The Increasing Role of Wireless Headsets in the Contact Center

1 Nov, 2006

By: Joe McGrogan

---

Wireless headsets allow contact center staff to move freely, stay connected and hear and be heard. Supervisors are able to remain productive even away from their desks and provide a better customer service experience due to quicker call resolution and superior inbound and outbound sound quality.

Frontline supervisors are being tasked with the responsibility to improve key contact center metrics such as customer satisfaction and agent productivity while they are managing more agents per shift. This poses some obvious challenges: How do they do more with less? How can technology help contact centers keep their staff effective and their customers happy while containing costs?

Part of the solution is to arm contact center staff with the necessary tools. To that end, wireless headsets have an increasing role in the contact center, for both management and agents. Wireless headsets allow staff to move freely, stay connected and hear and be heard. For example, a supervisor can simultaneously manage multiple tasks, in the office or out on the contact center floor, that would otherwise make him or her unavailable.

The phone is the first contact point with many customers. Customer satisfaction is linked with quicker call resolution and superior inbound and outbound sound quality. Wireless headsets can improve agent and supervisor performance to achieve these results.

Wireless headset adoption is growing. In August of 2005, Frost and Sullivan estimated that wireless headsets will attain annual growth rates of 20 to 25 percent, and office wireless headsets will total 75 percent of total headset sales in 2009.

 

Wireless Headset Growth Rate
Why would you choose a wireless headset over a traditional headset? Wireless headsets improve customer satisfaction, training processes and productivity by allowing staff to do the following:

• Move freely and stay connected — Wireless headsets let people go where their work takes them.
• Hear and be heard — Features such as a long boom and noise canceling mic ensure optimal voice quality.
• Optimize for VoIP — Many of today’s wireless headsets work with the hardware, or software such as PC-based softphones, that you have today and will have tomorrow.

Additionally, wireless headsets offer great ergonomic benefits, such as keeping your workforce comfortable and healthy. A well-chosen wireless headset provides sound quality equal to that of wired headsets.

 

Improving Metrics
Wireless mobility helps agents solve customer problems “in real-time” without the need to put a customer on hold, or call back that customer — once additional support or information has been retrieved. This decreases individual call times and increases productivity, thus improving the contact center’s metrics. Agents can be more efficient, which allows their call times to decrease. Coaches and supervisors can remain available to their team so if or when they are away from their desk they can still handle an escalation call remotely, even when they are hundreds of feet from their desk.

 

Move Freely and Stay Connected
Office productivity and efficiency improves when phone conversations and other office tasks can easily occur simultaneously. For example:

• Wireless headsets improve the handling of escalation calls even if the supervisor is away from his or her desk conducting other tasks. He or she still remains available to take the call.
• When agents are free to move about the floor to retrieve documents, information and expert help, calls are resolved more quickly and overall call-handling increases.

Wireless mobility also improves agent training and monitoring. A supervisor can be listening to an agent’s call and then walk down the aisle and watch the agent’s key strokes and body language without the agent knowing that he or she is being monitored. This offers a different insight than listening from a supervisor desk or doing side-by-side monitoring, which affects the results of the call since the agent knows when he or she is being monitored. A supervisor can monitor more agents when they are free to roam, thereby providing more feedback that improves agent efficiently.

 

Hear and Be Heard
Wireless headsets offer options to suit the needs of different users in a contact center environment.

• Monaural headsets (receive sound in one ear) allow supervisors and trainers to both listen to a call and listen to conversation going on around them.
• Binaural headsets (receive sound in both ears) allow total-focus sound reduction, which is important for agents who need to concentrate on an important call, especially in noisy environments.
• Noise-canceling microphone provides optimum sound quality in environments with background noise, and is recommended for contact centers with VoIP systems.

Optimize for VoIP
A well-chosen headset can enhance the VoIP experience even when the network or other system components are not performing optimally. Along with supporting current and future hardware and software, many enterprise-grade headsets can help minimize the impact of the following network issues:

• Echo: A properly selected headset can help with both prevention and echo management. Echo occurs when the speaker’s voice feeds from the speaker back into the microphone and the resulting sound is sent to the other listeners.
• Latency: Network latencies create diminished voice quality due to a lag while information is being sent over the network. This also affects the natural flow of conversation. A properly chosen headset can diminish the amount of additional latency added to the system.
• Distortion: When the high end and low end of the signal are clipped, the resulting sound may sound distorted, nasal or otherwise distorted. This affects listening comprehension and makes the listener work harder.
• Artifacts: Any bits that get dropped during signal transmission cause pops and ticks in the resulting sound. These could be caused due to lost signal or to narrowband/wideband mismatch where extra wideband signal could conceivably add artifacts in a narrow band connection. A compatible headset chosen to work with the existing equipment won’t cause this problem.

 

What to Look for in a Wireless Headset
Key features and user benefits:

• Wireless radio technology: Headsets that are 1.9GHz DECT 6.0 compliant allow users to hear and be heard clearly without interference from other typical office equipment, like Wi-Fi networks, security systems and microwave ovens. Unfortunately 2.4 GHz is especially vulnerable to this kind of interference. Alternatively, 900 MHz and 5.8 GHz offer radio technology with less vulnerability to interference, but are not in protected frequencies like the 1.9GHz DECT 6.0 systems.

• Digital security: Make sure to purchase wireless headsets with adequate encryption to ensure the security of customer conversations. Digital encryption allows private conversations to stay private
• Battery life: A wireless headset should offer enough talk time for intensive use during a full shift – without recharging.
• Multi-shift support: Look for quick, easy pairing between several headsets and a single base so that as shifts change, agents bring their personal headset and immediately start working, while sharing the same base unit at the workstation and lowering expenses.
• Remote call answer/end: A handset lifter that notifies a user of incoming calls, and provides call control is essential to effective use of wireless headsets. So even while away from the desk, users can prevent missed calls with one-button control.
• DSP (digital signal processing) is a technique which, when properly implemented, can create a better sound experience. Not all DSP implementations are created equal. DSP can be used to mitigate echo, unequal call levels, anti-startle from sudden increases in amplitude and acoustic shock from prolonged exposure to high amplitude.

Additionally, in the contact center environment, look for products that optimize softphones as a communications platform. This type of product tracks noise exposure over time for safety compliance, controls the desktop receive and transmit volumes to ensure a consistent customer experience, and in conjunction with the headset addresses the health and ergonomic issues of prolonged phone usage.

 

Increasing the Productivity of the Homeshore or Outsourced Workforce
When customers call an agent, they interpret good clear sound as a reflection of that company’s product quality and brand, whether the agent is working from home or in a contact center. Hearing confusing background noise or static detracts from the call and causes key metrics such as customer satisfaction and productivity to move in the wrong direction. A high-performance noise-canceling microphone is a requirement, plus recommending or outfitting at-home agents with wireless headsets increases agent uptime and speed of answer. A wireless headset frees the home-based workforce to move about the house while remaining available for calls.

Wireless headsets are an important way to contribute to improved customer satisfaction and to reduce operating costs.

The phone is the first contact point with customers and a key element in creating customer satisfaction. Headsets contribute to superior inbound and outbound sound quality, which clarifies and enhances customer communications. Mobile supervisors are better able to provide quicker resolutions thanks to shorter wait times and better individual experiences. They are also better able to manage more agents by being able to go where needed and yet remain available.