Likely you’ve heard about HD-voice, but it tends to get overshadowed by other reasons for choosing IP-based calling. While cost savings attract businesses to VoIP, HD-voice doesn’t seemingly have anywhere near the value proposition of lower-priced calls.
That doesn’t mean the improved call quality from VoIP is just gravy for callers. There actually are good reasons why improved call quality matters.
For international calling, for instance, the improved quality is huge from a practical standpoint. Anyone who has tried calling a colleague or customer in Asia, for instance, probably knows the dual challenge of understanding the poor English while simultaneously having a worse phone connection to discern what’s being said. Better call quality can make a big difference when it comes to the meeting of cultures.
With the portability that mobile phones now bring, there also is the issue of ambient noise. Better quality means that there is better comprehension when backgrounds are noisy and callers are straining to hear each other.
This is one reason that cellular providers are investing in improved call quality. It makes calls easier, so not providing it becomes a competitive disadvantage. Sprint (News - Alert) has begun touting its 60 Mbit/s and HD Voice in an attempt to woo back customers, and recently the UK’s largest mobile operator, EE, announced that it will spend £275 million ($449.76 million) on boosting the quality and reliability of its network.
One of the biggest advantages of improved call quality for businesses, however, is what it can do for call monitoring.
The emergence of speech analytics has basically revolutionized call recording. With speech analytics, call recording becomes much more useful because recordings can be mined for keywords and other trends. Whereas call recordings once sat largely unused, with modern speech analytics they become infinitely more useful to businesses and a competitive advantage for companies that fully utilize them.
The improved call quality from HD voice is a big boon for call recording because it enables better speech analytics. Just as callers are better able to understand the other person on the phone when there’s a good connection, so too does call recording and speech analytics benefit from higher quality voice.
While speech analytics is remarkably good at picking out words, delivering it a better call recording to work from will only improve accuracy and make such recordings even more useful.
So while the largest flag VoIP waves is still cost savings, in the very near future businesses might start valuing its ability to improve call quality just as much. HD voice is a quiet revolution waiting to happen.
Edited by Alisen Downey