Call centers are crowded and noisy locations. As a result, customer talking to an agent usually hears in the background other agents talking, the supervisor giving instructions and sometimes even an internal PA system. Such background voices have bad impact on customer experience. In addition to damaging the customer experience, these background voices also have other negative impacts:
- Privacy – When the customers hears these voices in the background, they are exposed to sensitive data like private data of other customers, internal discussions etc.
- Analytics – analytics that is done on the voice of the agent (e.g. transcription, mood of the agent) can get mixed up when, for example, part of the audio contains shouting of the supervisor.
- Productivity – the noisier the call, the longer it takes to finalize it.
The same problem can also happen for agents that are working from home. In such case, the customer might hear in the background children or TV playing, dog barking outside etc.
There are few solutions to this common problem:
- Physically rearrange the call center to increase space and separation between the agents and isolate each agent as much as possible.
- Use NR headsets. These NR headsets might reduce some of the noise although they have hard time dealing with background human voices as opposed to background non-human noise.
- Use a software that is simultaneously correlating the audio from all VoIP calls in order to identify the location of each agent and its contribution/disturbance to all other calls. PBXMate by SoliCall is such a software that based on this VoIP correlation can also generates a noise map of the call center.