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Nearly half of all consumers hang up immediately when they hear call center noise
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87% of customers have had to repeat themselves on a customer service call because the agent couldn’t hear them
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Additionally, 86% of agents have had to repeat themselves because the customer couldn’t hear them
Almost half of customer service calls are abandoned due to call center background noise, with 42% hanging up immediately when they detect the noise.
“In an ideal world, consumers would phone a call center agent and there wouldn’t be any background noise on either side, but this isn’t the case”
That’s according to the team behind IRIS Clarity, the AI-powered voice isolation app, which surveyed 1,000 consumers across the US and UK around their interactions with call centers. While all respondents indicated they use voice channels in some way for their customer service inquiries, more than half (54%) said they only use it for critical issues — making voice a premium that is demonstrably failing to deliver.
The research identified repetition as a key frustration for consumers, with ‘how to spell my name’ (45%), address (43%), and banking information (36%) as the most frustrating information to repeat.
Noise around the agent isn’t the only problem — caller’s locations also have an impact on call success. Nearly 60% of consumers have hung up because they felt they were in an inconvenient location — the noisiest ones being public transport (39%), the street (36%), and at a place of work (31%).
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“In an ideal world, consumers would phone a call center agent and there wouldn’t be any background noise on either side, but this isn’t the case,” said Jacobi Anstruther, Founder and CEO of IRIS Audio Technologies. “We know the power of voice and the survey clearly shows that ignoring its potential has significant ramifications on the customer and call center experience. The immediate abandonment of half of call center calls due to noise should raise red flags with call centers everywhere, if only because it’s a huge operating expense. With its real-time and bi-directional capabilities, voice isolation software like IRIS Clarity can ensure both customers and agents can hear each other clearly, in order to get the outcomes they each need.”
These findings come fresh off the heels of IRIS Clarity’s whitepaper, The Role of Audio in an Increasingly Digital World, which investigates the impact of poor audio across call centers, as well as enterprises, healthcare, and education.