Is voice communication letting you and your customers down?

Advances in voice technology and the advent of the contact centre have changed the nature of business, enabling call centres to be outsourced across the world and allowing companies with global branches to stay in constant contact.

Contact centres give companies a cost-effective means of conducting business across physical boundaries and enable customer contact, helping to resolve queries and drive greater customer service without the need for face-to-face interaction.

However, with the blurring of global boundaries, another problem has arisen when it comes to telephonic interactions - that of confusion between parties regarding information communicated and the emotions attached to phrasing, comments or retorts. This problem arises from the quality of voice interactions, whether these are over traditional analogue technology or voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP), and is compounded when callers with different first languages or cultural backgrounds communicate, as accent and phrasing may impede communication.

This problem is particularly apparent with outsourced contact centres. For example, many international organisations outsource their contact centres to South Africa, where we have 11 official languages, and many of the people who work in these centres are not native English speakers. Calls may also come in from all over the world, where the callers do not necessarily speak English as a first language either. Critical information may be altered, in much the same way as a children's game of broken telephone.

Adding to that the sometimes poor quality of analogue or VOIP lines across continents and there is a wide margin for unclear communications and misunderstandings.

Considering that one of the main goals of a contact centre should be to ensure accuracy, this not only makes the company in question appear to be highly unprofessional, it stops the flow of information, which can lead to confusion, frustration and ultimately customer loss.

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One of the major problems when it comes to voice communications is the frequency of the lines being used. Analogue operates at low frequency, generally 3kHz, which leaves a lot of room for things to get lost in the process. While VOIP is better, with most VOIP codecs supporting a higher frequency of 7kHz, there is still much room for error. This is where the newest technology of high definition (HD) voice comes into play. Operating at a frequency of either 14kHz or 20kHz, HD voice enables much clearer communications to take place, which means fewer misunderstandings and greater accuracy of information.

Adoption of HD voice, however, has been slow, as many organisations feel it is an expensive endeavour. While it may be true that the initial capital expenditure seems high, the benefits of adopting such a system translate to a ROI that far outweighs the initial expense, and the long-term benefits include an HD voice system that will continue to pay for itself many times over.

One of the obvious benefits of HD voice is the ability for callers to hear every word the person on the other end of the line is saying, without anybody having to repeat themselves. The higher quality of voice interactions results in improved productivity for contact centres and other operations where accents and differences in speaking patterns can be problematic, enabling people from different countries and cultural backgrounds to interact more naturally. People spend less time on the phone trying to understand each other, and will expend less energy concentrating on deciphering conversations, leading to greater understanding and clearer communications, as the wider bandwidth codec of HD voice captures a wider range of natural voice sounds.

HD voice provides more lifelike communications and better comprehension, as well as enabling people to overcome barriers such as accent, enabling greater productivity and in turn, a greater ROI for the company employing an HD voice system.