In the call center industry, the customer experience (CX) is critically important. How customers feel about their time with agents directly affects profitability and brand loyalty in a competitive market. But have you considered how call center noise can have a negative impact on customers’ experiences? Background conversations, music, and other sounds can result in miscommunication, frustration, and an unfavorable impression of the company. Here’s why background noise is killing your customer experience, and how you can fix it.
What is Customer Experience?
The term is pervasive in the business world, including in call centers. It refers to the overall perception customers have of their interactions with a company or brand throughout the entire journey. In addition to practical aspects of these interactions, the customer experience encompasses the sensory and emotional responses the interactions evoke.
The Importance of the Customer Experience
The customer’s experience is key to business success:
Differentiation
At every touchpoint—including call centers—the customer experience is the leading competitive differentiator. In a Gartner survey, 89% of organizations surveyed considered CX to be the new competitive battlefield.
Loyalty And Revenue
A positive customer experience generally leads to heightened loyalty and increased revenue.
Strategic Focus
Managing customer experience involves understanding needs, and crafting and continuously improving experiences.
The Role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in CX
Increasingly, AI is playing a key and burgeoning role in enhancing customer experience and customer service, driving loyalty and operational efficiency for organizations across industries. It’s doing so by enabling speedier, smarter, and more personalized interactions across various touchpoints.
These are key ways the technology is contributing to CX improvement:
Personalized Recommendations
Boosting customer satisfaction and increasing sales, AI employs machine learning to analyze customer behavior, purchase history, and preferences, offering customized service or goods recommendations.
Chatbots And Virtual Assistants
AI-powered chatbots provide round-the-clock customer support, reply to inquiries, resolve issues, and offer personalized assistance. Further enhancing the CX, virtual assistants analyze past interactions and create customized solutions in real time.
Sentiment Analysis
Using social media posts, text analysis of reviews, and emails, artificial intelligence can gauge customer sentiment. As a result, businesses better understand customer emotions, proactively address concerns, and improve engagement approaches.
Predictive Analytics
By analyzing data such as purchase patterns and browsing histories, AI can anticipate customer needs.
Real-Time Personalization
Artificial intelligence enables real-time experience personalization. For example, website content can be modified based on user behavior.
Smooth Multi-Channel Experience
To ensure a seamless transition for customers as they interact across platforms with brands, AI integrates data across channels.
Cost Efficiency
AI lowers operational costs by automating quality assurance, data entry, and other repetitive tasks.
Proactive Maintenance
The technology identifies prospective system failures before they happen, ensuring that customer services are not interrupted and reinforcing brand trust.
Better Knowledge Management
AI enables quicker resolutions and improves overall productivity by organizing and retrieving info quicker for CX teams.
How AI will Transform Contact Centers in the Next 5 Years
Three predictions, for contact center executives to consider, on how AI will shape the future of contact centers
Call Center Noise and the Customer Experience
Due to the high density of representatives, conversations, and background sounds, call centers are noisy places. Such noise can markedly impact CX as well as agent productivity.
Decibel Levels
To ensure clear communication and privacy, it’s widely recommended that call centers maintain noise levels that are between 50 and 60 decibels.
Productivity Impact
Excessive noise levels can lower agent productivity by up to 66%, resulting in increased stress and fatigue. Noise inhibits concentration, which can cause misunderstandings. Customers may have to repeat themselves, which can diminish the customer experience.
Sources of Call Center Noise
There are many sources of noise in call centers. Mainly, they come from:
Agent Conversations
The primary noise source is other representatives’ conversations, which can compromise privacy and distract customers.
Office Equipment
Sounds from machinery such as printers and phones contribute to a center’s overall noise level.
Layout And Density
Noise issues can be exacerbated by the close proximity of work stations
Tomato.ai and its De-Noising AI Solution
Background noise can really hurt the call center customer experience, which can ultimately affect your profitability. While there’s no shortage of headsets on the market, even the top devices can’t remove all the various noises around the wearer. By their nature, call centers are boisterous, clamorous environments. Such noises can be distracting and irritating and can negatively affect how customers feel about their experience. To add to the problem, many offshore call center agents have accents that can make them challenging to understand.
We have the solution.
Tomato.ai uses leading-edge generative artificial intelligence technology to generate someone’s voice without any of the noises around them. Whether the noise is other speakers, kids, pets, loud music, office equipment, or something else, our tool has proven to de-noise better than other popular solutions. It’s the most powerful AI noise canceller available. Audio quality is key.
With our system, noises are removed on both sides of a call—the representative’s and the caller’s. It’s a breeze to install on a PC and works great with any meeting app and VOIP provider with almost no latency.
This industry upending de-noising technology is in addition to our transformative solution that modifies call center representatives’ accents, making each agent sound more like the listener while retaining some elements of their original accent.
These key tools can improve the customer and agent experience, resulting in better-performing call centers.