By Michael Tessler, Managing Partner

It's clear that the battle to improve the customer experience is a popular discussion, and much of the debate recently focuses on migrating from on-premises to cloud solutions. While this migration brings great benefits, migrating a contact center is not easy given the complexity of the solution, the number of integrations and the embedded business logic. We have highlighted in a previous blog how poor existing experiences are and how these impact brand perception.

In this blog series, we will explore where enterprises can improve their customer experience by incrementally adding capabilities to their existing solutions. Instead of forklifting their complete solution, enterprises can add significant value without the disruption or cost of a complete migration to a new solution. To illustrate, we will examine a set of capabilities available for the Amazon Chime SDK, as an example, of some of the capabilities that can be used.

In this first blog, we wanted to highlight voice quality, an area of interest for some time. Scott and I often spoke that we wanted to investigate how we could make voice quality a real differentiator for BroadSoft. We already had an amazing media server and audio bridging solution, but how could we improve the voice quality of all calls and even fine tune the solution for the listener. We never got to complete that part of our vision, but today we see some amazing capabilities in the market. 

In today’s contact centers, voice continues to be the most important channel, as either the primary interaction or for escalations. This is even more relevant today as more customers are calling from their mobile devices in noisy environments like automobiles or from their homes while working remotely during the pandemic. Clearly, improving voice quality and making customer interaction as easy and painless as possible is key to improving customer satisfaction.

An example of a way to improve voice quality is to use the Amazon Chime SDK Noise Suppression feature. Amazon uses AI/ML technology to filter out disruptive background noises like typing, dogs barking, lawn mowers, and car noise. In fact, Inteliquent announced that they were integrating this capability into their SIP trunking network, enabling businesses and their customers to have better voice quality, independent of the call center technology being used. Adding this capability to SIP trunks makes it easy for enterprises to consume and provides SIP Trunking service providers a new way to differentiate their offer. This is clearly why Inteliquent is excited by this introduction.

Amazon’s Noise Suppression feature was shown to significantly improve human perception and understanding in a recent competition. The solution scored extremely well while being very CPU efficient which is a trade off when using complex deep learning techniques. Having an efficient and high-quality solution is critical for real world deployments.

That means that existing call centers can use this capability to improve customer experience today. No more agents asking customers to repeat themselves or answer the wrong question. And when agents are working from home, background noises are reduced to again improve the customer experience. No more road noise when customers call in from their cars.

So why is voice quality so important? First, voice quality is not only fundamental for customer and agent experience, but also in advanced technologies such as speech recognition and biometric software if the incoming audio quality is poor. Secondly, poor audio quality has a major impact on NPS and CES (Customer Effort Score). 

So to summarize our thoughts: 

1. Customer Experience is more critical than ever, 

2. Contact centers are a key part of customer experience, and

3. Voice in the contact center (despite omnichannel) is still the most important channel.

Solutions like the one now offered by Amazon can simply improve the customer experience without the expense and complexity of a solution forklift.