£7.6bn reasons to look at call quality

Communication systems integrator Datapoint has launched a managed service to help businesses reduce poor voice quality in the call centre.
The offering is a response to independent study from ContactBabel research that estimates poor voice quality costs UK businesses about £7.6bn in lost revenue each year.
Datapoint will use specialist tools to monitor and manage the quality of both the data and voice networks for call centres that have mostly switched over to converged networks. The service will be sold direct to end users, but claims Andy Scopes, managed services director at Datapoint: “We believe there is a significant opportunity for other channel partners to enter this market.
“Proactively managing data over the network is common practice; however, managing voice in this way is still in its infancy. We see a significant market opportunity as companies strive to make the most out of their existing infrastructure.”
Scopes believes that the complexity of multi-vendor, best of breed networks often causes firms to struggle when delivering high quality voice. A survey conducted by Customer Experience Foundation (CEF) found that that 79 percent of consumers reported experiencing poor voice quality; and only one in six organisations have appropriate tools to monitor poor voice quality issues.
The report goes on to say that poor voice quality occurs, on average, for 34 percent of each call. Across the UK this equates to a national loss in agent costs of £7.6bn. Typically, resolving these repetitive voice quality issues has been a process of elimination taking considerable time and money.
The service which Scopes believes is the first of its kind in the UK will initially target areas like the financial sectors. The service will focus on the call centre networks but Scopes admits that end-to-end delivery where a problem is outside of the call centre and due to an issue further along the circuit is not an area they are able to address at the present time.