Call Center Background Noise Leads to Directly to Abandoned Calls

In the contact center, providing an excellent customer experience based on knowledge, personalization and empathy is hard enough. Factor in a great deal of background noise, and it becomes even more difficult.  

Contact centers are noisy places. If agents are seated close together, overlapping conversations can mean confusion for customers. In many cases, this background noise is the cause of abandoned calls, according to new research commissioned by UK company IRIS Clarity (News - Alert), which offers an AI-powered voice isolation app. The company recently surveyed 1,000 consumers across the US and UK around their interactions with call centers. While all respondents indicated they use voice channels in some way for their customer service inquiries, more than half (54 percent) said they only use it for critical issues — making voice a premium that is demonstrably failing to deliver. As it turns out, audio quality is an

“We know the power of voice and the survey clearly shows that ignoring its potential has significant ramifications on the customer and call center experience,” said Jacobi Anstruther, Founder and CEO of IRIS Audio Technologies.

Not surprisingly, having to repeat information is a key frustration for consumers – ‘how to spell my name’ (45 percent), what’s my address (43 percent), and banking information (36 percent) as the most frustrating information to repeat. Noise around the agent isn’t the only problem — callers’ locations also have an impact on call success. Nearly 60 percent of consumers have hung up because they felt they were in an inconvenient location — the noisiest ones being public transport (39 percent), the street (36 percent) and at a place of work (31 percent).

“In an ideal world, consumers would phone a call center agent and there wouldn’t be any background noise on either side, but this isn’t the case,” said Anstruther. “The immediate abandonment of half of call center calls due to noise should raise red flags with call centers everywhere, if only because it’s a huge operating expense.”

IRIS Clarity offers real-time, bi-directional voice isolation capabilities that can help solve this problem on both ends of the call.  Customers will be happier and agents will feel more satisfied.

Edited by Erik Linask