The Value of Excellent Audio Quality in the Contact Centre

Josh O’Farrell of Spearline investigates why excellent audio quality is essential for contact centres.

Poor audio quality is something that will forever be overlooked by businesses as a threat to the company. One may think a poor phone call may be a harmless everyday problem but in reality, terrible audio quality can seriously impact customer relationships with your agents and cause a massive loss in revenue for businesses.

Following that, the bad word of mouth is then generated by your frustrated agents and dissatisfied customers, further ruining your brand reputation and causing potential customers to actually AVOID your business. This is why having excellent audio quality is vital for your contact centres.

1. Reduce Customer Churn

Poor audio quality being placed into an excellent network will still result in a poor audio experience for a customer. Constant frustration

To know for sure what your customer is actually experiencing when they dial their local contact number, you need to test your numbers from outside your network. The only way to truly do this is by placing a test call from that country into the local number.

This will allow you to check that the call connects and, through recording the call, reveal some objective measures like audio quality and latency.

Most businesses may not realize that customers are dissatisfied with the company because of terrible audio quality calls. This poor service will lead to endless frustration and customer churn. By the time the business has figured out this problem, it may be too late.

The customer has moved on, and it is always difficult to claim them back. Proactive monitoring removes this risk, minimizing widespread customer impact swiftly, thus protecting your business’s brand and removing any customer pain points.

2. Minimize Agent Attrition

Just as your customers suffer from poor audio quality, so do your agents. If an agent is dedicating extra effort trying to understand the customer’s complaint, constantly having to repeat themselves to be understood, the concentration and effort can easily cause fatigue.

If the audio quality on the calls coming in is poor, then an agent’s job is always going to be harder than it needs to be, they are always going to be prone to errors and they are always going to be exhausted by the effort involved.

No agent wants to come to work to be blamed by their customers for having poor-quality calls.

If you’re concerned about your agents’ experience (and are watching your advisor satisfaction/employee net promoter score), then one of the fundamental things you can do to improve this is to ensure that your lines have good audio quality.

If an agent is reporting to management that all of their calls are failing or even that some lines may be down, you need to ensure this problem is resolved immediately. Or better yet, before it becomes an issue.

This can easily be solved by proactively monitoring and testing numbers for call quality, thus ensuring your agents remain motivated and unfrustrated.

3. Avoid Terrible Brand Reputation

Expanding on the previous points, proactively monitoring your calls, producing better quality and greater customer experience will increase brand loyalty for your customers.

Your customers, and your agents, will trust your company more and rely on your product, knowing you provide excellent customer support. This, in turn, will generate better word of mouth for your business, gaining interest from potential customers.

Customers expect business services to be of excellent quality. They want their problems to not only be heard but solved. They trust that a business has the best services provided.

Trust is a two-way thing. Businesses trust their customers to help support them and their products. Customers also trust the business to supply them with excellent audio quality, engaging customer service, and perfect products.

If a business displays this trust (and promises that the problem is being dealt with), customers won’t be as irritated by the issue, and will also feel like the business cares about THEIR needs.

Conclusion

Josh O’Farrell

Ensure your business contact centres have the best audio quality by proactively monitoring and testing your numbers  From keeping customers happy, running all operations smoothly, stopping issues before they become a problem and generating more revenue for the business, it’s the smartest and safest option for you and your contact centre.

It all starts with providing excellent audio quality to your customers for the best possible experience.

Companies like Spearline provide tools to test the quality of for business communication services, allowing you to proactively manage your inbound and outbound voice, SMS, and Fax services.

Sign up now to book a demo of the Spearline Platform.

Author: Guest Author