call centres and communication in general that contribute to poorer intelligibility.

 Deregulation of Telecommunications

The old model of a single national Postal, Telegraph and Telephone (PTT) service responsible for all voice communications with a country has been replaced with a generally privatised service with multiple networks.  The end result is that a call can go across multiple networks to reach its destination, and there is no single body responsible for managing end to end quality for calls.  Given that each of those networks can have different a set-up, its no wonder the quality of calls can be variable.

 Wide Increase in End User Devices

Customers have moved away from calling you on that reliable corded phone that they rented from the PTT.  Now they want to call you from their office phone, their mobile phone (and yes, whilst they’re standing in a busy street), their free PC based softphone (Skype or similar) or their cordless phone. Each of these devices has different levels of audio quality that present different challenges to the call centre agent.  From the office phone, the end-user may talk quietlty to ensure co-workers do not overhear them.  From the mobile, the end-user may shout, or be obscured in background noise.  The embedded microphone and speakers on many PCs will be poor quality giving rise to echo and interference on PC based softphones.  And that cordless phone?  Well they’re probably using it whilst cooking, when holding the kids. 

 Changes to Call Centre Working

Like most ‘jobs’, call centre work is moving away from a place where you work, to a role that you carry out.  This means the call centre agent can be located in an efficiently controlled headquarters, a remote office, or even at home.  This means, for an end user calling in, they may experience different level of background noise – very little in the headquarters, background chatter in the remote office, and through to radio, TV, or even street noise from a home agent.

 The end result of all the above points is varying volume levels, noise, and poor audio quality all contributing to a conversation that is difficult for both sides to understand.

 Now that we know why poor intelligibility can occur, why is it important?  The most compelling reason is customer trust.  A large percentage of your organisations contact with customers is through your call centre so getting that relationship right is critical.  If customers have to constantly repeat themselves because the agent can’t hear them, or if they can’t hear the agent over the background noise in the call centre they are likely to initially get frustrated at the delays, and then they will lose trust in your ability to deliver the right service or product – after all, if you can’t get the initial interaction right, then it doesn’t look good for an ongoing relationship.

 A second reason is your time as a call centre.  Start adding up all those times when your agents say “pardon?” or “Please can you repeat that?”.  Even if it ‘only’ averages out as one second per call per day, then think about how that adds up over the course of a year?  Think of what you could do by removing all those repetitions – reduce the number of agents and keep the same level of service?  How about keep the same number of agents and motivate them to up-sell or cross-sell with that additional time.   

 The final reason is your reputation as a call centre manager.  You are probably measured on statistics such as ‘First Call Resolution’ now, so if your agents aren’t able to hear basic details from end-users, such as postcode, street number or email address then these aren’t likely to be entered in your system correctly meaning that deliveries will go to the wrong address, services won’t get enabled etc.  All this leads to customers calling you back, or you calling them back to fix the problem – not good for your first call resolution statistics!

 So what can you do about it?  How do you go about increasing intelligibility in your call centre?  Let’s start with your headsets.  I’ll split headsets into two categories – voice tube and noise cancelling.  If you have the voice tube models, there are a couple of simple steps you can take to improve intelligibility – first, make sure the voice tube is there, second make sure its pointing to the agents mouth, and finally make sure its not blocked.  If you are using noise cancelling headsets, then the key thing s to make sure the microphone is close to the agent’s mouth.  These simple steps will make sure that your agents voice is clearly heard above the background noise. 

 Next step is to review the capabilities of an audio processor.  These devices serve multiple functions, but their main benefit is to improve audio quality.  They do this through three key functions.  One, maintain a constant volume level in the agents headset.  With all those networks and end-user devices, it’s no wonder that calls into your call centre come in at so many different volume levels.  Your agents probably spend a lot of time turning up the phone for one call and then down for the next.   With an audio processor, they just choose the level they want to hear at, and the audio processor does the rest – keeping a constant volume in their headset.  This has the great benefit of making sure that the first part of any call is always at the right level – the agent doesn’t miss any information due to the customer being too quiet or too loud.  This will provide you

 Two, change the frequency response to add more high frequency emphasis.  In traditional telephony, the further the phone from the switch, the greater the loss of high frequency signals, mobile phones and cordless phones also deteriorate high frequency signals. High frequency loss limits intelligibility, especially with fricatives (Fricatives are consonants in which most of the speech energy is at the higher frequencies. There are hard fricatives (plosives), e.g,. the sounds of T, P, B, and soft fricatives, e.g., the sounds of S, F, Z, V), and makes the audio sound muffled. The agent listening is prone to repetitions and data input errors, decreasing customer satisfaction and aggravating the agent. A good headset and audio processor will have a frequency response curve that compensates for the losses by boosting the signal.

 Three, reduce in background noise.  The final function of the audio processor is to act as an intelligent switch.  If the call centre agent is not speaking, the audio processor turns off all communication ‘out’ to the phone.  This lowers the noise level heard by the end user considerably ensuring both improved audio quality and increased privacy (the end user can not hear other conversations in the call centre).  This feature also works the other way – if the end-user is not speaking, the audio processor drops all the communications to the headset lowering the noise level heard by the call centre agent and reducing fatigue. If either side starts talking again, the audio processor switches on instantly and resumes normal operation.

When all of the features of an audio processor come together, the net effect is an improvement in audio quality than enables you to drive a significant reduction in call times due to reduction of repetitions and simple miss-heard mistakes.  This will also give you an improvement in customer service through improved trust and confidence that customers will have in your agents.

 For more information and to arrange a trial of an headset or audio processor to see what it can do for you, please contact us.