Survey: Call center voice quality needs some work

It's bad enough when you feel like you are talking to a powerless operator several timezones away, the least they can do is make the call quality decent, right? Empirix commissioned the Consumer Experience Foundation to survey consumers globally who had used a call center to communicate with businesses and found some interesting results.

For starters, 79 percent of callers had experienced poor call voice quality. As you can imagine, they found that the poor voice quality hurt sales numbers and added to consumer frustrations with redials and extended call length. Thirty percent of consumers who experienced poor voice quality saw it happen on half of their calls to call centers--68 percent of those people usually hung up as a result!

"Consumers are quickly losing patience with companies that suffer from poor voice quality-truth is, it's a consumer's market; they have choices in today's market," said Professor Morris Pentel, chairman at Customer Experience Foundation in the release. "Consumers are having major issues that they will not tolerate, which has obvious ramifications for businesses. Customer and agent churn will increase if they are unable to communicate with each other, not to mention the loss of new business opportunities, such as upsells or new products and offerings. Organizations with a reputation for poor customer service are simply pushing their customers toward their competitors, which impacts market share and the bottom line."

In the age of Twitter and Yelp, where angry consumers can bash your company to the world at large in nanoseconds, having customer service that works and eases frustration is a serious concern and the voice quality of your IP network and call center is obviously one place that needs to be addressed.

For more:
- read the release

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