Empirix's Kendrick Addresses Voice Monitoring Issues
March 19, 2010
By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor
When TMCnet’s Stefania Viscusi interviewed Walter Kendrick, director of product management at Empirix (News - Alert)about voice monitoring recently, she asked why it’s vital that voice quality issues be identified and fixed before they reach the customer.
“Poor voice quality definitely has an effect on contact center metrics and customer satisfaction,” Kendrick told Viscusi in a podcast that’s available here, citing abandoned call ratios as just one of a number of negative implications: “If the customer cannot communicate effectively with that call center agent, they’re likely to hang up and turn their business over to somebody else.”
Of course, as he points out, nobody would stay on the phone if they can’t communicate with the end agent. “They’re going to get frustrated and hang up, and those companies are going to effectively lose customers because of poor voice quality,” something that, today, is relatively easy to fix.
Viscusi then asked him to speak on the company’s new OneSight Voice Quality Assurance offering. “What we do,” Kendrick said, “is we have voice quality probes we place throughout the customer’s environment.” They’re placed where the agent phones are located, he said, such as at branch offices and contact centers.
But one of the “key attributes” to their product, Kendrick believes, is “emulating the live customer experience, calling in to a contact center. We can actually have one of our probes making calls from the outside, from the customer’s PSTN into the voice network, being able to score that voice quality.”
So as he says, the company’s measuring not only voice quality, but network statistics for those calls. “One of the key elements I feel we have in our voice quality offering is being able to record the call. Because we generate a test score, we’re actually sending in a reference file. And really, nothing is as good as listening to a call that may have a poor voice quality score against it.”
There’s really no substitute, as he says, for being able to hear where the voice quality problems are – with the echo, is the voice clipping or what, because “if I can hear that, I get a better indication of what the real problem is related to.”
Listen to the full podcast here.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.
Edited by Michael Dinan