The Importance of Voice Quality to Your Contact Centre
In the contact centre industry, the importance of consistently high call quality cannot be understated. It is, after all, the fundamental purpose of a contact centre to make outbound calls to individuals, and due to the significant overheads associated with a contact centre operation, they simply cannot afford to drop calls or have bad call quality at any time. The significance of dropped calls and bad call quality cannot be understated due to the severe impact that it can have on the contact centre operation. This article explores some considerations that are necessary to ensure that call quality doesn’t adversely affect your operation.
With many call centers now switching their telecommunications to SIP (session initiation protocol) from PSTN (public switched telephone network), the quality of the network that is delivering the calls is of paramount importance. If a network has high latency on it, the outcome would be that the voice packets that make up the audio of the call can arrive at the destination in a different order than when they were sent. This results in jitter being present on the line, and makes it virtually impossible to hold a telephone conversation on the basis that neither party can establish what is being said. One particular cause of latency is the due to the fact that some contact centres will run their data and voice over the same network, and when the network is busy, jitter will be present. The best way of overcoming this issue is to have a separate connection for voice and one for data, or in the event that this isn’t possible, applying QoS to the network can ensure that voice quality doesn’t deteriorate during these busy times. Many routers have QoS settings built into them, and therefore, implementing such a solutions isn’t very complicated.
One way audio is another issue that is common with poor voice networks and can be caused by a myriad of issues such as outdated firmware, misconfigured firewalls, and VoIP telephones. This problem would have a significant impact on the operation of your contact centre due to the fact that only one side of the conversation would be heard at any one time, which would render the call completely pointless.
There are obviously many other factors outside the scope of this article that can affect call quality, however, what can clearly be established is that high call quality is essential to any successful contact centre operation. What is also clear is that any changes of provider and / or technology requires careful consideration and planning.