The customer experience is the single most important thing a call center needs to keep in mind. You could say it is the raison d’etre of any call center. And when servicing customers, it’s vital to get rid of all the obstacles of a customer interacting with your company to get assistance. For that, the single best thing you can focus the 80/20 rule on is call quality.
A study from the Customer Experience Foundation in 2010 shows that 30% of customers experienced poor voice quality during calls. Out of the 30%, 68% hung up on the call because they were having trouble having a meaningful conversation. 26% had to redial to complete their business.
This really should go without saying, but call voice quality is the most important component of a call center’s operations. You can’t even begin to work on actual things like Call Quality (correct information and processes), First Call Resolution (FCR), and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) if the voice quality of your calls is suspect. Customers just give up and those three important metrics take a serious hit. That’s bad news for the customer experience and a possible long-term issue for your company’s brand.
It’s the equivalent of walking into a car dealership and seeing all the cars with banged-up paint jobs, rusty fenders and dents all over the chassis. It becomes painfully obvious to people that your company doesn’t care about its product, and that you are willing to provide substandard service to customers.
Important call quality features that your customers want:
Lines need to be open and customer should spend a minimal amount of time in the queue, or they start the call impatient and irate, demanding of your agents.
Voice clarity should be stellar, or customers will need to keep repeating themselves over and over, and agents won’t be able to give intelligible responses. Anyone who has had a voice chat over Facebook messenger where the quality was poor can relate to the stress it causes.
Line dependability should be there, or calls may end up getting dropped, resulting in furious customers who call back to give your company a mouthful rather than to get assistance.
Improving voice quality involves many factors, but the important ones to cover are:
Internet connection quality - getting a connection with enough bandwidth and quality cabling is the lifeblood of VoiP. You’ll need to monitor your network traffic and ensure there is enough bandwidth for your call volume. If you have certain agents working wirelessly make sure to remove interference that can conflict with the 2.4Ghz band used by WiFi. Better yet, use CAT6 ethernet cables which transmit data with minimal loss and latency.
Contact center software - modern contact center software affects the quality of your voice calls. Better-engineered software works in tandem with your IT staff and data infrastructure to provide top quality calls for your customers.
Headset quality - it does not need to be a $400 headset per agent, but the headset affects the quality of the call tremendously. Go for wired solutions, which are more dependable with better quality.
VoiP Router - not all routers are created equal. It’s important to find a router that is VoiP-optimized, meaning it has settings which allow it to prioritize VoiP data over other network data.
There are a lot of things you can do to provide good voice quality for your customers. If you are looking to provide the best customer experience, you can’t skimp out on this reality. Ensure that voice is good and that customers can reach your center easily and with good voice quality, and your call center will reap the results in both call center efficiency and call quality.