Businesses losing sales due to poor interaction
Nearly eight out of ten callers globally experience “poor voice quality” with in interaction with call centres
Seventy-nine percent of consumers have experienced poor voice quality when in contact with call centres.
“Poor voice quality” (when speaking 
with a call centre agent or interacting with automated voice response systems) drives down sales and gives business away to competitors, according to a new survey.
The survey, carried out by the Customer Experience Foundation on behalf of Empirix, asked 3,925 consumers about their experiences in dealing with contact centres and identified technology related trends and common problems that are affecting customer service and costing organisations around the world billions of dollars.
It found that the high percentage of global consumers that highlighted poor voice quality as a common problem points to a real issue in the industry. The study also found that poor voice quality drives down sales volumes, increases call lengths and the number of calls that are forced to be redialed. And as a result, churn rates can increase for both customers and staff.
Other major findings of the survey include:
• Consumers say that forty two per cent of all call centre calls are impacted by poor voice quality
• Thirty per cent of consumers who experienced poor voice quality said that it happened in more than half of their calls, with 68 per cent of those saying that they would usually hang up as a result, and if they were calling about a new product or service would call a competing company instead.
• Twenty-six per cent of consumers say they need to redial to complete a transaction.
• Only 1 in 6 companies said they used specialist tools to manage voice quality, so it is no surprise that 72 per cent of the businesses polled said they had frequent voice quality issues for which they could not identify the root causes.
• “Stress” is the most commonly used word when consumers were asked to explain how they felt after a poor voice quality call was completed.
• Case studies show that consumers are often forced to repeat themselves on calls as a result of poor voice quality.
“Consumers are quickly losing patience with companies that suffer from poor voice quality — truth is it’s a consumer’s market, they have choices in today’s market,” said Professor Morris Pentel, chairman at Customer Experience Foundation. “Consumers are having major issues that they will not tolerate, which has obvious ramifications for businesses. Customer and agent churn will increase if they are unable to communicate with each other, not to mention that the loss of new business opportunities such as upsells or new products and offerings. Organisations with a reputation for poor customer service are simply pushing their customers towards their competitors which impacts market share and the bottom line.”
“The word most associated in the study by consumers with poor voice quality was stress, which is not a word organisations want associated with their customers’ experiences,” said Tim Moynihan, VP of marketing, enterprise solutions at IP communications company Empirix. “Nearly half of the consumers who commented also felt that poor voice quality was a sign that companies really didn’t value their business — at a time where ensuring customer loyalty is more important than ever in any industry. When you analyse the problems with the core issue of poor voice quality, it equates to costing the industry billions of dollars — directly impacting the bottom line of organisations across the globe.”
The survey had more than 5,140 responses overall online and by telephone, which came from, call centre and IT professionals in the US, UK, France and Germany as well as 3,925 consumers.