Poor Voice Quality Drives Down Sales and Gives Business Away to Competitors

Empirix announced it commissioned a global survey that highlights the hidden costs and consumer impact of issues that are at the heart of how an organization communicates and satisfies their customers. According to a recent survey undertaken by the Customer Experience Foundation on behalf of Empirix Inc., seventy-nine percent of consumers have experienced poor voice quality. The study asked 3,925 consumers about their experiences in dealing with contact centers and identified technology related trends and common problems that are affecting customer service and costing organizations around the world billions of dollars.

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 revealed 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. The magnitude of the problem is indicative of how much businesses are struggling to come to terms with this issue, while consumers are quickly losing patience.

• Consumers say that forty two percent of all call center calls are impacted by poor voice quality.
• Thirty percent of consumers who experienced poor voice quality said that it happened in more than half of their calls, with 68 percent 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 percent 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 percent 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.

Poor voice quality has a number of root causes, which explains why consumers think it is such a large problem. Background noise, poor headsets, loose connections, bad home voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), use of services such as Skype, poor transit by carriers and bad mobile phone connections and handsets have all been associated with the problem. Add poor voice quality within the enterprise to these problems and it is no surprise that this issue is such a major hot spot for consumers. Most companies do not have the tools to monitor voice quality and so it is no surprise why this issue has become such a problem – at a time when the move to voice over IP is a dominant strategy. As such, Empirix offers testing and monitoring solutions that help companies quickly identify and fix problems before they ever reach the end-user. With Empirix’s solutions, Enterprises can not only assure voice quality but also the entire end-to-end customer experience – thereby reducing customer churn and streamlining the overall customer service process.

The survey had more than 5140 responses overall online and by telephone, which came from, call center and IT Professionals in the US, UK, France and Germany as well as 3,925 consumers.

For a copy of a whitepaper covering these survey results – called Could you repeat that please? The costs and customer experience impacts of Poor Voice Quality – request one online at: http://www.empirix.com/poorvq.

Tags: Empirix, survey, Voice, VoIP

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