When you call a business, you expect professional support, to speak to a knowledgeable person, and to have a clear line of communication for engaging in conversation. If one of these 3 elements is missing, customers walk away. The most important of these 3 is poor call quality. If there is poor call quality, it doesn’t matter how knowledgeable the support representative is, customers cannot hear them. If there is poor call quality the professionalism of the company, and their staff is irrelevant since they cannot be heard. How do you monitor your poor call quality?
The Trifactor of Poor Call Quality
When a customer is experiencing poor call quality, they often hang up, sometimes they redial, other times, they call one of your competitors! Businesses lose between 40% and 50% of customers who experience poor call quality.
When a business experiences poor call quality, they look for a different provider. Whilst there are contractual concerns, and poor call quality in the telecoms space is getting more and more rare each year, businesses can still end contracts early, or simply walk away. Businesses often have a back-up telecoms supplier, and they will use this supplier more when there is poor call quality with their primary telecommunications supplier. Poor call quality is the key driver for businesses leaving one supplier and moving to another. Between 25% and 30% of all new business that we acquire is due to the poor call quality of the previous supplier.
When a call center agent experiences poor call quality they are unable to hit their quotas, they are frustrated at work, and they quit their job, looking for better opportunities in a more stable working environment. If they do not quit, they are forced out due to poor call quality and inability to hit quotas. This makes poor call quality the biggest driver of attrition in the BPO Industry.
With attrition in some BPO’s reaching into the 30% range, it is important to improve the poor call quality driver that forces agents out. Poor call quality also reduces productivity, efficiency, and profits; therefore, it is a focus of both agents and management.
How agents experience poor call quality
When poor call quality hits the production floor, calls drop, customers ask “Can you hear me?”, and agents must repeat themselves. Nearly all agents lose concentration and focus when poor call quality hits their lines. They are in a script and in the call flow, then must stop it, repeat it, or suddenly end it. If BPO Agents regularly experience poor call quality, they must speed up their calls just in case it happens. Talking too quickly causes confusion. Experiencing poor call quality causes confusion. Confusion loses agents and customers.
Working as a call centre agent often has low pay, but high bonuses. This salary model and incentive plan is designed to push people to make more calls, encouraging more sales, and happier customers. This works well when systems are aligned with productivity, but when systems breakdown, it becomes impossible to hit targets, and agents quickly become dissatisfied with their employer.
Agents do not want to repeatedly ask “Can you hear me?” or “I am sorry, what did you just say?”. Agents want to book callbacks with customers for the best time to convert the sale, but what happens if there are line quality issues and poor call quality at that time? They miss the call back, the customer gets frustrated, and goes somewhere else.
Due to poor call quality, deadlines are missed, targets not achieved, efficiency drops, productivity is reduced, and attrition increases. Businesses must improve their poor call quality.
When an agent experiences poor call quality they are less likely to convert the call, they are harder to engage with, more difficult to understand, and they are less trustworthy. An agent must sound credible, but how can they be credible if they are not audible?
If a customer hears poor call quality they distrust the company, cannot engage with the agent, and often think that both the company and the agent are less intelligent, less credible, and less professional. Their products and services are reflected in the poor call quality, and if the company cannot invest in good calls, it is assumed that they cannot invest in good quality services.
CSAT and AHT are affected by poor call quality
These are key performance indicators of the BPO Industry that help agents to achieve bonuses, promotions, and excel in their customer service jobs. If there is clear audio, the call is faster. If the audio is broken, the average handling time is much longer. This can be up to 50% longer, and that depends on the customer staying on the line. Most customers hang up, which affects the CSAT scores.
When we are speaking to our VIP First customers poor call quality reflects on the service that you give to these best customers. If the call quality is bad, the customer service is bad.
When AHT is affected, customers get frustrated and agents get more frustrated, since AHT is often a KPI on agents score cards. If an agent cannot achieve their scorecard minimum score, they are either dismissed, or they leave.
You always want to provide the best service and have the highest CSAT scores, but this is not possible if there is poor call quality. With poor call quality comes longer calls, with longer calls comes lower CSAT scores, and fewer customers. Call Quality is integrated with good service.
There is clear evidence that AHT, FCR, CSAT, and customer loyalty, including customer referrals are strongly linked. If you want customers to recommend your services to a friend, you must have calls that are either shorter than expected, or have a good flow to them, so they are the expected length. Where there is poor call quality and longer calls, CSAT scores drop by 50%, and customer referrals drop by 40% on average.
Can your business survive with poor call quality?
You might look at price of service as a key indicator of which telecoms company to partner with. You can see from the above, there are so many more factors that affect your bottom line that are impacted by poor call quality. You must work with a company that prides itself on flexibility as well as crystal-clear communication. Crystal clear communication comes from servers, internet providers, mobile solutions, and other technology. If they are static, and that provider or solution breaks, the crystal-clear communication will suddenly be clear as mud.
If your static phone supplier provides excellent call quality with 10 seats, will that translate to 100 seats, or does the number of users affect the poor call quality.
Does your phone supplier give excellent quality on one line, with one number, but when you add numbers because you are offering different services, growing different departments, and offering overseas calling support, will that affect your poor call quality?
Call quality is linked to service quality of the network, so if you are limited to one network, one line, minimal seats, and low bandwidth, you can not expand. If your business wants to expand, and suddenly experiences poor call quality, your expansion plans need to be put on hold.
There is a scale of poor call quality
If you can hear your customers, but they can not hear you properly, you can still resolve their complaints, send them an email with details, and apologise for the temporary outage.
If your customers can hear you, but you cannot hear them properly, you simply cannot resolve their concerns. You cannot provide any customer service, and your customers will get very frustrated, because they can hear you, so they think that the call quality is good.
If the communication between both sides is spotty, or choppy, both sides can try to understand each other, and it will be a challenge for both sides, the customer is more likely to drop the call than the agent, and they are 40% more likely to move to a competitor.
Without crystal clear communication, your business will drop customers, lose opportunities, and lose customer loyalty. Driving customer loyalty means reducing costs and increasing marketing reach. Customers must be heard, and agents must listen to the customers. Feedback is essential for business growth. Feedback is impossible if you are experiencing poor call quality. Without feedback businesses cannot fix their problems, respect their customers, and improve in the key areas necessary for growth.
Call Quality underpins operations
With over 2 thirds of customers using phones to contact businesses, and older generations choosing the phone over any other communication medium, businesses must invest in the best phone solutions to support their operations. Older generations have a higher spending power than the youth of today, and it is common for younger people to favor non-voice communication, which is still through your phone!
Investing in good phone quality is an investment in increased revenue, customer satisfaction, and customer retention.
Here at conXhub we have focused our bespoke and patented technology on call quality. We have never been accused of having poor call quality and have more than 96% of our customers giving us 5-star ratings for our amazing service.
If your business wants mobile-centric communications with crystal clear communication, every time, allowing for expansion and free international calling, you should speak to our amazing support staff and experience the best call quality for yourself.
