Does Your Voice Quality Truly Speak For Your Brand?
By Alok Kulkarni, Cyara
We all know how frustrating it is when you can’t clearly hear the person on the other end of the phone line. How many times have you simply hung up on someone, and then called back to try and get a better connection? Well, it’s one thing to call back your friends, family or colleagues. But when you are calling to check on the status of an order or for post-sales support, this certainly influences your impression of that retailer.
Over the past five years, most retailers have invested heavily in omnichannel customer engagement technologies. At the same time, the continued push toward digital transformation throughout the enterprise has digitized many of the interactions retailers exchange with their customers across phone, chat, SMS and web. As retailers prioritize digital interactions, they often overlook a simple fact: phones still handle around 68% of all contact center communications.
The fact is, for many interactions, especially complex ones, communicating by voice is faster, easier and more effective than typing messages back and forth. Your customers call you when they need the advice of your customer service and sales experts. These interactions are critical moments of truth that determine long-term customer value. Poor voice quality can interfere with a customer’s experience at these critical moments.
Voice quality is typically measured by what’s known as MOS, or Mean Opinion Score. However, many businesses find that it’s difficult to get a consistent, repeatable and objective read on when you are experiencing voice quality issues. You may hear complaints from agents or customers indicating a voice quality problem. Or, you might even see longer call times as agents and customers repeat themselves. But neither of these is a reliable or proactive way to identify voice quality issues.
Further complicating the quest for voice quality are the many factors that contribute to the MOS on a phone call. That’s because there are many moving parts between your customer’s mouth/ear and your agent’s mouth/ear: switches, gateways, interactive voice response systems (IVRs), routers and so on. Each hop in this chain represents a potential point of failure that could degrade audio quality.
These variables and the dearth of reliable feedback mean that it’s important to test voice quality — proactively, scientifically and continually. Here are two basic approaches that can shine a light on potential problems.
1. Be the customer
Start by testing the audio quality from the customer’s perspective. The simplest scenario is between a customer and your IVR. Can your customers understand what the IVR is saying to them, so they can respond to the prompts and accomplish their goals? If you encounter voice quality issues here, you know there are problems with equipment that sits between the customer and the IVR.
2. Test systems end-to-end and bi-directionally
Next, test the entire chain from customer to agent, and do it in both directions, so you can assure that both the agent and the customer can hear one another. By testing in this way, you can identify voice quality issues at any point along the path. We find that this is the most tested scenario because the connection between customer and agent is so critical for them to understand each other.
A leading U.S. retailer proactively diagnosed and fixed problems with voice quality in its contact center. In this case, the retailer had agents based in three separate locations. By replicating customer and agent voice interactions, we were able to find that one of the locations had a markedly lower voice quality score on average than the other two, both of which were seeing very good voice quality scores. Further investigation uncovered that the switch for the low-performing site was old and in need of an upgrade. Once upgraded, voice quality at the low-performing site improved to the level of the two high performers.
Voice quality is an important contributor to the quality of your brand in the mind of a customer. When was the last time you measured it scientifically?
Alok Kulkarni is an expert in ensuring excellent customer experiences. He founded Cyara to provide tools and technologies so that enterprises can be confident that they are delivering great customer experiences each and every time, even in a world with rapidly changing customer expectations and an increasingly complex technology ecosystem.