This reporter was browsing the Web and ran across an article titled How the Right Headset Affects Call Center Productivity and the Bottom Line, by a certain Jim Hanks.

Kudos to Mr. Hanks for clearly explaining a difficult topic. His article is well worth the read, main points are summarized here:

Background noise isnt just a bother, but a genuine money loss, Hanks contends: One of the biggest factors that adversely affect [a call center workers] Average Work Time is ambient noise. He cites to a recent study on the effects of background noise by ACS Wireless, which found that by decreasing AWT by a mere 0.6 second, one customer saved $8 million annually.

This figure sounds incredibly high, Hanks admits, but when customers and call center staff have to repeat themselves due to background noise, businesses lose money in many ways.

Some include:

• Increased long-distance charges. When noise makes it difficult to hear customers, it takes longer to acquire necessary information; meanwhile, long-distance charges are being incurred. Additionally, if customers can't hear well either, they might hang up before getting all the information they need and will have to call back later (thereby creating more charges).
• Decreased employee output. The inability to hear due to background noise reduces the speed at which call center employees can attend to customers. As a result, other customers must wait or additional staff must be hired to make up for the slack. Even if your staffing levels are sufficient, the frustration employees experience due to background noise decreases their performance.
• Customer dissatisfaction. In addition to the obvious annoyance of extraneous noise, if a caller can hear other conversations in your call center, they worry about their own privacy. Would you want to give your credit card number to someone (and have them repeat it back to you) when you know that other callers can overhear?

Hanks says call center managers can eliminate background noise and attendant problems with the proper headsets: A superior-quality headset offers any number of the following features that ensure that employees and customers can be heard, such as noise cancelling, compression, quick disconnect and binaural capacity.

Poor productivity isn't always a staffing problem or a system-response problem, Hanks contends, often, the fault lies in the staff's equipment. In order to reduce AWT (Average Work Time) and maximize profits in your call center, understanding what is said during every single phone call, every single time, is a primary objective.

David Sims is contributing editor and CRM Alert columnist for TMCnet.