It should be.
Think about the phone calls that you’ve taken at your desk in the past few weeks. How often do you experience garbled speech? Background noise? Calls suddenly dropping? Audio delay? Participants can’t hear you or you can’t hear participants?
45% of participants in the Brockmann & Company report When Quality Counts said they experience at least one of these most common defects at least once in the past month; 22% experience it at least once a week; 8% at least once a day.
This is shocking to me. Especially when I see that 85% of respondents consider voice communications to be very important to the success of their business. So, I would expect that given the importance, network and telecom managers will make improving voice quality in telephone communications a high priority.
This is probably going to receive some resistance. The stressful economic conditions we’re facing now will induce executives into suggesting that we need to do some tightening of belts, reducing expectations and otherwise making do with less. This new voice quality solution (maybe from Psytechnics , Communicado or Prognosis) may just get postponed for these reasons.
Your internal level of voice quality and its causes are certainly customer affecting. Even if your company still has a good ol’ digital PBX, chances are customers are calling in on their IP PBX and there’s a good chance that the long distance carrier is using VoIP and compression in their backbone, which when used in tandem can cause even more serious quality degradations, that your brand could be blamed for.
Some think that the quality of the experience doesn’t matter since users have been conditioned to expect poor quality from mobile services. This is utterly false. 61% of customers’ say that their perceptions of the suppliers’ brands decline when they experience voice quality defects in calls with them. And a third of respondents, especially those with the worse quality experience are willing to pay more to get Quality.
Besides, mobile services offer that great advantage of convenience. Users are rightfully willing to tolerate quality degradation and premium prices if business calls can be made to me even while I’m on the golf course.
Probably the most compelling argument to improve Voice Quality is the business performance argument. A common practice in Brockmann & Company reports is to apply the Brockmann Methodology. to rank order respondents from those with the least frequent quality problems to those with the most. Then we compare the bottom 15.9% against the top 15.9%. This comparison of the ‘Poor Performers’ against the ‘Top Performers’ shows that Top Performers had:
- 19% more revenue per employee
- 4 times more customer satisfaction
- 3 times more employee satisfaction
In a increasingly competitive marketplace, it is clear that Quality more than pays its way. Download our report to capture the recommendations on how to become a Top Performer.
